How do we turn science into policy in a timely way?

We consider ourselves to be rational beings with a fondness for "facts" derived from scientific research. And yet when it comes to public policy, it often takes decades for these "facts" to influence the way politicians make decisions in the public interest.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times indicates that we've known for 80 years that repeated concussions in professional athletes who box or play football can lead to hemorrhages and long-term brain damage. A 1928 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association warned that “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. ... The condition can no longer be ignored by the medical profession or the public.”

This warning was ignored for 80 years, and it's only this season that the N.F.L., for instance, issued new rules limiting players with head injuries from returning to the field. Why? Probably a whole lot of institutionalized denial. Like the tobacco industry, the NFL chose to run and hide from the problem rather than look out for the best interest of its players by addressing it as quickly as possible.

Even after the N.F.L. finally conceded that concussions “can lead to long-term problems,” one of the league’s longtime brain injury experts, Dr. Ira Casson, told a Congressional panel that there is not enough “valid, reliable or objective scientific evidence” showing that repeated blows to the head could cause permanent brain damage.

Sound familiar? The biggest example of the "denial strategy" is climate change. We've known since at least 1895 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the earth. And yet here we are, in 2010, 115 years later, still failing to put together a global climate change strategy that will meaningfully reduce GHG emissions enough to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change. Why? Perceived corporate self-interest defaulted to denial in response to calls for change.

So we shouldn't be surprised that Alberta's supposedly "science-based" grizzly bear recovery plan doesn't utilize even the most basic scientific understanding about how to recover ailing grizzly bear populations. For at least 20 years we've known that the minimum amount of secure core habitat needed to protect and recover grizzly bears is approximately 57 to 68 per cent of the recovery area (Mace et. al 1996, Mace and Manley 1993, Mattson and Haroldson 1985). Basically, this means that 57 to 68 per cent of the landscape needs to be managed at road densities at or below 0.6 kilometres per square kilometre.

What did the Alberta recovery plan stipulate after eight years of delay? That only 20 per cent of the recovery area be managed as core habitat, a far cry from the thresholds scientists have told us are necessary. In fact, if the recovery plan were ever actually implemented, secure core grizzly bear habitat would be approximately 50 per cent less than it is today.

This problem is not unique to Alberta. According to How much is enough? The recurrent problem of setting measurable objectives in conservation, over a quarter of the recovery plans for federally threatened and endangered species in the U.S. set quantitative recovery objectives at or below the species' existing population size or number of populations (Tear and colleagues, 1993, 1995). These objectives are likely low because they were politically palatable (Scott et al. 1995).

Deciding where grizzly bears will be allowed to survive in Alberta is a socio-political issue to be sure. But hiding behind a recovery plan based on false optimism and/or outright deceit will only result in further declines in grizzly bears and public trust in government. Let's at least put the facts on the table and make conscious decisions based on the best available information. That's not only good for grizzly bears, it's good for governance.

How much is enough to conserve grizzly bears?

A new report by released a consortium of environmental organizations suggests that fifty per cent of the landbase needs to be managed for conservation in light of the threats posed by our warming climate.

Authored by senior forest ecologist Dr. Jim Pojar, A New Climate for Conservation states that intact forests play key roles in storing carbon, mitigating climate impacts and conserving biodiversity. The report calls on the B.C. government to implement a climate conservation strategy that includes managing at least 50 per cent of the province's land base for these objectives.

“A minimum conservation target of 50 per cent is what's necessary to give our plants and animals a fighting chance to adapt while also keeping and drawing more carbon out of the atmosphere so that over time, we can slow and reduce climate change,” Pojar told The Globe and Mail recently.

Although some people may find the number — 50 per cent! — rather large, it really should not come as a surprise, and it likely applies to most of Canada, not just B.C. Numerous reports and studies have suggested that even without considering the impacts of climate change, reducing the egregious rate of biodiversity loss we're experiencing will require the protection or conservation management of much more land (and water) than we are today.

Svancara and colleagues (2005), for instance, showed that while policy-based approaches are very close to achieving the well-known (but largely politically expedient) target of protecting 10 to 12 per cent of the landbase, evidence-based approaches called for targets between 30.6 and 41.6 per cent. (See How much is enough? The recurrent problem of setting measurable objectives in conservation.)

Relatively successful efforts to recover grizzly bears in the United States suggests that 68 per cent of the landbase must be managed for the needs of grizzly bears. This largely depends on managing road densities where grizzly bears are to be allowed to persist. (See Roads Kill: Grizzly Bears and the Effects of Human Access for more information.)

Alberta, where grizzly bears have been recognized as a threatened species, has a long way to go to reach these targets. Given that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, there's no better time to start than now.

Fooling the people won't work forever

Alberta's Tories (and even their federal counterparts, Harper's Conservatives) would do well to pay attention to the implosion of the G.O.P. south of the border.

As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."

The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."

Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.

As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”

The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.

It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.

No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.

When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."

The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.

But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.

I just hope we don't wait too long.

Give Albertans a real chance

I was sitting here minding my own business yesterday when the CKUA news subjected me to the Alberta government's latest attempt to embarrass the people it represents. As if spending $25 million on a branding campaign to convince the rest of the world we're not what we are wasn't enough. Now they're trying to convince the rest of the world to follow our lead and not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

With the plaintive cry of a child who can't have any more candy, Alberta Energy Director of Communications Jason Chance complained that California's attempt to pass the U.S. 's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) "wasn't fair."

Alberta Energy's version of Nick Naylor (think: Thank You for Smoking), Chance was the mouthpiece for Alberta government officials in California this week wasting taxpayers' money (and political capital and international standing) trying to convince the state's air-quality regulator that banning carbon-heavy fuels singles out Canadian exports of oilsands-derived crude.

In a "historic vote," California's Air Resources Board passed the implementing regulations for the nation's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) by an overwhelming 9-1. This vote will put into action the LCFS first proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger as a key policy for meeting California's global warming goals. This precedent setting environmental policy will favor cleaner fuels over high carbon fuels such as Canadian tar sands, liquid coal and oil shale.

"Low carbon fuel standards are a critical complementary measure to a cap on global warming pollution," writes Liz Barrat-Brown, a senior attorney with NRDC. "The LCFS requires that the carbon content of fuels decline over the next decade, paving the way for lower carbon fuels, such as next generation biofuels, and other measures to reduce global warming pollution from our transportation sector.

"The approval of the California LCFS regulations gives a huge boost to efforts to pass a similar measure nationally. Today all eyes will turn to Washington D.C. where the House Energy and Commerce Committee will debate a national LCFS."

Despite Chance's ideologically motivated protests of "unfairness," the beauty of the LCFS is "it does not pick favorites," says Barrat-Brown. "Instead it provides a more level playing field for lower carbon fuels to compete against dirtier fuels. It does this by relying on a straight forward concept - determining how much carbon is embedded in the fuel through lifecycle assessment, an accounting measure that evaluates emissions from the production through to the combustion of a fuel."

How long is it going to take the dinosaurs in the Alberta legislature to realize that the world has changed? Despite the Alberta Tories' apparent apathy (if not outright disdain) for the environment around them, most of the rest of the world, including the U.S., our favourite trading partner and the world's most voracious consumer of oil, has decided that climate change is very real and very serious, and as such must be stopped with a vigour usually reserved for martial enemies.

“Let’s be clear,” Dr. David Keith prophesied last year. “A lot of Albertans, people who are members of APEGGA, for instance, the engineer and geophysicist group in Alberta, don’t believe that climate change is a problem, and quite a few members of our cabinet don’t believe it’s a problem. But what they believe doesn’t actually matter. We’re going to be regulated from the outside. The U.S. is moving [climate change] regulations through the House and the Senate that are very serious. Sometimes you may wish the world is one way. You may wish you don’t have a problem. But we do."

And as Keith points out, it's not just the environment Albertans should be concerned about. It's our entire economy: “I think people are frighteningly naive about what the impacts of this could be. Serious carbon regulation [in the U.S.] could have people walking away from their mortgages the way they did here in the early 1980s. Alberta needs to make some strategic investments to protect itself against carbon regulation, and ... right now, [the government is] just dropping the ball.”

Albertans could be global leaders in the fight against climate change, if only Premier Ed Stelmach would give us a different kind of chance -- one that involves honesty and integrity and transparency rather than shady PR campaigns and obstructionist government intervention.