Social Change to Address Climate Change
by Lynn McDonald
7 February 2008
Centre for Constitutional Studies, University of Alberta

Climate change, or climate breakdown, is arguably the greatest challenge Canadians, and the rest of the world, have now to face. The need to address it seriously has now been widely accepted, by all the political parties in Canada, if lately and grudgingly. Yet Canada is far behind European countries in turning to low-carbon energy sources--we remain the world's highest per capita energy user and carbon emitter. We signed the Kyoto Protocol, but far from meeting our obligations under it we have increased our greenhouse gas emissions. Our record is worse even than the Americans', who did not sign Kyoto.

Climate change has a twin demon to be considered at the same time: the very nature of fossil fuels, the non-renewable energy source that has fueled the industrial revolution and has largely caused the global heating at issue. Not only do fossil fuels cause greenhouse gas emissions, and otherwise pollute the environment, they are close to being all used up, especially the most efficient and least polluting, oil and gas (coal will be around for longer, but is also a non-renewable resource). Oil and gas are valuable resources and may be indispensable for such uses as airplane flights. (Renewable sources might be adequate, but it would be unwise to have confidence in such a technological advance.) The debate about "peak oil" misses the point. Peak oil occurred millions of years ago; it's been running out ever since.

On both climate, and many issues of environmental deterioration, the science has been done; the recommendations are comprehensive; there are successful models from other, like, prosperous, industrial countries, but yet we fail to act.

Political constraints, it will be argued here, are part of the reason for Canadian inaction on these urgent matters. Change is needed, from the Constitution down to corporations acts, elections acts, taxation, transportation, the armed forces, immigration, municipal governance and government procurement policies. Probably space travel and Arctic exploration should go on the list. Change is needed in all jurisdictions, and co-ordination among them, but the focus here will be the federal Constitution, an issue itself and an obstacle to the revision of key statutes and the development of practical programs of remedy.
We need a green Enlightenment akin to that of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment that stimulated and shaped the democratic constitutions of the next centuries.

It would be grossly premature to suggest any new sections or clauses, or any particular amendments. The purpose here rather is to explain why full-scale revision of the Constitution is needed--when ours is so young--and give direction and criteria to meet. A process of radical rethinking and exploration of alternatives is needed before specific drafting is undertaken.

We are faced with a major moral challenge, that a few generations, largely of rich westerners, have nearly entirely used up an extremely valuable resource, at the expense of vast numbers of other peoples who and species which are adversely affected by the unintended consequences of our extravagant, industrial, way of life. As well future generations of our own kind will inherit a deforested landscape, dead oceans, polluted cities, and have to live with higher temperatures, tornados, floods, fires and storms. But the Canadian constitution lacks any facility for dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, and any for dealing with such a key, scarce, non-renewable energy use as fossil fuels. The only constitutional consideration is the level of government holding jurisdiction. Conservation of one-time resources is not mentioned, nor the needs of future generations, in whatever province they live. No constitution anywhere was written with future citizens, let alone geological time, in mind.

A Constitution is Grounded in Time, the Problems of its Age

In order to understand why our constitution is so far from adequate for the challenges of our day, we have to look at the conditions of its time of formulation, effectively the 1860s, in Britain, for the British North America Act of 1867 remains the core of the present Constitution Act of 1982. The Charter of Rights component of course is more recent, the work of a remarkably short period of time, effectively 1980-81. Both reflect not only the constitutional predilections of the then prime minister, Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, but the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the principles of which guided him and most constitutional thinking of the western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The great problems of the eighteenth century in Europe were poverty, disease, ignorance, intolerance and vast inequalities by class, race and gender. Economic downturns then meant actual starvation for the poorest, so that greater productivity was an aim of social justice. The rising use of fossil fuels to increase production meant a better standard of living for vast numbers of people, although terrible misery for many in the course. The scientific knowledge and technological application to reduce poverty and disease alas have had the unintended consequence of increasing global temperatures and pollution.

The enunciation of the principles of sovereignty of the people (versus the divine right of kings), liberty and equality (when ordinary people were largely bereft of rights) and universalism (against the great divisions of class, race and gender) in time led to great advances for the vast majority of the population. Enlightenment thinking provided the moral and intellectual energy that nourished the great reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the abolition of slavery, the right to vote for all citizens, equality rights for women, tolerance for different religions and political views, rights for workers, and eventually rights for persons of a different sexual orientation, the disabled and others. Collective rights to self-determination in the United Nations similarly derive from this earlier thinking on sovereignty and liberty.

By the time of the British North America Act of 1867 pollution from industrialization was evident, especially in the manufacturing towns of England.  But oil was only just discovered (in the United States) and gas had not come into use, coal seemed to be plentiful, and the problems it produced were still unknown.

That no attention was given to inter-generational justice in the BNA Act reflects the obvious fact that no resource was seen to be limited, so that its use would deprive others of their rights. In effect resources were assumed to be capable of sustainable use. Metals of course were mined, and they are in finite supply, but to some extent these are capable of reuse and recycling, not the case for fossil fuels.

The Enlightenment notion of rights, to be limited only by respect for the rights of others, seemed to apply only to those in the here and now. That understanding was well articulated by John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill in "On Liberty," 1859, or the period just prior to the framing of the BNA Act:

That the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

This principle would inform such debates as "private morality," notably in the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. That future generations might be harmed by our energy use and exports was simply not then thought of. It is demonstrable now, so that fossil fuel use and other harmful industrial practices should be approached on the basis of the harm they cause.

Who counts in the consideration of harm of course remains a divisive issue. Enlightenment thinking radically extended the circle. Jeremy Bentham's writing on utility theory suggested five levels of inclusion, from certain individuals to "the whole nation" (thus including both sexes and all classes), "humankind in general" (all races now) and even possibly to "the whole sensitive creation" (bringing in other species).  With climate breakdown and declining non-renewable resources we need now to take this to a sixth category: future generations.

Warnings were given of limits, notably by Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population, 1798. Indeed the "limits to growth" movement of the 1970s is often called neo-Malthusian in recognition, although the original theory was simply on the tendency of population growth to outstrip food production. The availability of new farmland in the new world, and the later use of fossil fuels, pesticides and fertilizers, however, resulted in vastly increased food production, apparently disproving the theory. We should be less confident now, recognizing that the fossil fuels used in food production are a finite source, and the fertilizers and pesticides, etc., are highly polluting. Where food production has doubled, à la green revolution, the water required has tripled, and fresh water is a concern some think as bad as climate change itself.

By the time of the BNA Act industrialization had gone far enough to cause greenhouse gas emissions beyond the earth's capacity to absorb them. But this was not known. The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius hypothesized increased temperatures on the ground from the "carbonic acid effect" of burning coal, in 1895, in his now famous paper, "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground."  The potential for a greenhouse effect had been argued even earlier, in 1824, by the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, but Arrhenius went the next step with predictions as to the amount of temperature rises, which have turned out to be remarkably accurate. He later won the Nobel Prize, but not for this work.

Scientific consensus that global heating was occurring and could be serious emerged only in the late 1980s, or just after the passing of the Charter of Rights in 1982. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reporting in 1988, would become the major source of information about global heating. In Canada the Standing Committee on the Environment  began issuing (unanimous) reports arguing for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 1990 there was No Time to Lose: The Challenge of Global Warming, in 1991 Out of Balance: The Risks of Irreversible Climate Change. Paul Martin was an alternate member of that committee, yet he as finance minister provided subsidies for the tar sands project, the major source of Canada's increased emissions, and as prime minister allowed greenhouse gas emissions to soar, after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

These reports provided concrete measures of implementation, formulated by experienced political actors, including former Cabinet ministers. The first had 17 recommendations, ending with the requirement that all federal departments and agencies, as part of their budget submissions, report on direct and indirect impacts of their operations on global warming, and set annual targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The second report recommended that ministers of the Environment develop policies, programs and regulations to span the full range of activities of the federal government, analogous to those of the minister of Finance for financial and economic affairs, and to report annually to Parliament on the environmental impact of all federal activities. This was not done. The recommendation that the Auditor General establish an environment audit function was acted on, but not at the level sought, which was to ensure a truly comprehensive response to global warming.

By 1997 this Parliamentary committee, now the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development, again unanimously, recommended that the prime minister assume the responsibility of implementing Canada's climate change commitment, with a small team of senior officials. Further it recommended, naively as we now see, that if the reduction of greenhouse gases were to be above the target set or ahead of schedule, the target should be raised or the timetable shortened, or both.

Clearly not only has the science on the problem been done, and a host of practical solutions advanced over the past few decades, considerable attention has been given to the administrative structure needed to facilitate action. To understand why this has been to so little avail we detour to the principles at the base of our constitution and thinking.

Sovereignty of the People: its Rise and Demise

One of the great legacies of the Enlightenment is the principle that people have the right to determine their collective affairs, as opposed to kings, to whom they owe obedience. Democracy is founded on this principle, in Canada in the form of a constitutional monarchy. But since the BNA Act the rights of the people have been diminished in ways pertinent to action on climate change and other forms of environmental deterioration. While the original BNA Act did not give corporations rights equivalent to individuals they have acquired them by judicial interpretation.

The Charter of Rights is grounded on Enlightenment principles that were entirely oriented to individuals, but again corporations have been deemed to possess rights to freedom of speech, including the advertising of lethal products like cigarettes, and lethal energy uses, like the tar sands. Individual human beings concerned about health, life and death now see their sovereign right to government action impeded by these newly issued rights to corporations. Measures to ensure "liberty of expression" were intended to keep the likes of Voltaire and Diderot out prison for their writing on social reform. That they should be used to guarantee corporate rights to advertise hazardous products seems a grotesque development of such a lofty Enlightenment principle.

The cases themselves are shoddy: in the United States a Supreme Court decision, 1886, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were legal "persons," and thus protected under the 14th Amendment, was the very amendment that freed the slaves. The 1989 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, on a Quebec law to prohibit advertising of toys to children under thirteen, is less outrageous but also perverse. The SCC drew on the "large and liberal" interpretation its earlier decisions had given to Charter rights, to decide that "there was no sound reason for excluding commercial expression" from the Charter protection of free expression. This decision, of course, narrows and lessens the rights of actual people, through their legislators, to make public policy, even on matters of life and death, such as cigarette advertising.

Measures needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions can also be countered by foreign governments, prompted by their corporations, thanks to commitments made in the North American Free Trade Agreement, 1992, and the World Trade Organization, 1994.

Both corporate rights and trade agreements trump the gains made through democratic reforms.

The Impediment of Divided Jurisdiction

As well as diminished sovereignty, in Canada those seeking action on the climate crisis come up against the thorny problems of our federal structure, nowhere more than in the division of jurisdiction set out by the old BNA Act and maintained in the Constitution Act of 1982. Climate change is a global matter, and the federal government has jurisdiction over international matters generally. But resources and "private property" are provincial. Oceans and fisheries are federal, agriculture is joint, etc. The federal level retains the power to regulate for the "peace, order and good government" of the country, wording not devised with polar melting, rising oceans and deforestation in mind.

Alastair Lucas points out that pro-environment actions taken by a country could be challenged on trade grounds by countries in the trade agreement but not in the environmental agreement.  Further, there is no "federal pre-emption of legislative authority in relation to national environmental protection." There is "a possibility" that measures for greenhouse gas control "could meet the peace, order and good government criteria," but the "scale" of impact any such federal scheme would have "on core provincial powers over property, natural resources and local industry weighs against federal jurisdiction" (186). Opinions among constitutional experts are divided:

But none have concluded that the federal government has constitutional jurisdiction broad enough to permit an optimal scheme to be tailored. Consequently, there is at least a likelihood that the federal government lacks constitutional authority to legislate national standards and the necessary framework for a national emissions trading system (186).

But the "optimal" scheme might be just what is needed.

Federal-provincial agreement effectively would have to be reached for a concerted scheme to deal with the climate crisis, and the Constitution Act does nothing to facilitate this. Citing Lucas again:

It is equally clear that there are constraints on institutional ability to make the necessary changes. In theory legislatures are sovereign, at least within their constitutional legislative competence, but it is this matter of constitutional competence that presents the first problem....What must be settled is the allocation of the total GHG [greenhouse gas] reduction requirement of the respective provinces, as well as related roles, legislative and regulatory action, and financial obligations (190-91).

Germany of course is a federal state and has done much more than Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in Europe generally there are greater, more immediate, concerns about energy security, from reliance on Middle East and Russian sources for oil. Nor is thinking there so much clouded by the erroneous belief that any country is a "producer" of oil. Norway, which still extracts North Sea oil and gas, realizes the limited nature of its fortune, and demands more for its heritage fund than Alberta. (This is of course also an argument for replacing the word "production" with "extraction," and "heritage fund" with "heritage depletion fund" when non-renewable resources are at issue.)

The Scope of Response Needed
The magnitude of the changes needed to deal with climate change must be understood, in relation to the political tools available. That the ozone crisis was successfully met (or at least apparently) gives no cause for comfort. Scientific opinion alerted politicians, who acted in time. Canada even played a vital role, under the government of Brian Mulroney, in the signing of the Montreal Protocol for reducing ozone-depleting substances. But these substances were few in number, and alternatives, even cheaper as it turned out, were available. Consumers could make their displeasure known simply by not buying certain devices and containers, with minimal inconvenience. Nobody told them not to drive their SUVs or take cheap holidays in sunny climes.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report stated that the amount of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions required is 85%. George Monbiot, in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, gives 90% as the average required for industrial countries, for Canada 94% given that we are worse than other industrial countries.  This is based on the object of keeping the average global temperature increase to 2o, the amount beyond which there is good reason to believe vast, swift and unpredictable disasters could occur. Yet Canada has failed to meet the 6% reduction it agreed on in 1997.

Unless these figures can be refuted and lower, easier, numbers justified, we have a long way to go. Goals of 50% or 60% reduction set by some European countries, some American states and Canadian provinces and cities are still inadequate, if our best experts are correct, and even that is assuming they have not erred on the optimistic side. Such reductions cannot be achieved by technological advances within the current political and economic system. Perhaps that is why Premier Stelmach insists on no more than a 14% reduction in emissions, by 2050.

George Monbiot's Heat offers solutions for the 90% carbon reductions, in such key sectors of the economy as transportation, manufacturing, government, retail sales and housing. These are given as feasible examples, for Britain--no equivalent attempt has been made for Canada. Most of the proposals would require legislative changes. For Canada with the impediments of our constitution we have to consider both constitutional revision and statute rewriting, as well as changes in regulations, government procurement practices, etc.

While arguing for massive system change let it be made clear that this applies to all current socio-economic types. If capitalism is the culprit so also are communism and socialism in any form yet found, or Chinese-style communism-capitalism. Industrialism effectively is the culprit, and it can exist in capitalism and numerous forms of centrally-organized economies and social democracy. The mixed European social democracies so far seem to have done the best job of acting on the climate crisis, but they too have a long way to go to meet the IPCC targets.

Can a largely capitalist, democratic country, with a significant welfare state such as Canada has, make the adaptations necessary to meet the climate crisis, in time? Can other, larger, more important countries adapt their political forms? We have seen massive changes to capitalism with the incorporation of welfare state measures for income security and social programs like medicare, employment insurance, counter-cyclical economic measures, and so forth. Is sustainable capitalism possible? Can corporations be profitable without growing?

Capitalism even as promoted by its far right advocates in Canada differs greatly from the laissez-faire version of the nineteenth century. It has been argued that the threat of Bolshevism was the great stimulator of social reform, the Russian Revolution convincing capitalists that a measure of reform would be better than risking total confiscation and exile.  Of course many Russian property owners did go into exile and became living examples to the wealthy in the West. The equivalent threat with regard to global heating is not so immediate or obvious.

Principles of a Green Enlightenment

Instead of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or even peace, order and good government, we need accountability, caution and evidence-based research as our watchwords. From "more is better" we need "make your mistakes small." Activities both in the public and private sector must be monitored for their effects on climate change and other forms of environmental deterioration. We need a healthy respect for the potential of unintended consequences to act counter to our actions.

Do no harm. Enlightenment optimism and confidence in progress must be tempered with the great principle of the Hippocratic School of Medicine (5th century BCE): first of all do no harm. Florence Nightingale famously argued that this should be applied to hospitals, not just doctors.  We might now want to require it of holders of political power (the prime minister and cabinet, mayors and municipal councilors), of economic power (corporate executives, directors, trade union officials), and of leaders in other areas (health care, media, sports, culture).

Left-right politics have little relevance to the climate crisis and the environment generally, however important they may remain for traditional issues of social justice, conflicts between haves and have-nots. Some of the worst projects world wide, for environmental deterioration and climate change, were created in the name of development for human betterment, for example the massive water diversion projects of the old Soviet Union.

The public-private division is often irrelevant in Canada too for environmental concerns. Some of our greatest environmental disasters--overfishing leading to vast losses of fish stocks--were not only permitted by governments but subsidized by tax dollars. Corporations united with municipal governments and trade unions to obtain federal financial incentives, and continue them when scientific data (usually paid for by federal tax dollars) indicated that a substantial reversal in policy was needed. Alberta's tar sands project was given royalty breaks.

The federal-provincial divide desirably would be revisited with a view to facilitating action on the climate crisis. The great dichotomy is not which level of government should have jurisdiction, but what type of resource--renewable or non-renewable. Different morality and correspondingly different kinds of protection are needed for the two types. Some economic activities are at least theoretically renewable (until the sun goes out, in billions of years). Some are not.

Earth-based economics is needed in place of our present fixation on corporate profits this year. Again, the Enlightenment is worth consulting, for the school of "physiocracy," or "rule by nature," taught that all value comes from the land (which included forests, fisheries and mining, not merely land as in agriculture). A whole moral debate as to the rights of future generations has to be engaged.

Successful Models

The extent of change held by scientific authorities as necessary is drastic indeed, but it would be well to remember that human societies have managed to make massive changes before. The abolition of slavery and apartheid, equality rights for women, the achievement of a great measure of democracy in many countries, the social safety net and social programs, the United Nations and its organizations are all positive examples of enormous social change. Some enormous changes even happened quite rapidly, notably the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet bloc, détente and some disarmament.

On the environment itself there is the example of the ozone crisis, in which Canada in fact played an important role in getting an international treaty to act, the Montreal Protocol. On climate change indeed Canadian scientists and the Canadian government provided key input at several (early) stages. We do not have to start at zero, although we have a long way to go.

First nations peoples in Canada and elsewhere have traditions and principles that could be enormously helpful. The long time frame brought into deliberations--seven generations hence--is far better than a visible achievement for the next election. First nations concepts of communal land ownership, in perpetuity, are more conducive to conservation than the industrial land-as-commodity prevalent in western capitalism. First nations respect for other species similarly might be more conducive to good practice than western instrumentalism. Their concept of the earth as an entity, Mother Earth, differs profoundly from that of the industrial approach of the earth as an inert repository of "natural resources."

Judicial activism in Canada has extended the rights of First Nations peoples and stimulated important legislative changes and financial settlements. Another challenge our constitutional thinkers face is the incorporation of First Nations principles into the constitution itself.

A host of other structural changes are needed to facilitate action on climate change and resource conservation. Proportional representation would result in the election of more environmentalists to legislatures, notably from the Green Party. It would likely result in frequent minority governments, which have been good for the achievement of such social justice measures as the old age pension and controls on election spending and reporting. Constitutional change to bring in proportional representation should be a priority.

International conventions have also to be revisited in the light of the climate crisis. The Geneva Convention from its inception in 1864 was aimed at the reduction of harm to ordinary people, limiting the "rights" of states to make war. War and the preparation for it are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and the release of other toxic substances into the atmosphere, oceans and soil. Yet "national defence" has traditionally been exempted from environmental assessment, and even the idea of its inclusion seems ridiculous, for war is surely intended to be harmful. Yet Canada's military for decades now has been engaged in activities justified as peacemaking, and certainly neither territorial aggrandizement or vanquishing the queen's enemies has been the aim. Our own constitution keeps the decision to go to war at the executive level; Parliament need not be consulted. (Any democratic control over such a decision is unhappily no guarantee of different thinking, as was seen with the United States' Congress ceding its power to the president in the case of the Iraq war.)

Environmental bills of rights have been adopted in some jurisdictions, but there will be no argument here for such a tactic. Much more fundamental change is required. The very notion that people have "rights" to a healthy environment, when we make the lifestyle choices we do, is ludicrous. Rather we need to conceptualize some way of providing rights for future generations, which means the curtailment of rights for individuals and corporations in the here and now. This will require major rethinking, and we should be promoting such without delay. Town hall meetings across the country, with citizen participation, desirably with input from specialists in values and ethics, would be a helpful step.

Such a process produced excellent results in the process of refinement of the Charter of Rights in 1980-82. Women, notably, made great gains, surprising the federal government in the course, and indeed themselves, for there were few women constitutional lawyers to draw on and virtually no academic literature either to assist.

Revision of the Constitution Act and other statutes to deal with climate change will be divisive. Pessimists will remind that the French Enlightenment was followed by a revolution, a period of terror and the Napoleonic wars. Slavery was ended in the United States only after a devastating civil war. Not acting vigorously and promptly, however, can only be expected to risk unprecedented environmental breakdown. Realists must rise to the occasion, and the sooner we start the better for all.

Al Gore found an example in Abraham Lincoln's seeing opportunity in all the difficulties of the American Civil War: "As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country." Gore argued that Americans of our day have also to "disenthrall" themselves from "the sound-and-light show" that have diverted attention "from the important issues and challenges of our day," Iraq and AIDS as well as climate change. He quoted the proverb: "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18) optimistically adding that there is another side: "Where there is vision the people prosper and flourish, and the natural world recovers and our communities recover." The knowledge of what to do is available, he insisted, rightly I believe. What is needed is "political will," which Gore described as "a renewable resource in a democracy."

My concluding point is that the political will has to be directed to revising political institutions as well as dealing with the substance of the climate crisis as such, to the Constitution, numerous statutes and policies. Let's agree that a crisis also brings with it opportunity and let's get on with that greatly needed creative thinking.

Endnotes

1. United Kingdom, Fourth Annual Report on the Alkali Act, 4; and see Robert Angus Smith, Air and Rain: the Beginning of a Chemical Climatology.
2. In the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) 18:11.
3. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham. reprint of 1838 ed., ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell & Russell 1962) 1:25.
4. Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 2007).
5. Svante Arrhenius, "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground." London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 5th ed. ser. 237-76.
6. Alastair R. Lucas, "Legal Constraints and Opportunities: Climate Change and the Law." In Harold Coward and Andrew J. Weaver, eds. Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2006) 179-98.
7. Op. cit. 182.
8. George Monbiot, in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Toronto: Doubleday 2006) 15-16.
9. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph 1994).
10. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals. 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Green 1863) preface.
11. Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin 2007) 212-13.