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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 124

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 3, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22
Ms. Elizabeth May
  • Nov/3/22 6:59:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hull—Aylmer for his excellent question. We are now in a long emergency, as a book title called it. Madam Speaker, about a decade ago, there was a book by James Kunstler called The Long Emergency, which predicted that we were going to see our economy significantly rocked by what will happen as fossil fuels become more expensive as we move away from fossil fuels. The Long Emergency was about where we are now: real costs are increasing, a real dislocation. That does not mean ongoing inflationary trends. It does mean thinking about how a society flourishes despite these very unusual headwinds. They are unusual now because they are new, but they are not going away. We have to think about that and make sure that we design our economy and our economic signals of what makes us better off. The GDP is not a good measurement to help us chart a course through an ongoing climate emergency. We need to chart our course. I think this is a global challenge. At the end of the Second World War nations met at Bretton Woods to figure out what are the global and shared financial institutions to help us get through that. We need new institutions and a review, a new Bretton Woods, that would help us with both the post-COVID impacts on our economies and the current climate impacts on our economies. We cannot rewrite the laws of atmospheric physics and chemistry. We can easily rewrite the way we want our economy to work if all the economies and central banks of the world get together and say, “This is what we are looking at. How do we protect the citizens and the communities of all, and, I would hope, the non-human species of Mother Earth?”
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