November, a month where conversations tend to lament the long lost days of summer, has seen a remarkable number of conversations about a similarly depressing topic: overcrowded transportation infrastructure in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area (GTHA).  At the beginning of the month, the Canadian Urban Transit Association held its fall conference. Sponsored by TTC and Metrolinx, the title was Public Transit: Investing in Quality of Life. This was followed up with Toronto Talks Mobility, a session organized by the Pembina Institute, Councillor Joe Mihevc and the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre. Coming up later this month is a “Mobility Pricing Stakeholder Forum” sponsored by Transport Futures.  These conversations are driven by projections that the GTHA will add close to 3 million new people in the next 20 years. Given current car ownership trends, this will result in an additional 1 million automobiles trying to access roads that are already hopelessly congested.   But isn’t the GTHA already at “peak car” with traffic congestion rates among the worst in North America? And aren’t vehicles already the largest sources of greenhouse gases in Ontario (see chart below)? Can we afford to put all these additional vehicles on the road, you ask? Good question.

The message emerging from these conversations is that we need to get serious about moving people out of their cars and onto mass transit. But with the GTHA’s public transit system in its own state of chronic underfunding, significant investment – $80 billion dollars was the amount being tossed around at the Toronto Talks Mobility session – is required to make it a viable alternative.  That is a huge sum of money for cash strapped governments in a time of fiscal austerity, and so innovative funding mechanisms will be required. Metrolinx is required to release an investment strategy to find the money by no later than 2013; why the delay? Let’s get this strategy released for public discussion sooner so that it can influence and inform transit planning and decision-making in 2012. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that we’ll continue to make planning decisions that will lock-in our commuting patterns for decades to come.

While I have pointed to the potential for road pricing to bridge the funding gap in both my 2010 and 2011 annual greenhouse gas progress reports and in a recent blog, most decision-makers in the region are reluctant to entertain it as a possibility. Most of the speakers at the Toronto Talks Mobility session danced around the issue of road pricing. Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion did suggest, however, that road tolls and related road pricing will have to be evaluated as a funding option. She stressed repeatedly that this will be tough to sell to the commuting public, especially those traveling to work in single-occupancy vehicles. She conceded however, that if the monies were put towards funding rapid transit – and only rapid transit – this would be an easier sell.  The elephant in the room is making its presence known.

The Australian Senate passed its carbon tax legislation this past Tuesday as a key component of its Clean Energy Legislation Package. It’s the first stage in the country’s plan to reduce carbon emissions to five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050. It will fix a tax of A$23 ($24 CDN) per tonne on the country’s top 500 emitters starting in July 2012 with a plan to transition to a cap-and-trade system from July 2015 onward. Industries including mining, airlines, steel and power generation are covered. After July 2015, companies in these industries will need a permit for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.

As the title of the legislative package suggests, the Australian government has linked the emergence of a clean energy economy with the establishment of a price on carbon. I’ve taken a similar position in my most recent Greenhouse Gas Progress Report as well as in a recent blog. For one thing, pricing pollution is one surefire way to ensure a more level playing field so that renewable energy can compete in the marketplace.

South Africa is also considering legislation to place a tax on carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the Ontario government has indicated it won’t move on pricing carbon until at least 2013. While Ontario continues to delay, other jurisdictions are taking a leadership role while kick-starting their green economies. If Ontario wants to accelerate the growth in green energy and a low-carbon economy, putting a price on carbon will need to happen sooner rather than later.

Sometimes friends ask me for summer book suggestions.  If you’re up for some big picture thinking, I can recommend The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon. I admit, with “Catastrophe” in the sub-title, it’s not exactly escapist froth for the beach.  But having read it a few years ago, I find my thoughts coming back to some of the core ideas.  Among other things, Homer-Dixon offers a great introduction to the concept of resilience, and what it takes for ecosystems and societies to maintain resilience.

As complexity increases in systems, resilience tends to decline. Predictability also is lost as complexity rises and feedback loops emerge. This was a theme I also focused on in my 2008/2009 Annual Report, “The one thing you can expect from complex systems is the unexpected.”  Once you’re attuned to the resilience concept, you begin to see the implications everywhere, from the cyclical burning and regrowth of fire-adapted northern forests to periodic financial bubbles and collapses, to this past spring’s social upheavals and democratic renewals in a string of Arab nations.

Building Resilience where I observed that I returned to the resilience theme this past spring in my annual Greenhouse Gas Report Meeting Responsibilities – Creating Opportunities, noting the risk of a climatic tipping point in the nearterm.Even in southern Ontario we are seeing cities like Peterborough battered by repeated extreme storms, supposedly rare, one-in-100-year events, as I described in my 2009/2010 Annual Report.

We face a great challenge: to de-carbonize our global economy in the next 40 years in order to avoid this tipping point. This is a challenge that will require humanity’s full scope of creativity and exuberant experimentation.  It will also require resilience at every level of social organization.

Summer can be a good time for quiet reflection – preferably by a cool lake, a hammock slung under some big old trees.  That may be the very best place for us to re-imagine ourselves in a resilient future.

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