“Scientists are now worried that unless accelerated action is taken by 2020, the Paris goal may become unattainable,” the UN chief told reporters at the world body’s New York Headquarters.
“I am beginning to wonder how many more alarm bells must go off before the world rises to the challenge,” Mr. Guterres said, noting that 2017 had been filled with climate chaos and 2018 has already brought more of the same.
“Climate change is still moving much faster than we are,” he warned, calling the phenomenon the greatest threat facing humankind.
Recent information from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Bank and the International Energy Agency shows the relentless pace of climate change.
For instance, the UN chief said, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 per cent, to a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes.Now I don't want to piss on Justin's Pipeline Parade but Canada has stepped into the Dark Side. We can't blame this on a bunch of foreign oil companies and Texas pipeline bandits. From now on in, it's pretty much "Made in Canada" and it comes with Justin's winning smile stamped right on it.
In social as well as economic terms, the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was devastating, washing away decades of development in an instant.
In South Asia, major monsoon floods affected 41 million people.
In Africa, severe drought drove nearly 900,000 people from their homes.
Wildfires caused destruction across the world. Arctic sea ice cover in winter is at its lowest level, and the oceans are warmer and more acidic than at any time in recorded history.
“This tsunami of data should create a storm of concern,” Mr. Guterres said, noting that next year he will convene a climate summit in New York aimed at boosting global ambition to meet the level of the climate challenge.Yeah, well, Antonio, not so much. The scientists have told us we have to leave that bitumen in the ground and we've answered with a resounding "fuck you, we'll do as we please."
No matter how many cowardly newspaper editorial boards cast this pipeline as an economic issue, it's much, much more than that. This is life and death, especially for the poorest, most vulnerable people on Earth and, at the very least, a brutal and ruinous future for our grandchildren and their kids.
This is a huge catastrophic threat to the coastline of British Columbia and the tens of thousands of jobs that would be lost from a tanker calamity in these treacherous, congested waters. An ordinary, conventional oil spill takes 50 years to clean up. Remember the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, a quarter century ago? It's still a mess and recently marine biologists warned that one of the two local orca pods will soon be no more.
There's no shortage of clean crude oil on the market but we're going to undercut that with rotgut bitumen at bargain basement prices. You've got to go low to flog that stuff. And you've got to be low to go low. Trudeau might as well revive the asbestos trade.
If only he would. Asbestos mainly kills the people that mine it and work with it. Burning up those tar sands will kill us all.
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ReplyDeleteMy point, Cap, is that we used to be the good guys or at least we aspired to be. None of us imagined we were perfect but we strived to be better. It was an end unto itself. We failed, regularly, yes, but we acknowledged, sometimes embraced, the goal.
Trudeau, Pierre, was inspirational. It wasn't just the Charter. Long before that we embraced his 'just society' a new enlightenment. As a subaltern, then a journalist, then a law student, that Trudeau shaped my life. He was a flawed man as all men must be but we've not seen his like since.
The party of Laurier and St. Laurent, Mike Pearson and Pierre Trudeau bears little resemblance to the Liberal Party of Chretien, Dion, Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. For all his strengths, Jean Chretien had no vision of Canada. Paul Martin had some but no opportunity to achieve much. Ignatieff wanted a Canadian Democratic Party as Harper wanted a north-of-the-49th hard right Republican movement.
Trudeau rode to power on seductive promises and a name that he never grew into and never will. Yet those I now call Stepford Wife Liberals are all he needs.
Trudeau has erased the anxiety of scraping the Liberal Party off my boots in the Ignatieff era. I watched the Liberal leadership contest that chose Trudeau leader. I had never imagined that the party had been Shanghaied by such a gang of petty mercantilists. They revealed how completely progressivism had been purged from the Liberal Party in the 21st century.
More than 40 years a loyal Liberal I wish I had taken my leave sooner. I really didn't leave the LPC. It left me, long before I was ready to acknowledge that.
History will prove Trudeau to be a climate saving martyr. Rather than allowing the Redneck Texasscans to run willy nilly over our country he bought them out (so as not to piss them off - you can never under estimate what a pissed off Texasscan will do in retaliation). He will shut down the worn out 60+ year old line and abandon the plans for the Stranded Asset Twin Line, thus curtailing one of the planets most significant pollution plans! History will prove him a hero! And the good news is that we will live to have a history.
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ReplyDeleteJohn, apparently they're not legalizing weed until August. Don't get ahead of yourself.