It's The End Of The World As We Know It

First, there was the plague. In February 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic seized the planet, disrupting normal life, and taking more than five million lives and counting as it spread despite humanity’s best efforts to limit its reach. Then, there was fire. In the summer of 2021, in the paradisal setting of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia, Canada, the temperature rose to 49.6 degrees Celsius as a heat dome settled upon the Pacific Northwest. The day after the record high was set, the village of Lytton burst into flames, destroying more than 90% of the buildings in the village. Houses on the adjacent Lytton First Nation reserves, home to the Nlaka’pamux people who have resided on the territory for thousands of years, also burned to the ground. Hundreds of people in the province died from heat-related illness; more than a billion sea animals were cooked alive; and crops were destroyed – the cherries were roasting on the trees Then came the floods. In November 2021, an atmospheric river drenched the region that had just survived the summer wildfires. More than a month’s rain fell during 24 hours, causing massive flooding, and forcing the evacuation of the entire population of nearby Merrit, British Columbia, with approximately 8,000 residents. Vancouver, Canada’s largest port, was cut off from the rest of the country; the principal roads and rail lines had been washed away. 

Burned to the Ground: The Canadian village incinerated by record temperatures (watch video)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/jun/08/burned-to-the-ground-the-canadian-village-incinerated-by-record-temperatures

Suddenly, there were thousands of climate change refugees looking for shelter. In a weird twist of fate, a nearby Seventh Day Adventist Summer Camp and Conference Center, aptly named Camp Hope, offered to take in some of Merrit’s refugees. In case you are wondering, The Seventh Day Adventists are a Protestant denomination that strongly believes in the sanctity of the Sabbath and the imminent second coming of Jesus, in other words, a doctrine that incorporates a strong belief in the end of days as spelled out in the bible. A few weeks earlier, Camp Hope had taken in refugees from the Lytton First Nation reserves. As a result, Camp Hope became the meeting place for displaced people from both Indigenous communities and the descendants of the European settlers who made their way onto what had been exclusively Indigenous land.

You have to think at some point in time, there would be an exchange, some type of communication between these two forsaken groups. I would love to have been there. A clash of civilizations. Competing narratives trying to make sense of what had just happened. I imagine someone from the Nlaka’pamux band lashing out at one of the beleaguered, white residents from Merrit, saying something to the effect, “Look at us. We tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen.” And a Seventh-Day Adventist handing them both a pamphlet explaining how these types of natural catastrophes are a warning of the second coming.

Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to cite scripture to understand what’s happening, although the idea of the apocalypse certainly appears to be in play. Instead, we can look to science to give us an explanatory narrative, which unfortunately might be even more frightening than end-of-days scenarios we have previously known.

In short, we have left the Holocene geological epoch, the period of time after the last ice age in which the planet’s climate warmed and remained stable for approximately 10,000 years, giving rise to human civilization. Some time ago, we entered into the Anthropocene epoch, the period of time in which human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems. That of course came about with the invention of the steam engine, giving birth to the Industrial Age and the corelating burning of fossil fuels to propel the economic expansion.

With the increase of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to the burning of coal, oil, and gas, scientists correctly predicted that this would have an effect on the environment: higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase its greenhouse effect, eventually leading to global warming. The particulars, how much and how fast, have been the subject of intense debate, but the underlying principles to why the planet could expect global climate change if we continued to indiscriminately dump trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere were sound.

Some scientists label the 1950s as the point in time in which the Great Acceleration occurs, a period of time in which the consumption of material goods begins to skyrocket worldwide as the planet’s inhabitants yearn and aspire to North American levels of consumption. In 1958, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately 310 parts per million (ppm). Today (Nov. 17, 2021), the concentration was measured at 414 ppm, an increase of a mind-boggling 33% in only sixty short years, a blink of an eye in geological time.

As could be expected, the planet has warmed up since the dawn of the industrial age, approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius and that has already brought on cataclysmic climate change: glaciers in retreat, polar ice caps melting, extended periods of severe drought, unprecedented wildfires in North America, Europe, and Australia, increased atmospheric disturbances, grasslands turning into desserts, and ocean acidification leading to the death of coral reefs, to mention a few.

It’s not as if the leaders of the countries in the Global North had not been forewarned. As early as 1957, scientists in the United States sensed the potential scale of the problem that global warming presented – human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future – and decided to build a site to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above sea level. For ten years, they collected data, and Presidents were informed of the potential risks of global warming. Finally, in 1979, at the request of President Jimmy Carter and the National Academy of the Sciences, the Climate Research Board was convened to assess the future climatic changes resulting from man-made releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Board reached a stark conclusion in its report: Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. The Assessment predicts that based on current rates of CO2 emissions (emission rates have increased significantly since the publication of the report) the global surface of the earth will warm 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius, more so at higher latitudes, sometime during the twenty-first century.

During the 1980s, the Americans and the rest of the world dithered when it came to reducing CO2 emissions. Instead, attention was focused on the problem of atmospheric pollution caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) normally emitted by refrigeration, solvents, and aerosol sprays that were reducing the level of ozone in the atmosphere (remember the hole in the ozone layer), thereby allowing a dangerous level of ultraviolet light to reach the earth, potentially causing unprecedented levels to skin cancer to appear. Here was a problem that was much easier to fix. To their credit, representatives from around the world were able to negotiate an agreement, the Montreal Protocol, to reduce the use of CFCs, and the threat to human health was successfully mitigated. Yet, such an agreement, although showing that international cooperation to solve a global environmental problem was possible, did nothing to abate the increasing extraction and burning of fossil fuels globally.

There was a ray of hope in 1988 when NASA climate scientist, Jim Hansen, appeared before a Senate Committee and reported that there was undeniable evidence establishing the link between an increase in global surface temperatures and the greenhouse effect. The signal had emerged from the noise and the world took notice. That same year the United Nations established the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was tasked to periodically provide reports concerning climate change, drawing upon the peer-reviewed scientific research papers from around the world. A few years later (1995) the United Nations sponsored the first annual global conference about climate change held in Berlin. Some twenty years later, it appeared that some progress had been made at the level of discussions: during the 2015 conference in Paris, an agreement was struck to provide a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In some people’s minds, the Paris Agreement represented a potential pathway to avoid catastrophic climate change. A glimmer of hope – perhaps, but in reality, despite all the talk, more CO2 was being dumped into the atmosphere than ever before.

Looking at the data compiled and presented by Barry Saxifrage in the following charts concerning the consumption of oil, gas, and coal, it is clear that the global burning of fossil fuels has actually increased dramatically since 1990.

 As measured by the metric, tonne of oil equivalent (toe), a metric used to compare different sources of energy (a Mtoe is a million toe and a Gtoe is a billion toe), the level of consumption of all fossil fuels combined rose from 7.1 Gtoe in 1990 to 11.7 Gtoe in 2018, a staggering increase of 65%. As could be expected, the acceleration of the global fossil fuel burn would show up in the CO2 atmospheric measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory: from 1990 to 1999 the annual mean of atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased 1.50 parts per million (ppm) per year; from 2000 to 2009 the annual mean increased 1.97 ppm per year; and from 2010 to 2018 the annual mean increased 2.40 ppm per year. This acceleration should be more than a cause for concern because the trend raises the specter of catastrophic climate change.

 

 

Looking at the global fossil fuel burn from a longer historical perspective, we discover that more than 80% of the CO2 emissions dumped into the atmosphere occurred after the Great Acceleration in the 1950s, and more than 50% since 1990 when the threat of global warming had become well known in the political corridors around the world.

No wonder the youth of today look at the UN-sponsored conferences on global change with cynicism. In their eyes, the world’s politicians have been co-opted by the multinational fossil fuel corporations, and both are engaged in a concerted effort to greenwash the future, which will certainly be bleak for future generations if the present trends continue.

For example, the latest global conference held in Glasgow in 2021, COP26, confirmed that such meetings were, in the words of the world-renown, young activist, Greta Thunberg, little more than “blah, blah, blah.”

And she’s right.

The take-a-ways from COP26 included more hollow pledges committing governments to future actions that have no compliance measures to ensure that the reductions in the burning of fossil fuels will be met; a laughable recognition that the burning of fossil fuels is linked to climate change; and the failure to put into words the commitment to “phase out”, not “phase down” the burning of coal.

What is more telling are the actions undertaken by the governments of the world leaders who try to pass themselves off as climate change warriors. In the case of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, his government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline so to continue with its construction it would triple the amount of tar sand oil, one of the most destructive carbon-intensive and toxic fuels on the planet, to be exported from Alberta. The pipeline runs across British Columbia, a province that has just been hit with two climate change catastrophes in less than six months. In a similar vein, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has lent his support to the building of the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, slated to be the longest in the world, bringing even more oil to global markets, in order to increase France’s economic presence in the region. Finally, the American President, Joe Biden, proud of the green energy proposals in his Build Back Better plan recently signed into law, failed to halt the approvals for companies to drill for oil and gas on U.S. public lands – more than 2000 permits were approved during his first six months in office – and his administration opened up more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to auction for oil and gas drilling only four days after the close of COP 26 in Glasgow, a lease sale that has the potential to emit more than 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter how many new clean energy resources we develop to fuel our vehicles, heat our homes, and light our buildings as long as we continue to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. Adding new CO2 at the present rate increases the greenhouse effect and, as a result, increases global warming, regardless of how much of our energy needs are met by renewable resources.

As the following chart demonstrates, the growth in the available amount of clean energy is woefully insufficient to match our energy needs as compared to the global fossil fuel burn.

As Saxifrage’s chart shows, the energy obtained from renewables and nuclear power did increase significantly from 1990 to 2018, from 1.0 Gtoe to 2.1 Gtoe, an increase of 1.1 Gtoe. However, the energy obtained from burning fossil fuels in absolute terms increased from 7.1 Gtoe to 11.7 Gtoe, an increase of 4.6 Gtoe. Thus, the increase in energy obtained from the burning of fossil fuels was four times greater than the increase in energy obtained from renewables and nuclear power. Moreover, the gap between the two categories of energy use has risen from 6.1 Gtoe in 1990 to 9.6 Gtoe in 2018. This is cause for concern since the global demand for energy is returning to pre-pandemic levels, thereby re-establishing the historic trend of the use of energy from burning fossil fuels far outstripping the use of energy from other sources. 

According to Saxifrage, “it is just another form of climate denial to expect clean energy to force fossil fuel burning to fall — let alone fall all the way down to zero as required to avoid a climate crisis.” I agree. It is also another form of climate denial to expect carbon sequestration technology or geoengineering interventions to counteract potential catastrophic climate change without severely reducing the global fossil fuel burn.

So, either we eliminate the use of energy obtained from burning fossil fuels – an extremely disruptive change, requiring fundamental changes to the way we lead our lives and organize our societies – or we continue along our present collective path, leading us to the possible extinction of the human species as the planet’s atmosphere morphs into one that no longer supports human life.

Such a scenario makes me think about the pamphlets the Seventh Day Adventists were handing out to the climate change refugees in Camp Hope, British Columbia. If I could rewrite the story in the pamphlet, I would say that we were all born into something like the Garden of Eden, but we were not cast out. On the contrary, those of us lucky to find ourselves in paradise never learned when enough is enough, and we let our desire to have more and more get the better of us, and we chose to ignore the warning signs that we were destroying the garden. Moreover, we decided to build a wall around a portion of the garden and began to transfer the wealth from outside the walls inside, leaving the people who lived outside of the walls to live on the impoverished soil. Those living inside the fortress blamed the poorer people for their plight, saying that they deserved their misfortune because the outcasts were liars, and cheaters, and refused to help themselves.

I would also change the part that deals with the apocalypse. In the biblical version, as prophesized in the Book of Revelation, the apocalypse depicts the complete destruction of the world preceding the establishment of a new world and heaven. In my version, the destruction of human civilization is not a prelude to a better life. Rather, the massive die-off of humans is simply a stage in the evolution of the planet: the dominant species on the planet became too numerous and greedily devoured as much of the planet’s natural resources as it could, destroying the habitat that made its life possible on earth, and putting into play planetary forces out of their control that over time brings about the extinction of the species. Humans may be warm-blooded and capable of performing advanced cognitive feats, like putting a man on the moon, harnessing the tremendous energy contained within a single atom, or writing a symphony that elicits tears of joy, but when it comes to our collective intelligence, we are like the dinosaurs that used to be the dominant species and met their demise as a result of climate change.

The other thing that calls into question our collective intelligence is that unlike the biblical version, where the coming of the end of days is revealed, and the hidden information about God, the real nature of our lives and the spiritual world is made known, humanity knows very well what will bring about its demise, but chooses to do little or nothing to change the path it’s on.

The scientific evidence available to all doesn’t lie. The message is clear: stop extracting and burning fossil fuels!

Yet, we continue on this path as if there were no tomorrow. Consequently, I feel like I am a character in a science fiction film in which humanity learns that there is an asteroid hurtling toward the earth and will destroy the planet upon impact. However, in this movie, there are no heroes that save the day. As well, the cascade of natural disasters unfolds in what appears to be slow motion. This movie doesn’t last two hours; it runs for decades, perhaps for centuries, slowly grinding towards its inevitable conclusion: the end of the world as we know it.   

 

 

 

 

Will Canada Ever Get Woke ?

Maybe, but not in my lifetime. Canada’s colonial mentality, although showing its age, has brought so much wealth to those who adhere to its cultural imperatives that this mentality is not going to be tossed aside anytime soon. 

To be Canadian is to be trapped in a historical narrative of conquest, arriving from British soil, not unlike the Spanish, French, and Portuguese forays into the Americas, that has as its raison d’être the never-ending extraction of wealth from the land and its people.

Recently, however, Canadians have discovered that something is amiss among the fundamental ideas of colonial expansion. For one, before declaring that the new colony was terra nullius, an empty land devoid of inhabitants, ready to be colonized by European settlers, it should have been recognized that the Indigenous people living in the coveted territory had rights to the land that predated the arrival of the settlers. In a symbolic gesture, the act of signing of treaties with the indigenous peoples recognized their rights to the land, but in the realpolitik of the day, the treaties were empty gestures, never to be respected, never to impede in any meaningful way the land grab that was about to take place.

Essentially our Fathers of Confederation faced a problem: how to build a nation on stolen land? The answer: first round up the undesirables, take their ancestral lands, and relocate them on reserves of impoverished territory that cannot support their traditional way of life, in other words, genocide by administrative decree.

Although partially successful, placing indigenous peoples on reserves did not solve the problem. Too many of them hung on to their lives and their traditions. Since the military solution of entering into the reserves and slaughtering the “natives” was a non-starter, the Canadian Government of the day, led by Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, who was also Minister of Indian Affairs, decided instead to create the Indian Residential schools with the goal of assimilating Indigenous children and adolescents into what was the, for the most part, European culture -- in the words of Sir John, “take the Indian out of the child.”

In creating the Residential schools, the Canadian Government removed by consent or by force tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes, some as young as two or four years of age; attempted to deprive these children of any connections with their parents; underfunded and willfully neglected the educational system so thousands of students perished from malnutrition, poor medical care, and disease; created a system where child labor was a norm and where academic achievements were severely compromised; and failed to provide oversight and accountability, which led to rampant physical and sexual abuse of the children. More than 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to attend the schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. An estimated 6,000 children died while attending these schools.

Eventually, Canadians learned about their horrible fate. Much of it was documented in the report tabled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. Years later, the memories of the cultural genocide resurfaced in 2021 when thousands of unmarked graves containing the bodies of indigenous children who were living in the residential schools were discovered. The nation was reminded of its shameful past.

Yet, looking at how Canadians reacted to the newly discovered graves suggests that something had changed in the national zeitgeist. The traditional boisterous festivities to celebrate Canada Day were muted, partially by the COVID pandemic, more so by the somber realization that the nation had been founded on a fundamental injustice towards Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Many Canadians decided to forego donning the nation’s colors of red and white, and chose instead to wear orange in recognition of the crimes committed against the innocent children who had been identified as being part of the “Indian problem.” Many municipalities decided to cancel Canada Day events, but in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, the anger boiled over: protesters threw red paint on the statue of Queen Victoria in front of the provincial legislature, the monarch who had come to symbolize the rise of the British Empire, and then toppled her statue, as well as statue of Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s reigning monarch and Canada’s present head of state.

In my recollection, this was a first in Canadian history. Never before have we seen such a public desecration of the symbols of empire. After all, Canada had been initially settled by British loyalists. No matter. The collective shame of having the nation founded on the colonial desire to expand the empire, killing innocent children in the process, was too much to bear. It was as if Canadians had finally realized that their colonial past was not something to be celebrated. They were awoken by a painful remembrance of the past that affected the way they felt about the present.

But what about the future? Are Canadians ready to continue to explore the consequences and possible remedies of the imperial project that gave birth to the nation: the European quest to plunder the planet at the expense of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, a project that continues today no longer under the flags of the respective mother or father lands, but under the logos of the multinational corporations who run the world and the financiers who try their best not to attract any attention to themselves or the hoard of wealth they have stashed away in offshore tax havens?

The stakes are high. The health of the planet is in peril, as is the well-being of future generations of Canadians. The economic model we have come to know after the end of the Second World War, heavily dependent on the extraction and exportation of non-renewable resources, is no longer sustainable. Likewise, for our current levels of consumption.

We have a stark choice before us. Either we abandon our obsession of trying to perpetually grow the economy and realize that there are limits to growth, in particular how much carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere, or we will face the unintended consequences of our collective actions, an inhospitable planet.

 We can no longer hide behind the veil of willful ignorance.

Making the necessary changes will not be easy. It requires a deep structural change to the way we have been taught to lead our lives. The practice of making our collective decisions based on what is best for economic growth has been incredibly successful in creating wealth, with the exception, of course, of Canada’s indigenous peoples, who were never really considered to be part of the plan to raise the material well-being of the population.

Considering that my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression, had difficulty putting enough food on the table and to clothe their children properly, I understand how Canadians have benefited enormously from the economic imperialism first foisted upon us by the British and then continued by our desire to imitate the lifestyles of our rich, white, American cousins.

Our attachment to the modus operandi of perpetual wealth accumulation is our collective sacred flaw. We can talk about many things, but the one thing we are unable to do is sustain a discussion about how our lifestyles are no longer sustainable given the consequences of climate change. We need to wake up and smell the coffee. All of us, not just Canadians, need to reduce our consumption: less movement on the ground, less air travel, less construction, less plastic, less meat. Moreover, in the political realm we must stop using public funds to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and we need to raise taxes on corporate profits and the transfer of funds between generations in order to pay for the required structural changes within Canada and to help defray the costs of transitioning away from fossil fuels in the developing world. There is no way around it. There are no technological fixes on the horizon. The longer we delay, the worse the situation will get. We need to act now.  

Here's A Scary Thought: Let's Keep Fossil Fuels In The Ground

WTF? What are you talking about?

You heard me right. Let's keep them in the ground. The choice is clear. If we continue to extract and burn them, dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the process, we risk rendering the earth inhospitable for human life. Or, we could stop torching the earth by simply leaving them in the ground. A drastic reduction in their availability would require a complete redesign of the economy, forcing us to develop the use of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels.

But that would cause massive pain to a lot of people who depend on their exploitation to earn their livelihoods. Absolutely. Yet, in comparison to the suffering that awaits humanity as a result of parts of the planet becoming inhospitable, it is minor. Short-term pain, long-term gain.

But what about the economy? Weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels would shrink the economy.

Well, there are times when you have to say FUCK the economy: the outbreak of the global COVID pandemic comes to mind. In order to save lives, the populations of the world's leading economies were locked down and commerce was severely reduced, thereby limiting the spread of the virus. Economic growth was sacrificed for the benefit of the population at large.

Turning to the question of catastrophic climate change, if ever there were a context in which the thought, "FUCK the economy" should reign, it is in the context of the immense challenge facing us to mitigate the damage of climate change. If we don't change our ways, and do so quickly, we face the very real possibility of bringing on a massive die off of the human race within the next hundred years.

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Sometimes You Have Too Say: "Fuck the Economy"

There are some that think this isn't such a bad idea, believing that my strong feelings on the subject are too anthropocentric. Maybe I'm wired that way. Others have already reached the conclusion that catastrophic climate change is inevitable and that there isn't anything we can do now to prevent it. The process is already too advanced to change the planet's trajectory. Consequently, we should try to squeeze out as much pleasure as we can before the party is over, like the passengers who drank and danced while the band played on after the Titanic had struck the iceberg.

Personally, I believe we have a moral obligation to abandon our addiction to fossil fuels. Perhaps, going cold turkey is not the way to go about it. Nevertheless, the "Keep Fossil Fuels In The Ground" meme needs to gain traction. It needs to spread and filter its way into the political discourse. The sooner, the better!

Wake Up Canada: It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

These are trying times. A global pandemic has forced millions of people to re-evaluate their priorities and rethink the way their lives are structured. Yet, in the midst of the tumult, Canadians have been forced to go to the polls to elect a new government even though the government in place has done an admirable job of handling the Covid-19 crisis. Why? Is it because of what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dubiously asserted to be a toxic situation in Parliament? 

 

Toxic for whom? For the population at large, or for Trudeau’s aspirations to rule the country like a king?  Seeing that the Liberal government has been able to pass all of its legislation without having the opposition parties that are in the majority force an election by means of a non-confidence motion, it appears that the problem is Trudeau’s desire to rule as if he had the support of the majority of Canadian electors when clearly he hasn’t. The only way he can expect to form a majority government and assume the regal powers that go with it is that the antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system distorts the popular vote so to fabricate a false majority. No wonder he reneged on his promise to change the voting system. He now stands to be the principal beneficiary of its systemic distortions.

 

If we dig a bit deeper, the real problem isn’t simply Trudeau’s desire to rule like a king, but Canada’s inability to upgrade its political system from a system born in the nineteenth century, before the advent of electricity, to a system capable of responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century, a century in which humanity’s future is threatened by its refusal to make the necessary changes to ensure its survival in the face of catastrophic climate change.

 

Canadians find themselves trapped by a political system that perpetuates the colonial obsession with wealth extraction. The two political parties that have governed Canada, Liberal or Conservative, since confederation may differ with regard to their social policies, but both have given their unwavering support to economic policies that give priority to the perpetual accumulation of wealth. In this regard, both parties are the flip side of the same coin, what the French refer to as: la pensée unique. 

 

Although it may be argued that this manner of thinking served the nation well throughout the twentieth century, having helped to build the infrastructure that makes modern life possible, it is the inability to let go of this colonial mindset that is the real issue. Essentially, the present system of governance promotes the wealth accumulation modus operandi to such an extent that it prevents any significant change that would steer the nation in another direction.

However, for Canada not to change direction, along with all the other developed nations, runs the risk of sacrificing the well-being of future generations because they will be the ones who will be saddled with the onerous task of trying to survive in a world where today’s extreme weather events are no longer considered to be extreme.

 

I wonder how many citizens from Lytton, British Columbia will be voting in this federal election?  I’m sure that many of them will be, but they won’t be casting their votes in the small town they used to call home. After recording the highest temperature since records have been kept in Canada, 49 degrees Celsius, Lytton had the misfortune of being caught in what seemed like a case of spontaneous combustion from a Dickens’ novel. The nearby forest burst into flames and engulfed the town in a fire that burned 90% of the buildings to the ground.

 

Hello Canada. That was your wake up call. The formation of heat domes has increased in frequency during the last ten years. How many towns need to meet the same fate before Canada takes concrete action instead of setting carbon emissions goals that it never meets? The time has come for immediate action. Forget trying to make believe change is in the works. as long as no concrete measures are put into place. It might be already to late to mitigate the damage that climate change will bring about during what’s left of the century. But we have a moral obligation to assume the duty of care towards the environment. Nothing less will do.

 

Now, here’s the thing. Giving Trudeau a majority government will only exacerbate the problem. Remember this is the man who thought it would be a good thing if the Canadian government would support the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline that would almost triple the amount of oil being transported from Alberta through the interior of British Columbia, a province that is now experiencing the worst forest fire devastation in living memory. Talk about throwing gasoline on the fire. The Canadian government bought the Trans Mountain from Kinder Morgan Inc. for C$4.5 billion in 2018 after the company threatened to scrap the line's expansion amid fierce environmental opposition. It did so while Trudeau’s Liberals formed a “majority” government with less than 40% of the popular vote.

 

One of the fallouts of the COVID pandemic, however, is the realization that nothing is written in stone. Change is possible. For example, millions of people have continued to work through these difficult times, no longer having to waste two hours of their day commuting to and from their place of work. Instead, they learned to work from home without a demonstrable loss of productivity. Now the majority of these workers don’t want to return to the status quo, the way things were before the pandemic. They would prefer to continue to work from home, at least for a coupe of days per week. Others came to the realization that they were sacrificing too much of their lives for the sake of keeping their jobs. As a result, the Great Resignation has ensued and millions of workers in North America have quit their jobs.

 

In a similar vein, the pandemic has demonstrated that a majority government in Parliament is not required to run a country like Canada even during a global health crisis. In fact, the concentration of political power in one person constitutes a significant risk since one person holding such power can make decisions that imperil the well-being of the population as has been the case in the Trump-led USA, the Johnson-led Great Britain, and the Bolsonaro-led Brazil.

 

Facing the even greater challenge of responding to the challenge of dealing with catastrophic climate change, Canadians would do well not to place all their eggs in one basket by handing Trudeau a majority government. He can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Political power means too much to him, and to maintain that power he will be extremely reluctant to do anything that would diminish the returns to the investors in the gas and oil sector. He won’t bite the hand that feeds him. 

 

But that what’s needed to even have the slim chance of mitigating the effects of extreme weather events like the one that destroyed the town of Lytton. The new normal that we are rapidly moving towards includes what were once in a lifetime weather event happening every year and what were once in a millennium event happening every decade.

 

A minority Liberal, Conservative, or New Democratic Party government is Canada’s best option at the moment. That way the regal powers of the crown-in-parliament political system will not be transferred to a single person. As much as some people are disappointed with Trudeau’s performance, a majority Conservative government is not something to be desired. No one person should be empowered to make the decisions for the entire country, especially now since the quality of life of future generations is now in our hands.

A Lament For A Paradise Lost

Not having written a blog post for a couple of years, I knew that it might be difficult to get into the flow. I wanted to break my silence. I thought I would write a post about climate change and that I would take my usual tone of the disgruntled citizen railing against the powers that be for their inaction and a complacent citizenry for not paying sufficient attention to what’s going on. Then, this Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest assessment, and the prognosis was worse than what I feared. It now seems certain that climate change is occurring at a faster rate than we thought, the change is unequivocally being caused by human activity, and the effects will be felt for centuries. The only thing we can do know is mitigate the damage. For example, if we can cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by the middle of this century, we can halt and possibly reverse the rise in temperatures. Good luck with that!

I am not a pessimist. Far from it. However, the scale of the change required to be able to reach those lofty goals are beyond humanity’s capacity to change. It would require a total make over of how we live our lives. Massive investments would need to be redirected into re-engineering how we make things, how we move about, and what and how we consume what is produced. In other words, our level of comfort and the convenient way in which life has been arranged for the vast majority of people in the developed world would become a thing of the past.

One of the key takeaways from the global response to the COVID pandemic is how deeply we are attached to our precious lifestyles. What should be a simply straight forward public health issue has become politicized. Throughout Europe and North and South America a significant number of people resent or even refuse to adopt rather innocuous measures like wearing a mask in public or getting vaccinated against the virus, claiming that their rights are being infringed upon. Moreover, there are sufficient number politicians who pander to their desires not to have to make changes in the way they live. As a result, the number of human lives lost and the level of grief to be endured is far higher than it need be.

I say this because the level of change required to mitigate climate change is exponentially greater than what has been required to limit the effects of the spread of the COVID virus. This is extremely discouraging since the effects of contracting the virus are immediate and the spread of the human misery caused by the virus is very rapid. It only took a few scant months for the world to become engulfed in a global crisis. Yet, countries like the United States of America and Brazil dragged their heels when it came time to protect their citizens and hundreds of thousands of people perished as a result of government inaction.

If major, economically-advanced nations cannot respond adequately to the threat of the spread of a virus, it is extremely unlikely that they will be able to respond adequately to the threat of climate change. Too many players have to come to agreement on what needs to be done in too short of a time frame for an effective response to emerge. Besides, the political will is not there. Governments are not apt to take action that would reduce the earnings of the shareholders of fossil fuel companies, and citizens who are trying to return as quickly as they can to their previous lifestyles are not going to force the issue.

So, what’s left for the distraught to do? Not much. Individuals cutting back on their own consumption of fossil fuels will not be enough. The damage has already been done and will only get worse as we plod through the rest of the century. By the time humanity reaches the tipping point of realizing that it is the midst of a climate catastrophe, it will be too late. The apocalyptic images we have witnessed in the summer of 2021 are alarming, but no where near what is coming down the road in the years ahead.

I mourn losing what we had, and ask forgiveness to future generations for not exercising the duty of care necessary so that you too could behold the amazing beauty of the earth as it used to be.