Exasperation about the world’s ineffective measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was registered clearly on August 2, 2012, when Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and a principle founder of the environmental movement called 350.org, published a detailed article in Rolling Stone magazine called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”. As one of the most eloquent, passionate and informed spokespersons on the environmental threat of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, McKibben’s article reads like a warning and an ultimatum. To give shape to his concerns, he identifies three numbers as key reference points.

The first is 2°C. This is the maximum global temperature increase that national political leaders have decided is prudent and safe. But even with this limited increase, climatologists warn, we have a one in five chance of losing control and far exceeding this number — it’s Russian roulette, McKibben reminds us, with five chambers instead of six. He quotes Thomas Lovejoy, former World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, who observed, “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.” And James Hansen, one of the world’s foremost climatologists, concurs. “The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”

Newscasts now commonly carry reports of unusual droughts, heat waves, forest fires, torrential rains, floods, landslides and windstorms. As the global temperature rise approaches 0.8°C, weather anomalies are already disruptive and costly. Even with this apparently modest rise, McKibben writes, “June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere — the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average…”. The odds of this “occurring by simple chance”, he explains, is 3.7 x 10 to power of 99 — “a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.” A rise of 2°C represents two and a half times this temperature increase.

The second number he asks us to note is 565 gigatons. This, scientists estimate, is the additional amount of carbon dioxide we can emit into the atmosphere before we exceed the 2°C limit. Global emissions in 2011 were 31.6 gigatons, an increase of 3.2 percent over the year before. Projections are for continued increases, the result of wholly unsuccessful efforts to reduce the global output. “In fact,” McKibben writes, “study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year — and at that rate, we’ll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today’s preschoolers will be graduating from high school.” A more ominous prediction comes from Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency”s chief economist. “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees,” a situation McKibben describes as “a planet straight out of science fiction.”

The third number McKibben asks us to note is 2,795 gigatons. This is the total carbon dioxide known to be held in storage in proven reserves of oil, gas and coal around the world. These reserves are the national property of countries and the private property of corporations. The present value of these reserves is about $27 trillion, an amount that the owners expect to recover by sale and the purchasers expect to burn as fuel. Notice that this 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide in storage is five times larger than the allowable 565 gigatons of emissions if average global temperature increases are to be held below 2°C.

As McKibben points out, this discrepancy reveals a worrisome dilemma. If the 2°C temperature ceiling is going to be met, then 80 percent of the fossil fuels held in storage will have to remain there, unburned, at a loss of about $20 trillion in assets. In McKibben’s words, “Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically above ground — it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide — those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.” Countries relying on royalties and corporations expecting profits will have to forego most of their income to avoid the unleashing of a “science fiction” world of excessive heat and extreme weather.

These countries and corporations are not expected to willingly constrain their extraction of fossil fuels to save the planet from the environmental consequences. Their history and performance confirm this expectation. As McKibben points out, the melting Arctic ice has merely been an incentive for countries and corporations to rush northward to find even more gas and oil. Venezuela is intending to develop the Orinoco tar sands, a site even bigger than Alberta’s reserves. Burning the oil from just these two deposits would reach the 565 gigaton limit set for holding global temperature increases below 2°C. To paraphrase Naomi Klein’s chilling words, “…wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.” The Northern Gateway, Keystone and Kinder Morgan pipelines are all North American examples of such oil promotion projects. So are the daily tankers planned for BC’s West Coast.

If a way exists through this dilemma, it’s a global carbon tax that is sufficiently large to give renewable energies a competitive advantage and to leverage petro-states and fossil-fuel corporations to leave their assets in the ground. But this will take an unprecedented act of political will — one, it seems, we are not yet ready to take.

The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide hit a record 400 parts per million in May, 2012, a milestone that should send a chill of concern through anyone who is remotely concerned about the disturbing ramifications of global warming. Little solace should come from the fact that this concentration of greenhouse gas was only reached in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Iceland, Norway, Greenland and Mongolia, and will dip slightly as plants in the Northern Hemisphere absorbs some of it during the summer months of growth.

As for the rest of the planet, however, levels have risen during the last year from 391 to 395 ppm, up from the pre-industrial reference number of 280 ppm. We are now at the highest known concentration in at least 800,000 years, according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado. The rest of the planet will probably reach the 400 ppm milestone within two years as carbon dioxide concentrations increase and equalize. The NOAA reports that the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest ever recorded in human history. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency recently announced that global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2011 hit a record high of 34.8 billion tonnes, up 3.2 percent from 2010.

For those who are counting carbon, these numbers are dismaying because they are the definitive indicators of how poorly humanity is collectively addressing the climate change issue. Normal weather, reliable food production, community safety, political stability and almost everything environmental is linked directly or indirectly to these carbon dioxide levels. Efforts to date are not even slowing the increase in atmospheric CO2, let alone reducing the concentrations to the 350 ppm considered safe for stable climate conditions.

The exasperating element in this whole sorry process is that we know how to fix the problem and we have enough of the technology to do it. All we lack is the political will.

As models of contrast, Canada is an example of dismal procrastination and denial while Denmark represents exemplary and pragmatic effort. Instead of reducing emissions from the 1990 reference level and despite its pledge to do so, Canada has increased its emissions by 30 percent and is not even expected to reach its diluted 2020 target. In contrast, Denmark’s emissions are now 13 percent below its 1990 levels and the country is taking a leading role in wind technology, energy efficiencies and functional solutions. Canada’s failure to act is a powerful factor in the cynical and gloomy mood pervading the country — the only real antidote for pessimism is to acknowledge a problem and confront it with constructive effort.

Jeff Rubin, who left the CIBC bank as its chief economist for World Markets to analyze the direction of future socio-economic structure in an age of rising energy costs, has included Denmark’s success in his latest book, The End of Growth. How is this country accomplishing what Canada is not? The answer is surprising and obvious.

Denmark is thought of as the “wind technology capital of the world”. Indeed, it may be. But its thousands of huge turbines produce only 20 percent of its power. The rest comes from coal. Yes, coal, the fossil fuel that is 20 percent dirtier than oil and twice as polluting as natural gas. Granted, the coal is combusted in state-of-the-art facilities and the excess heat is used to warm buildings. But that’s not how Denmark’s has accomplished what Canada cannot — or will not.

Denmark’s secret, according to Rubin, is carbon taxes. The simple pressure of price on carbon dioxide-emitting goods and services induces Danes to reduce electricity consumption, to buy small cars, to build efficient houses, to bicycle, to favour local over imported food, and to shop for low-carbon products. Amazing. And the money raised goes to increasing efficiencies that further reduce carbon emissions. This little country has found a solution that is elegant, practical and effective, one that must lift a heavy moral weight from the Danish conscience and replace the load of guilt with an immense national pride — very unlike Canadians who live with a shameful international reputation darkened by the stigma of being a global environmental laggard and pariah.

For Canada, the carbon tax solution has been recommended multiple times by the government’s own National Roundtable On the Economy and Environment, an organization created in 1988 precisely for the purpose of finding common agreement between seemingly opposing interests. It was founded on the principle that “a modern economy” and “a sustainable environment” are “mutually reinforcing.” And this is one of the organizations, along with important climate science, that the Harper government is eliminating as superfluous.

If a government intends to deny the facts of science and repudiate the relationship between economics and the environment, then an image is emerging of leadership wholly disconnected from fundamental realities. All that remains for Canadians is bewilderment, exasperation and the haunting suspicion that their future is being charted by an ideology that is incomprehensible, myopic and ominous.