Climate Emergency Round-Up

The climate emergency has faded from consciousness. It can't compete with the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump, the Trudeau scandal of the day, the economic collapse that half claim is a recession while the other half brand it a depression - there are just so many things, none of them particularly welcome, vying for our attention. It's hard to fault those who flee into denial or just turn off the switch especially when we keep getting told 'if you think this is bad, just wait.'

Most of our afflictions, either in whole or in part, are man-made. These viruses? They're actually a failure to socially distance humanity from our relentless intrusion on nature. We know there are countless viruses common in wildlife and yet we keep opening the door to let them in. Then, when they get in we scramble to lockdown and scramble to develop vaccines. That's clever, isn't it?

Trump and the political perversion also known as the Republican Party, that's pretty obviously man-made. Trudeau's tawdry scandal du jour, man-made. The recession/depression - the virus might have triggered it but the causes of this collapse were building for decades. This is just terminal stage neoliberalism, the end result of the economic infection caused by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney.  Man-made. Last I checked, nature didn't teach us that the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth was a good idea.




Then there's the climate emergency. We've been stoking that fire for a couple of centuries but especially over the postwar era. Man-made. If we wanted to burn this house down we would have done pretty much what we actually did. See: The Great Acceleration. It's all there.

Just because we, especially our leaders, haven't really made climate change much of a priority over all these other problems this year, nature didn't get the message.

Just this week Canada's last major ice sheet went for a tumble. The Milne Ice Shelf lost 40 per cent of its area in just two days.  It wasn't played up much at home but it was a hot topic in other countries.

What else? Britain is enduring a protracted heatwave that's sending Brits jamming the beaches of the south, merrily shedding virus.  The Brits are bracing for a deluge. They're being warned they could receive a month's rain in a 2-hour deluge this week.

“Even in just a couple of hours we could see 80mm of rain falling. That amount of rain in a short amount of time especially when the ground is hot can lead to flash flooding,” the Met Office said, adding that the average rainfall for England during the month of August is around 70mm.

And the Brits don't even have arroyos, poor buggers. Not yet anyway.

The Americans are warned to brace for a heavy hurricane season.  Up to 25 named storms, 11 of which could be hurricanes. Brace yourselves, fellas.

Central Europe has been told it's on the path to a possible 7-fold increase in severe droughts.

Good news for BP. After reporting one of its worst quarterly results on record, BP shares climbed 6.5 per cent when the company announced it will shift from fossil fuels to clean energy over the coming decade.

Financial leprosy has broken out in the tar pits of Athabasca. After a steady departure of the world's biggest investment houses and global insurance giants, first Total and then Exxon wrote down (as in 'wrote off') their Tar Sands assets. Exxon trimmed as much as 20 per cent from the company's asset sheet. Total even used the dreaded term "stranded asset." We should have listened to Mark Carney.

Then there's a lot of really dire stuff that I just don't want to get into. We've got too much on our plates already without dwelling on what might happen by 2100.

Besides, Bootsy Collins just came up on my playlist. Bootsy. Funk yeah.