Will 2018 Be the Year That Reality Sinks In?

It's in the news, daily. It's everywhere. Heatwaves sweeping the entire northern hemisphere. Wildfires even up inside the Arctic Circle. Floods and flash floods. Drought and flash droughts. People dying here. People dying there. Dozens, hundreds of dead here, there and there.  People displaced in hundreds of thousands.

All this and word that we're just getting started. Basic physics shows us this is going to get worse. So, do we finally get it? Have we figured out that the climate change deniers/footdraggers are actually dangerous, potentially harmful to us and our kids and life on Earth? Are we nearing the point where we're going to see their antics as crimes against humanity? That's what they are.

Every supertanker of dilbit that sails under Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge is going to make this summer's inferno worse, more deadly in years to come. It's the very stuff of death and suffering - not so much here of course but across the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world. Our Liberals and Conservatives can ignore it but they can't change that and they're not even going to try. To them, once that armada of supertankers reaches the open sea it's someone else's problem and, in the worst possible way, it really is - someone else's problem.

Remember in the Harper era how Canada was lambasted as a climate pariah? Canada was an international pariah. Yet Trudeau has done more for the Tar Sands and global bitumen trafficking than Harper ever dreamed of doing. I'm sorry Grits but that's a fact, a goddamned fact. This is on you. And it's arguably a crime against humanity.

Trudeau's candle is burning from both ends. The days of the petro-state are numbered and we will be vilified for our choices, our decision to exploit a truly horrible carbon resource for profit leaving the real price - death, suffering and dislocation -  to be paid by others.

Maybe we'll come to our senses. Maybe not. With bitumen stalwarts such as Notley, Kenney, Moe, Scheer and, yes, Justin Trudeau and this Liberal government, the Tar Sands won't go without a fight. Canada will be a greater climate pariah than ever even as the world burns. Woe, Canada.

Or maybe 2018 will be the year that reality sinks in. Maybe this is the year we'll tell Trudeau and his Liberals, Scheer and his Tories, that this deadly nonsense must stop. It's over. The world is on fire. We can't throw matches onto the fire. There's no longer a place for the filthiest, highest-carbon ersatz oil.

We're better than this.