Isn't Politics the Real Problem?

The CBC had an 'experts panel' recently answering audience questions about climate change. One topic that was expressly off-limits was politics.

I listened for a while but it was all pretty mundane stuff, nothing remotely new.

The decision to prohibit discussion of the political dynamic undercut the intended purpose of the programme. I tuned out.

Has there ever been a threat of this magnitude so severely worsened by politics as climate change? From Donald Trump to Dandy Andy Scheer to the Coal Thugs of Poland and Hungary, the right wing has deliberately turned climate change into a political issue, a right versus left contest. Why the political arena? That's easy. It is the one place where ideology, an advanced belief- or faith-based construct, has the ability to thwart science, knowledge.

I think the right has largely succeeded. They've even cowed the centre-left into falling back on a bagful of half-measures, gestural stuff of limited or no effect.

The right has captured the narrative. 'Action on climate change will destroy the economy, put ordinary people out of work and worse.' The centre-left has done a lousy job at pushing back, in the process becoming deeply compromised. Look at the cognitive-dissonance riddled Liberals of the Trudeau government. When it suits him, he apes the excuses peddled by the right.

This widespread failure of politics is surely no less a threat to our future than global warming, sea level rise, droughts and floods, and severe storm events of all descriptions.