• One of Canada's top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments
• Contains the results of an exclusive national poll on Canadians' attitudes to the climate crisis
• Shows that radical climate crisis transformation can bring jobs and prosperity as we retool how we live and work
• Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow
"Read this inspiring book to realize giving up is not an option and 'can't be done' is not an excuse." - David Suzuki, scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster
The world has just ten years to at least halve our greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a hope of holding global warming to a 1.5°C increase. Currently, Canada is not on a path to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, and radical systemic change to the way we live and work must happen at high speed, but how are we ever to do this?
We can do it. We've actually done it before. During the Second World War, Canadians and their governments completely remade the economy - retooling factories, transforming the workforce and creating common cause among Canadians for the war effort.
In A Good War, author and activist Seth Klein looks at the Second World War strategies and shows how they can be repurposed today for a rapid transition. He demonstrates that this change can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations and shows us a bold, practical policy plan for a zero-carbon Canada. In this unusually hopeful book, Klein explores how we can align our politics and economy with what the science says we must do. Inspiring and realizable, his book is an invitation to both the public and our political leaders to reflect on the people who saw us through the war, and to consider who we want to be, as we face down the defining task of our lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has brought change upon our world that would have been unthinkable a few months ago, change very like what Klein has proposed. It turns out the world can turn on a dime if necessary. The blueprint is in your hands. This book will explore whether we can successfully align our politics with climate science, and the conditions under which it may be possible to act boldly. Canada's WWII experience, Klein contends, provides a reminder that we have mobilized in common cause and retooled our economy in a few short years. Seth Klein was the founding British Columbia director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for over two decades and has been immersed in climate change and inequality issues for his working life. He is currently an adjunct professor in urban studies at Simon Fraser University and remains a research associate with the CCPA. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.
This is not another book about climate science. It takes the urgent science and the impacts of climate breakdown as a given. It is a book about politics, history and policy innovation. More specifically, it's a book about what it takes to align our politics with the imperative the science demands of us. It takes as inspiration Canada's Second World War experience and also draws encouragement from other countries that, are starting to treat this crisis as the emergency that it is.
