It's funny, with the October elections nearing, how concerned the Conservatives and Liberals are becoming about climate change or, at least, the flooding that has ravaged eastern Canada and the maritimes. Oh they're all eco-warriors now. So precious.
It might be inspirational if they weren't such petro-pimps, eager to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low-value sludge bitumen. It doesn't matter where that garbage is burned. It's all going up into our shared atmosphere and it's our warming and more moisture-laden atmosphere that's delivering all those floods.
Hell, even PostMedia's Montreal Gazette is getting wise. Today the paper warns that this flooding could be Quebec's "new normal." Not really. Give it another ten years, twenty to be sure, and Quebeckers might be remembering this as the good old days. This is just "early onset" stuff. There's no stasis. The climate is worsening. There'll be plenty of new normal to come, sort of like the "oldest person on Earth" contest.
In today's Globe, Ibbitson writes that even the Tories are now getting onside about climate change. Why does Greenwash smell so much like horse shit? Ibbitson begins with the mandatory disclaimer that no weather event can absolutely be linked to global warming and then follows up with this whopper:
Although the United States, China and India are far more responsible for climate change than Canada, that does does not relieve this country of its moral obligation to do its part.We're really not the problem. Until you consider that Canada consistently ranks in the Top Ten countries for overall emissions and an impressive Top Three standing for per capita emissions. And that's before we get an honest accounting for the emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan's bitumen producers (don't hold your breath waiting).
There may not be another issue that has prompted so much blatant dishonest from governments as climate change. Pity it's also an existential threat, the gravest in the history of human civilization. Scheer is about to pull some sort of eco-bunny out of his backside. Singh will go tut-tut, tut-tut. Trudeau will fill a sandbag, maybe flash his abs.
Who to trust, who to believe? The one that produces a convincing policy to meet the immediate baseline requirement for averting catastrophic, runaway global warming - a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 leading to a near total decarbonization by 2050.
You'll know they're lying if they don't identify how they'll fund such a Herculean effort. Where's the money coming from? What will we have to sacrifice? Who loses so that we all might survive? Something has to give. What'll it be? How about those billions in subsidies and benefits you're lavishing on the Oil Patch? That would be a start.
No rush. The Three Stooges might just get solutions from the motion Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party will table in Britain's HoC this Wednesday. Harnessing the energy of the Extinction Rebellion and the Greta Thunberg-inspired student climate strikers, Corbyn will demand that the government declare a national climate emergency. It's expected that part of that deal will require a firm commitment to meet the 50 per cent by 2030 and near total elimination of GHG emissions by 2050, something our government hasn't even acknowledged much less accepted.
3 comments:
The flooding isn't affecting the Maritimes - it is specifically affecting New Brunswick and its Saint John River watershed. A geography lesson is required for your hazy understandings of my region, something I've noted before.
From the NEB website:
"Canada produced approximately 4.4 million barrels per day (MMb/d) of crude oil in 2017, an increase of 47% from 2010 (Figure 1). This ranked Canada as the 4th largest oil producer in the world. Canadian production is centred in western Canada, which accounted for 95% of total production in 2017. The remaining 5% was produced mostly in Newfoundland and Labrador. Canada’s crude oil goes primarily to export markets. In 2017, Canada exported an average of 3.3 MMb/d – a 6.5% increase since 2016 and a 68% increase since 2010."
Read that and weep, Since 2010, Alberta/Sask has increased "oil" exports 68 frigging percent. While Notley had her shit fits, there was a 6.5% increase 2016 to 2017. Increase of 47% in overall production from 2010 to 2017.
I didn't bother to look it up, but quite obviously, Alberta has a crap royalty regime. They should be charging on a per barrel basis for that public resource, but obviously are not or Alberta wouldn't be on the supposed skids. They'd instead be rich from the increased production. Talk about being "owned" by the oil industry, yet your average Alberta dolt listens to the Notley and Kenney bullshit about the need for new pipelines. The only way to fill them would be even more production, which the country needs like a hole-in-the-head. Not to mention it would blow away our international GHG commitments. Well, not would. It is already without a new pipeline.
Alberta gets its fresh water from glacier melt and uses vast amounts producing dilbit. When the glaciers disappear, as they will, what then? Well, the oil companies will disappear overnight and remediation will never happen. Don't worry. It'll be Eastern Canada's fault, because Alberta is flawless.
I have to say, Alberta is populated by navel-gazers uninterested in anywhere else. Even the progressives there are tied up in this BS (read their blogs) and never talk about the environment except for Climenhaga. It's a bubble where outside influences do not penetrate, and all the bad times are caused by other people who don't live in their idea of paradise. And where do a lot of white scratch-their-armpits supremacists come from? Alberta, land of the complete idiot.
Our federation is far too loose. We don't have national strategies on anything important because two-bit joke provincial premiers object. And in Alberta in particular, with a nod to Saskatchewan as junior partner, fully-formed conservative twits pop up fully-formed from gopher holes ready to whinge about those easterners and latterly BCers and always Muslims. Or like Scheer or Kenney or harper are born in Ontario and head west, their heads full of relgious shit, to incite the locals further.
You'd think the country would be focused on the environment to the exclusion of pretty much all else. But regional loons run the place to the detriment of us all.
BM
Chill out, BM. New Brunswick is a maritime province. Sorry if I didn't specifically deal with NS or PEI but, in fairness, so what?
The rest of your points, however, I cannot help but agree with. Canada does, indeed, lack really national policies but part of that is because of the difficulty of trying to forge federal-provincial agreements without some province demanding to renegotiate the constitution because of some grievance, real or imagined.
Bm..good job. That is exactly what it is about. All those German prisoners of the IIWW finally getting on the Cattle Drive East. Who said Nazis don't exists. Just live in Alberta for a few months and learn.
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