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.
