The New Oracles

We've got new oracles to advise the government how to get out of the current high-carbon death spiral with our asses more or less intact.

They're called the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices and the feds have funded them for five years to the tune of $20-million.

No one knows how quickly the world is going to cut carbon pollution, CEO Kathy Bardswick said in an interview, and Canada must make decisions that account for the uncertainty, rather than be paralyzed by it. 

In either a high-carbon or low-carbon future, “there’s a substantial impact on the country,” Bardswick said. “What we’re trying to say is, ‘Yes, we agree there’s uncertainty, and we agree that these scenarios can play out quite differently, and the implications can be quite dramatic. But that doesn’t mean that we wait and see — we’ve got to be able to plan within that context.’”

CICC opened with an 80-page report  that may or may not steer the petro-feds in the right direction. (Hint - let's see what Ottawa does with the proposed Teck mega-mine in the Athabasca Tar Sands. If they greenlight that this is probably a waste of $20-million on another silly gesture.)

Drawing on extensive economic and scientific research, the report sketches out two broad scenarios, with two possible outcomes in each one. 

In the first scenario, a massive economic metamorphosis has occurred. Nations around the world cut their pollution severely over the next 10 years, reaching the Paris Agreement goal. Global demand for fossil fuels has plummeted, and proven reserves are left in the ground. A majority of electricity comes from renewables like solar, wind and bioenergy, while nuclear capacity triples and heavy industry is largely decarbonized.

In the other scenario, carbon pollution continues to be pumped into the air unchecked, and the world fails to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal, leading to runaway climate change: collapse of ecosystems, accelerating global heating, coastlines that sink underwater, relentless extreme weather and mass societal unrest. 

Canada must be prepared for that world, too, the report says, or it will become “caught in a continual cycle of impact and recovery.” People will be injured or killed, or suffer poor air quality and contaminated water, as insurance skyrockets and companies lay off workers. Food and water shortages drive war, conflict and humanitarian disasters, which reach Canada’s shores.

As the saying goes, you can lead the feds to water but you can't make 'em drink.

Your Government Will Sit By as Its Petro-Pals Do In Your Grandkids.

The fossil energy giants have taken the pulse of their political enablers and what they see is clear sailing ahead.

The world’s 50 biggest oil companies are poised to flood markets with an additional 7m barrels per day over the next decade, despite warnings from scientists that this will push global heating towards catastrophic levels. 

New research commissioned by the Guardian forecasts Shell and ExxonMobil will be among the leaders with a projected production increase of more than 35% between 2018 and 2030 – a sharper rise than over the previous 12 years. 

The acceleration is almost the opposite of the 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that scientists say is necessary to have any chance of holding global heating at a relatively safe level of 1.5C. 

The projections by Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy regarded as the gold standard for data in the industry, highlight how major players seem to be ignoring government promises, scientific alarms and a growing public outcry so they can pump more fossil fuels – and profits – out of the ground.

How is that even possible? If you're asking yourself that, don't. This is exactly what Schellnhuber meant when he told the delegates to the 2015 Paris climate summit that whatever hope we had of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius demanded an "induced implosion" of the world's fossil energy giants.

And what have we got? A government that shells out billions on a pipeline to triple the flow of high-carbon, toxin-laden, low-value bitumen to world markets and then pretends that's the key to a green future for Canada. Bollocks!

Not What I Usually Expect From Concerned Scientists on a Monday Morning

One of the many emails I look forward to on Monday mornings is the bulletin of the Union of Atomic Scientists, a body mainly known for maintaining the Doomsday Clock.

This week's bulletin was a bit out of the ordinary. The first feature is about white nationalism's solution to climate change - a world with a whole lot fewer brown people.

Full disclosure - I've been writing for some time that Canada's bitumen barons are tolerated, indeed supported, because, at the moment, climate change is predominantly a scourge for the little brown people, living in distant lands that are typically impoverished and exceedingly vulnerable. If the front ranks were full of white people of European heritage would we be quite so blase about bitumen and the toll it will exact? Try to be honest.

The white man charged with killing 22 people in El Paso on Saturday is believed to be the author of a racist “manifesto” posted shortly before the shooting rampage. The hate-filled screed described a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and warned that white Americans are being “replaced” by foreigners. The manifesto also sounded a growing theme in far-right rhetoric: that nonwhite people are responsible for environmental problems ranging from litter to climate change.

The forced marriage of white supremacy and environmentalism is not new (Adolf Hitler, for one, advocated both racial and environmental purity), but once again it is birthing ugly “solutions,” from shunning refugees to ethnic cleansing. Even those on the far right who don’t “believe” in climate change are happy to jump on the environmental bandwagon. As the far-right author and media pundit Ann Coulter tweeted last year, “I’m fine with pretending to believe in global warming if we can save our language, culture and borders.” 

In an article about white nationalists discovering the environment, The Atlantic explains the manifesto writer’s mentality:

The American lifestyle is destroying the environment, the author declares. But the answer is not to ask native-born white Americans to change their ways. It is to rid the country of Latinos. 

It is not brown-skinned immigrants who are primarily responsible for environmental degradation, though. In fact, climate change and other environmental crises are driving migration, not the other way around.

As The Atlantic reminds readers, “Large corporations and the wealthy consume the most environmental resources, not poor immigrants.” 

Population growth is, of course, contributing to climate change, along with rising affluence and per-capita consumption. But rather than tackling any of these issues, the manifesto’s author proposes genocide: “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Writing in The Nation, Jeet Heer describes how eco-fascism may find a toehold in US politics: 

This combination of a white nationalism with angst about the prospects for human survival is a perfect recipe for radicalizing young right-wingers and taking Trumpian themes to a new level of extremism. Instead of the merely restorationist day-dream of “making American great again,” the extreme right is using social media agitprop and the propaganda of the deed to harden young white Americans for a global race war fought over diminishing resources. The very real dangers of climate change provide race war fantasists the dystopian background they need to give urgency to their violent agenda.

While left-leaning environmentalists have become increasing tolerant of immigration, The Atlantic notes that “opposition to immigration plays an ever-greater role in defining the conservative movement.” Among registered Republican voters, immigration is viewed as the country’s most important problem. A growing number of young Republicans, however, view climate change as a top priority. Eco-fascists want to connect those dots.

I want to clarify that my past remarks were not to suggest that our governments' inexcusable support for the Bitumen Barons is grounded in racism. Our Parliament and legislatures are not out to cleanse the world for the white race. Their sin is to look the other way, to ignore the harm - the dislocation, the suffering, the death - that fossil fuels, especially the really dirty, high-carbon, low-value stuff - are inflicting and will continue to cause to people who just happen to be poor, vulnerable and almost invariably brown.

Well, Let's Add This to Our Growing List of Dire Warnings

Another day another warning that humanity is pushing its luck, overstressing this Earth, our one and only biosphere.

For those of you who can't handle stress, don't fret. It'll be down the Memory Hole by the end of the weekend at the outside.  We've already forgotten Tuesday's dire warning from the World Resource Institute about the dire freshwater crisis that has beset a quarter of humanity.  So many crises, so little time, how is a girl supposed to remember them all?

Dirt. Who gives a damn about dirt? Apparently the UN does.  The latest report from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, visits a recurring theme - soils degradation.

It's a topic that's been considered in depth before. Agronomists have been howling their warnings for years. We're exhausting our stocks of arable land, the soils we need to grow our food. It finally led the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to issue a report in 2014 warning that we were heading toward a collapse in agricultural production within 60 years. Even the best remaining farmland, the agency claimed, were already somewhat degraded. We even got a map showing the then state of soils degradation. Then - whoosh - straight down the Memory Hole.

That 2014 report was followed up by another in 2018 that seemed to disappear into that hole of oblivion even faster. With it was a report warning that we would need a 50 per cent increase in agricultural production to feed the herd in 2050. Damn, if we were just a tiny fraction as good at responding to these warnings as we are at ignoring them, and we're so very good at ignoring them, we might just have some hope. Yeah but ignoring them until we've completely forgotten about them comes just so naturally to us. It's effortless and demands nothing of us and,  when it comes to change, our favourite flavour is nothing.

Today's report layers man-made climate change atop man-made soils degradation. I suppose you've guessed it's not good news.

The climate crisis is damaging the ability of the land to sustain humanity, with cascading risks becoming increasingly severe as global temperatures rise, according to a landmark UN report compiled by some of the world’s top scientists. 

Global heating is increasing droughts, soil erosion and wildfires while diminishing crop yields in the tropics and thawing permafrost near the poles, says the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Further heating will lead to unprecedented climate conditions at lower latitudes, with potential growth in hunger, migration and conflict and increased damage to the great northern forests. 

The report, approved by the world’s governments, makes clear that humanity faces a stark choice between a vicious or virtuous circle. Continued destruction of forests and huge emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices will intensify the climate crisis, making the impacts on land still worse.

What came through for me in reading those four paragraphs was how bland the message. It's almost as sterile as the soil itself and it's from The Guardian!  I know, ask George. Monbiot calls this report a miserable failure.

The problem is that it concentrates on just one of the two ways of counting the carbon costs of farming. The first way – the IPCC’s approach – could be described as farming’s current account. How much greenhouse gas does driving tractors, spreading fertiliser and raising livestock produce every year? According to the panel’s report, the answer is around 23% of the planet-heating gases we currently produce. But this fails miserably to capture the overall impact of food production.

The second accounting method is more important. This could be described as the capital account: how does farming compare to the natural ecosystems that would otherwise have occupied the land? A paper published in Nature last year, but not mentioned by the IPCC, sought to count this cost. Please read these figures carefully. They could change your life.

The official carbon footprint of people in the UK is 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year. But in addition to this, the Nature paper estimates that the total greenhouse gas cost – in terms of lost opportunities for storing carbon that the land would offer were it not being farmed – of an average northern European diet is 9 tonnes a year. In other words, if we counted the “carbon opportunity costs” of our diet, our total footprint would almost triple, to 14.4 tonnes.

Okay, well, I'm not sure we're ready to give up meat, poultry, even fish for a diet of swill and soya. I could be wrong but I just don't see it. Still, I like Monbiot's closer:

Are we prepared to act on what we know, or will we continue to gorge on the lives of our descendants?

But wait, there's more. We can avert the worst of the worst. All it will take is a little sacrifice.

However, action now to allow soils and forests to regenerate and store carbon, and to cut meat consumption by people and food waste, could play a big role in tackling the climate crisis, the report says.

Such moves would also improve human health, reduce poverty and tackle the huge losses of wildlife across the globe, the IPCC says.
Burning of fossil fuels should end as well to avoid “irreversible loss in land ecosystem services required for food, health and habitable settlements”, the report says. 

“This is a perfect storm,” said Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report. 

“Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.”

Didn't you just know that our fossil-fuel economy would get in there somehow?  We know we've got to shut it down but even our Eco-warrior prime minister has other plans. He wants to take us in exactly the opposite direction. Burn baby, burn.

Prof Jim Skea, from the IPPC, said the land was already struggling and climate change was adding to its burdens. Almost three-quarters of ice-free land was now directly affected by human activity, the report says. 

Poor land use is also behind almost a quarter of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions – the destruction of forests, huge cattle herds and overuse of chemical fertilisers being key factors.

Emissions relating to fertilisers have risen ninefold since the early 1960s. Rising temperatures are causing deserts to spread, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the Americas and Mediterranean are at risk, the report says. 

One of the most stark conclusions in the IPCC report is that soil, upon which humanity is entirely dependent, is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed in ploughed areas; and lost 10 to 20 times faster even on fields that are not tilled. 

The report recommends strong action from governments and business, including ending deforestation and enabling new forests to grow, reforming farming subsidies, supporting small farmers and breeding more resilient crops. Many of those solutions, however, would take decades to have an impact, the IPCC says.

Decades. We haven't got decades to turn this around. Not unless we act now to buy more time.  That could begin by at least exploring new economic models to replace our current three-pack-a-day neoliberalism with its impossible growth-centric focus. And shutting down fossil fuels as fast as possible would be a great help. That could begin by putting an abrupt end to high-carbon fossil energy, thermal coal and bitumen.

The key to all of these crises is quite simple. Mankind has to accept the mortal need to live within the sustainable limitations of our very finite planet, Earth. We're way beyond that now and we just want to grow bigger, faster, all the time. If we can't find and adopt ways to again live in harmony with this, our one and only biosphere, it will surely eliminate us. And that is suicide.

"We've Run Out of Elections to Waste" - McKibben

Bill McKibben has a warning - "We've run out of elections to waste - this is the last chance to make a difference on climate change."

McKibben, of 350.org, has been waging a war against climate change and the political caste that ignores it since his first book was published in 1989. Now he's written an urgent plea to Australians as they head to the polls.

I can say with confidence that if Australians want to play a serious role in fixing the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced, this may be about the last election where people retain enough leverage to make a real difference. 

Global warming, after all, is a math problem: how quickly can we reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report last year, said that unless a fundamental transformation was fully underway by 2030, we stood no chance of meeting the targets the world set in the Paris climate accords. No matter what country you’re in, “fundamental transformations” don’t come overnight; if you want to dramatically trim carbon emissions in 2030, it means you better start in 2020. 

That means that if Aussie politicians of all stripes are still passing around lumps of coal and fantasising about huge new coal mines, that’s not going to happen. 

The good news is, if you want change, the timing couldn’t be better: the engineers have done their job so well that the cost of renewable energy just keeps falling. In much of the world it’s now the cheapest way to produce electrons (and that’s even without charging fossil fuel a penny for the damage it’s doing). That means we’re in a position to make truly fast strides in the right direction (especially those of us lucky enough to live on a continent washed by wind and bathed in the rays of the sun). 

...A decade is an eternity in climate time now. We’ve wasted three decades since scientists first raised the warning – that’s guaranteed that we’ll have massive increases in temperature.It means we’ve run out of decades to waste, and hence of elections to waste. Every election matters – it registers who we are at a certain moment in history, and it sets the course of the next few years. 

But this election will matter forever.

McKibben's warning should resonate with every Canadian who will vote in our federal elections in October.  Ours will also be an election that will matter forever. This year may be our last election where the Canadian rank and file, you and me, retain enough leverage to make a real difference.

Here's the thing. We've run out of elections to waste. So too have those who plead for our votes. When it comes to this issue, this existential threat, climate change, they've wasted three decades of elections ignoring the clear warning of science.

They'll waste this election too, if you let them. They will do no more than they absolutely must to win your vote. In fact, experience shows us, they'll do far less when the dust settles, after the votes are counted. Justin is long on promises and very short on action.

So, if you can't rely on them to do what is so critically necessary, don't vote for them. Why waste your vote in this, our most important election? Scheer and Trudeau between them will still get most of the votes. Whoever gets closest to 39 per cent of the vote will stand a good chance at winning an undemocratic, false majority virtually guaranteeing no meaningful action on climate change. Bump that down from 39 to 35 or 30 per cent and it's a different dynamic.So, no false majority. Minority government. Coalition government. Government that can no longer ignore the needs and security of the Canadian people. 

This election is too critical to squander on empty campaign promises and weasel words.

What Would It Really Take?

We all know the injunction - cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and entirely by 2050.

To some that conjures up visions of the end of fossil fuels, a switch to alternative green energy, electric cars instead of gas guzzlers, baseboard heaters instead of oil or gas furnaces, simple stuff like that.  Easy-peasy.

Only it's not so simple. It would require wholesale change to our economies, what we produce, how we trade. There would be a focus on curbing inequality, not just within national societies but on a global scale.

The UN official in charge of this September's climate summit in New York, recently hinted at what's in store if we're to avoid runaway climate change.

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's [climate change] summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

We have to rethink the global economic model. That's a reference to neoliberal globalism. What would a drastic rethink of hyper-capitalism look like? How do our leaders sit down and formulate neoliberalism's successor?

de Alba rejects any "gradual increase of ambitions." That sounds to me like a warning that we have to find better, more sustainable goals than the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth in GDP that has been the hallmark of the postwar era.

We seem to have reached a point where theories of classical economics, already slammed by some as a "mental illness," crash into the concrete wall of environmental reality. It was bound to happen. Infinite growth is not compatible with a finite ecosystem and Earth is sublimely finite.

Think of this Earth as the source of almost all our resources (other than solar energy) which is very much what it is. Earth provides all our soils that sustain life and support modern agriculture. Pretty much everything we do from basic hygiene to our morning coffee to industrial manufacturing requires clean water, enormous volumes of clean water. Again, that is provided by Earth.  Minerals that we use for fossil fuels, metals and other products - that's also Earth. The atmosphere, that's Earth.

Earth, then, is life. It is wildlife and it is human life. Yet it's finite. There's only so much Earth and, because Earth is finite, the planet's carrying capacity, its ability to support life is limited.  It can go only so far and no further. It is our host and we are obliged to respect our host's boundaries, its limits, or we will pay dearly for abusing the environment. And that is where we are today.

We have grown too large for our host. This manifests in several ways. Climate change is one - but only one - of them.

Earth is regenerative. It has cycles. Two of the most critical are the carbon cycle and the hydrologic or water cycle. Here's a depiction of the Carbon Cycle -

And here's the hydrologic or Water Cycle -

Humans have messed up both cycles. We have skewed the carbon cycle by digging up once safely sequestered fossil fuels that, when burned, have significantly increased atmospheric carbon loading causing changes including global warming, the capture and retention of additional solar energy.

The increased retention of solar energy has likewise altered the water cycle through atmospheric warming.  Hotter surface temperatures result in increased evaporation and hotter atmospheric temperatures increase the atmosphere's ability to hold greater volumes of water vapor. Hotter atmospheric temperatures also change how the atmosphere moves, jet streams and circulation patterns influencing floods and droughts. Hotter, moister air also generates more powerful severe weather events - hurricanes, tornadoes.

Both of these now significantly modified cycles are not only caused by man-made activities but have a powerful effect on how the Earth, our host, responds to us. They degrade the Earth's environmental carrying capacity, the very essence of life. It's wildly beyond counter-intuitive for us to imagine that we can continue our pursuit of perpetual exponential growth, increasing our perpetual exponential burden on Earth in the process.

We're running amok. We've grown like a malignancy. The recent UN report on biodiversity loss and extinction is an indictment of the neoliberal obsession with unrestrained endless growth. A million species are in serious risk of extinction, among them many "keystone" species whose loss will have knock-on effects on other species.  In forty years, the rough lifespan of neoliberalism, we have depleted the numbers of both terrestrial and marine life by more than half through direct predation or habitat loss.

When you follow these worrisome developments long enough, the manner and depth of their interconnection is inescapable. There are no "stand alone" existential threats even if we do prefer to treat them as such.  Climate change and biodiversity are linked and, together, they produce knock-on effects in other areas that can demonstrate both the robustness and the fragility of our natural world and its systems.

And so I hope that I have at least imperfectly explained how, when we're debating greenhouse gas emissions or biodiversity loss or a new economic model for the Anthropocene, all of these things are related. Common threads run through them all. When you step far enough back and look on these threats one thing emerges from them all - humans urgently need to find ways to live in harmony with Earth's ecology. We have to live within the safety bounds of our environment and we're way past that today. If we can't or won't get back inside, we're done.

de Alba is right. It's time for a "drastic rethink."

I Know, You Know, So Does Antonio

UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says the political will to fight climate change is "fading." From Deutsche Welle.

Guterres said the world was "not on track" to confine the rise in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as agreed in the 2015 Paris agreement. 

"The paradox is that as things are getting worse on the ground, political will seems to be fading," said the UN secretary general. 

"Climate change is running faster than what we are … the last four years have been the hottest registered," he said, adding that political inadequacy was evident "everywhere."

Gutteres urged the world community to, "protect the lives of our people."  As if.

His remarks precede a Climate Action Summit he plans to convene in New York in September where nations will be asked to present "concrete, realistic plans" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% over the next decade and reach net zero by 2050. 

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

"Concrete, realistic plans" by September? With Canada in an election campaign? Canadian governments don't do "concrete" or "realistic." Our governments are, however, world class when it comes to peddling horse shit.

And, as for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model, Justin, like Chuckles, is an avowed neoliberal.  So that idea is simply not on.

Meanwhile, in Canada, it's wildfire season, again.  The 2019 season was officially kicked off with a state of emergency declared for the Fraser Lake area.

The Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako issued a state of emergencySaturday night and ordered people to leave an area near the community of Lejac, about five kilometres east of Fraser Lake. 

An evacuation alert is in place for a larger area, meaning people there have to be ready to leave at a moment's notice.

A big shout out to the home team, the oil heads of Team Carbon Canada - Alberta and Saskatchewan, Scheer, Kenney and Moe, and Kid Pipeline, Justin Trudeau.

"A Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide" I Guess That Sums It Up.

If you're planning on being around for another two or three decades you'll be witness to a world like you've never known it. What's in store for you is a darker, more dangerous and, ultimately, dystopian world as nature re-calibrates the biosphere. Talk about death by natural causes only on a civilizational scale.

We know there's still time, just barely, to avert the worst impacts of climate change and biodiversity collapse. We know what must be done, that's been clearly spelled out for us. We know what we must do but we're not going to do it.

Recently Bloomberg has reported that the Trudeau government is expected to give the go-ahead for the three-fold expansion of the Trans-Mountain pipeline next month. In a lovely companion piece yesterday, Bloomberg observed that "Even Trudeau's Canada Won't Rid Itself of Coal."

"Even Trudeau's Canada" what is that implying? That Justin Trudeau isn't totally in the bag for the fossil fuel industries - gas, oil, bitumen, coal. He's in it up to his eyeballs. That carbon tax nonsense, that's to make the rubes happy.

Petro-states are notorious liars and Canada is no exception whether it's ruled by Conservatives or Liberals. They're both profoundly dishonest. Both will sacrifice the future, perhaps irreparably, for the present. I'm sorry Liberals but that's true.

A recent article in New York Magazine spoke of a "globe-spanning murder-suicide" now underway.

Human beings are more prosperous and numerous than we’ve ever been, while the Earth’s other species are dying off faster than at any time in human history. 

These two conditions are related. But if the second one persists long enough, we will be following our fellow organisms into the dustbin of geological history.

...Climate change is a major driver of all this death, but burning fossil fuels is far from our species’ only method of mass ecocide. We are also harvesting fish populations faster than they can reproduce themselves, annually dumping upward of 300 million tons of heavy metals and toxic sludge into the oceans, introducing devastating diseases and invasive species into vulnerable environments as we send people and goods hurtling across the globe, and simply taking up too much space — about 75 percent of the Earth’s land, and 85 percent of its wetlands, have been severely altered or destroyed by human development.

Some day you may see prime ministers such as Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau for what are - monsters. By then it will be much too late to do anything about our collapsed ecosystems and the ravages of climate change. The windows of opportunity for dealing with these existential threats are fast closing and, if we were determined to act you would already know about it.

Some hyper-zealous Liberals are fond of extolling fine "Canadian values." Really, what values? We gave up on that decades ago when we succumbed to the embrace of the neoliberal order, something perpetuated today by Mr. Trudeau and almost certain to be continued by the winner of our general elections in October.  If life is not our priority, if the fate being dealt to future generations doesn't guide our planning and policy, our "Canadian values" are, in a word, shite.

A globe-spanning murder-suicide it will be then.  We had a choice. We made a choice. 

What Are We To Make of Justin Trudeau?

To a few, he's the best person ever, a truly decent man and a great prime minister. To a different few, he's the worst person ever, utterly corrupt, even venal.

I don't believe either of them. He is flawed. He is not to be trusted. He'll break his promises without breaking a sweat. Not everyone can lie so effortlessly. That doesn't mean he's the worst person ever. That doesn't quite reach the level of corrupt. He could be corrupt but I've yet to see the proof of it.

I don't think he's a good prime minister, not even close. Leaders of other governments - Scotland, Wales, the United Kingdom - have declared a state of emergency over climate change. It's not like there's any shortage of evidence that this emergency does exist or that it's extremely dire and in urgent need of action. Only we're not declaring an emergency or taking any emergency measures to deal with it.

When it comes to the drivers of climate change - greenhouse gas emissions - we're still slackers. Canada with our very modest population still stands in the top ten nations for overall GHG emissions and we're in the top three for per capita emissions. That puts a powerful onus on us to implement extraordinary measures to curb our emissions. This time we are not the good guys.

The UN's IPCC has given us the prescription. The nations of the world must cut GHG emissions by 50 per cent by 2030.  Major emitters that we are, we're not even acknowledging that injunction. Our emissions are actually going up, especially now that we've found the bitumen barons to be grossly underestimating their emissions. 50 X 2030 - that's for losers, not Canada, but we will throw in a little carbon tax for appearances.

There's a looming existential threat, a major force in what some warn will be a sixth mass extinction, and we're thumbing our nose at it. Tell me, what kind of leader does that? Full points if you said "ours."

So whether he's corrupt or not isn't that important to me. He's not much of a leader. The guy who's gunning for his job will plainly be worse but when you're talking about unaddressed existential threats the distinction between them narrows quite a bit.

It's no excuse to claim that answering the call is not politically feasible. That doesn't matter. When the threat is existential you're obliged to try. If you fail and lose that doesn't matter. You must try and then hand the reins to the next guy from him or her to try. Eventually one of you will succeed and whether that requires five or even ten leaders to fall that's not important, not compared to what's at stake.

One thing I do realize is that I don't want to see either the Liberals or the Conservatives take another "false majority." They can't be trusted with the power of majority government. Both sides believe that winning the support of slightly less than two voters out of five gives them a magical mandate to do whatever in hell they choose but a false majority is a false democracy. I don't want someone incapable of getting even close to a majority of the electorate thinking they have the right to make fundamental changes to our country. That's oppressive. It's anti-democratic. And, when that almost two out of five victory is gained on the back of a litany of false promises never fulfilled, it's that much worse. You're not governing with the informed consent of the public. You're governing with the misled consent of a minority of the public.

The petro lobby is alive and well within the Liberal and Conservative parties. That's why they won't declare a state of emergency. It's why they balk at even attempting to cut our emissions by half by 2030. That's how they betray our nation, our people, and our future generations.

I don't know if Justin has obstructed justice. I don't know if he's corrupt. I know he's not as decent as his more ardent supporters claim, not remotely.

This October I hope for a weak minority government with the Greens winning enough seats that they can force the next government to respond to this incredibly dangerous threat. Whether that's Justin or some new Liberal face or Andrew Scheer, we can't afford to give them much slack.

Young People, Climate Change, Quebec

Have our atrophied old school political parties misjudged the issue of climate change? I think so. The worst part is that they haven't merely shot themselves in the foot. They were pointing that gun considerably higher.

This isn't about Paul Manly and the Green's by-election win yesterday in Nanaimo-Ladysmith. It's about much more than that, a generational thing that may cost the old school parties dearly in years to come. It's about students. Quebec students. It's about climate change. And, sure, it's about generational justice.

A Quebec high school French exam question that asked students about adapting to climate change has drawn a torrent of online criticism, as teens used memes and videos to denounce what they see as government inaction on climate issues. 

The question on last week’s ministry exam for Grade 11 students asked: “Can we adapt to climate change?” 

It quickly drew the ire of students like 17-year-old Francis Claude, who feels the way the question was phrased suggests the government has accepted climate change. 

“It’s like they want to abandon the fight against climate change, and just make do and adapt,” said Claude, whose Facebook group dedicated to the exam has exploded to almost 37,000 members in recent days. 

Claude said the members of his generation are committed to fighting environmental destruction, not adapting to it.

What's expedient to the old-before-their-time pols like Justin and Chuckles is seen much differently by our young people. It's their future being compromised by a gaggle of political hacks. It's the whole Greta Thunberg thing.

Trudeau is selling out their generation. They're not addled, unlike Liberal supporters who think a carbon tax at this horrible moment is meaningful, some great green step forward. These young people, they're clued in. They pay attention because, in many ways, we're deciding their fate twenty, thirty, forty years down the road and we're making those calls based on our interests, not theirs.

Trudeau is bad. Scheer will, if he gets the chance, be far worse. Scheer will do the nihilistic bidding of his posse - Kenney, Moe, Pallister and Ford and all the boys in Big Oil's boardrooms.

But "lousy" versus "even worse" isn't much of a choice, is it. And if those people are relieving themselves on your future maybe you just want rid of the lot.

We get the same warnings the kids get. We see the same stories in the papers, on TV. Only they don't mean as much to us, the "not just yet" generations. To the kids those reports and all those studies have a decidedly dystopian tinge while it's all "don't worry, be happy" from their elders, the Higher Purpose Persons like Justin and Andy and even Jagmeet.

Why shouldn't they get pissed off? Their needs, the real life and death stuff, isn't reflected in our decisions. Trudeau's pipeline is a repudiation of their lives twenty, thirty, forty years from now when we'll be enjoying a restful dirt nap as they curse our memory.

This is possibly, even probably, the decisive election year. After this year the door will close on a lot of opportunities to implement urgent initiatives. How many of these rubbish parties will present credible plans to slash Canada's greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and then to decarbonize our society and our economy by 2050? After the phenomenal disappointment of Justin Trudeau how are young people to trust them?

They're going to have to sacrifice. We're already seeing to that. But it's compromising their future that we support, not sacrificing today to give them a fair shake, a less degraded future, that we'll endorse.

“What’s the point of studying for a future we’re not going to have?” said Claude, who attends Mont-Ste-Anne School in Beaupre, 40 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. 

Claude said he started the Facebook group so students could exchange study tips and share jokes and memes about the exam process. But it has now morphed into a sort of environmental forum, where students direct their anger at the government and its perceived inaction.

Good luck to those kids. They'll need it. We'll see they need every scrap of luck they can muster.

The Smoked-Out Coast

What does it mean to live in America's Pacific states? Smoke, a lot of smoke, enough that it is changing the way of life, perhaps unalterably. That's discussed in an essay/book review by McKenzie Funk in The London Review of Books.

The author, his wife, two young boys and their middle-age dog left Seattle for the town of Ashland, Oregon, just north of the California border. It was a watery-eye opener.  Here are a few excerpts you might find thought provoking.

The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.

...Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.

... Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be. 

On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.

...I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt. 

By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives.

One of the author's assignments, while in refuge, was to write a review of Eric Struzik's book, "Firestorm," about the megafire that hit Fort Mac.

...In Canada, the average area affected annually has doubled since global temperatures began their abrupt rise in the 1970s, and it is likely to double again by 2050. Quoting a favourite scientist, Mike Flannigan, Struzik lays out the three simple reasons for this. First, warmer temperatures mean drier forests. Second, warmer temperatures mean more lightning strikes. Third, warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons. Struzik centres his story on the Horse River Fire, also known as the ‘Beast’, which struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s tar-sands capital, in 2016. It spread across 1.5 million acres, destroyed 2500 homes and 12,000 vehicles, and forced 88,000 residents to flee. The firestorm was of such ferocity it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach. The irony of the fire’s location wasn’t lost on Struzik. ‘Behind us glowed the lights of fossil fuel-driven human activity,’ he wrote of a night spent in the burned-out forest not far from the site of the $7.3 billion tar-sands project, ‘emitting greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.’

Struzik describes how Fort McMurray residents escaped from the Beast while bureaucrats were still fighting over how to respond; dives into the scientific mystery of the fire’s lightning-producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs...

Expanding the extraction, transportation and export of bitumen suddenly sounds a bit less brilliant, doesn't it? Pyrocumulonimbus - there's your new word for the day.

Then he moved to another book, Ashley Dawson's "Extreme Cities."

We have built our megacities – 13 of the largest twenty are ports – in sinking river deltas. Half of the world’s population already lives close to the sea, and now more people, fleeing rural drought or poverty, are moving there. ‘Two great tides are converging on the world’s cities,’ Dawson writes. ‘The first of these is a human tide. In 2007, humanity became a predominantly city-dwelling species.’ The second tide, of course, is the literal one: the rising seas, which may be metres higher by the end of the century.

Meanwhile, back at home in Ashland:

Jenny was still stuck in class in Ashland in the smoke. Now she drove an air-conditioned car to and from the university with the windows rolled up, and her bike sat idle. I kept checking my AQI app. Smoke was still choking the Rogue Valley, and haze spread from other fires to the rest of the Pacific Northwest as the summer dragged on. The boys and I stayed away from Ashland until the end of August, when the AQI edged more frequently into the yellow zone and their school year began and I dressed them in smoke masks and new shoes and took them to meet their teachers. 

There was no distinct moment when the smoke stopped. But in September it was more often the case that when the wind blew it away, it didn’t get blown right back again. We went outside with sunglasses on. We kept waiting for the hills to disappear again, for our fragile string of yellow and green days to turn orange, but eventually we realised it was over. Now we could assess the damage. That month, regional vineyards got a letter from a major buyer, a California winery, saying that their contracts were cancelled due to ‘smoke taint’. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, engine of the local economy, announced that the smoke had cost it at least $2 million in lost ticket revenue. The knock-on effects on hotels, shops and restaurants amounted to many millions more, and a few businesses closed down. For me, it hadn’t been nearly that bad. I’d lost some savings and some time, but suddenly the air was crisp and the boys were at school and I could sit and type for uninterrupted hours.

... In Ashland, the mountain lion disappeared from town and the Shakespeare festival laid off a few dozen employees. State and federal fire officials traded barbs in the local newspaper, which started running a countdown clock to the 2019 fire season. A local lawmaker proposed that college students should take a year off to work on tree-thinning projects. The bookstore I frequented was put up for sale, but I overheard two long-time patrons predicting that there would be no serious bids. ‘Ashland’s not what it used to be,’ one said. My younger son learned to ride a bike in the sun in the park just down the block. My older son started playing soccer, and by the pitch one morning another parent told me about a campsite near the Pacific that filled with local families every summer once the smoke began. ‘Maybe we’ll be like Europeans,’ he said. ‘Everyone will just leave every August.’ It almost sounded reasonable.

This essay describes conditions common to the people of the Pacific coast from Mexico all the way north into Alaska. Even out here on this island in the Pacific, fronts of smoke come from mainland wildfires to blanket our homes. I had to invest in air purification this year so that I could have air fit to breathe indoors. Like the author's wife, Jenny, there are months where you don't go outside because this particulate matter, PM 2.5, gets into your tissues, embeds in your lungs.

And yet those death-dealing banshees in Alberta rage like madmen, threatening us if we dare block their pipelines to our, not theirs but ours, tidewater.

I'm Glad This Week is About Over

This has been an unusually stressful week on the climate/environment front. Don't worry, it'll be back at full bore on Monday morning but at least there's the weekend (I hope) to chill out.

The week began with anxious wondering if Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party would table a motion for a declaration that the UK is in a climate change national emergency and how Parliament would respond.

On Monday came news of a poll of 100,000 Europeans that found climate change as their first priority, outdistancing the economy, migration, and everything else.

That same day, news of a report from the US EPA advising communities how best to cope with worsening destruction from climate change - everything from "debris streams" from ruined buildings, to how to recycle building materials and how to dispose of hazmat stuff such as asbestos.

On Tuesday there was encouraging news that two-thirds of Britons realized they were already in a climate emergency and three-quarters said they would vote for whatever party was best positioned to "protect the planet."

Canadian Press quoted the prime minister, responding to the flooding in Ottawa and Quebec, by saying "we will have to have significant reflections and conversations on how we move forward," a perfect WTF?? moment.

In Britain again, a Labour MP asked the thorny question "Why are taxpayers subsidising the oil and gas companies that are jeopardizing our future?" Too bad that question is taboo in our House of Commons.

The Weather Network released the second of its three part series, "2X Faster: Canada's Weather Future in a Changing Climate." It even features a bleating commentary from our EnviroMin, Dame Cathy McKenna.

On Wednesday, a NASA-Columbia University study discovered, through examining tree rings, that global warming has been ushering in an era of sustained drought since the turn of the 20th century.  This was disrupted from 1950 to 1975 thanks to a beneficial side effect of ozone-layer destroying aerosols but now it's back at full bore. The petro-provinces - tomorrow's barren wastelands.

The biggest news on Wednesday came from the House of Commons in Westminster where MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Labour's motion for a declaration that the UK was in a national climate emergency. Meanwhile, in Canada, Morneau was crowing about fracked gas and how the latest LNG venture shows that, when it comes to climate destroying carbon fuels, Canada can and will deliver.  Trudeau, meanwhile, begged Jason Kenney, offering to look the other way on certain Tar Sands emissions if Kenney would pretend to uphold Notley's deal on a carbon cap. 

And then the hammer dropped today with a sneak preview at a report to be released on Monday warning that a million species, our own very much included, are at risk of imminent extinction due to our carbon crisis and rapacious over-consumption of natural resources. What distinguishes this report from so many others is its scope. This isn't something that future generations will have to endure. It's your generation too. You. This is mass extinction and it's not decades off. It could be just a matter of years, possibly one decade. 

Finally I closed the week out with an op-ed written by David Suzuki a few days back warning that, when your life is at stake, don't count on your federal government to protect you.  If there's going to be any heavy lifting required, we'll have to see to it ourselves. 

I don't remember a week as simultaneously tumultuous, inspiring, dispiriting and terrifying as this one. We've had highs and we've had terrible lows. What will next week bring?

David Suzuki's Warning - Don't Rely On the Federal Government When Your Life's at Stake.

As our environment slides into meltdown, David Suzuki has a word of warning - don't count on your political leadership to do the right thing.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna have young children who will surely be greatly affected by climate change, but they've done little to raise the IPCC's alarm or educate the public about the severity of climate disruption. It's all because of politics. They don't want to jeopardize their chances in the next election so they avoid antagonizing some segments of society. 

As the SNC-Lavalin scandal unfolds, we see politicians held hostage by corporate threats of job losses or head offices moving to other countries. As economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs recalls, ozone-depleting CFCs were not eliminated by raising taxes on them or encouraging the public to stop buying CFC-containing spray cans or refrigerators. They were legislated out. 

We're in a battle for a liveable future and must make a declaration of war against catastrophic climate change. It's too late to remove the carbon we've already put into the atmosphere, so we'll have to live with the results for decades. But it makes no sense to continue to add to what is already at a devastating level higher than it's been for millions of years.  

...Many of my colleagues argue it's too late, that we're like the coyote, already over the edge, about to fall. Is that an argument for doing nothing? I don't think so, because we still don't really know whether we're the coyote or the roadrunner. And even if we fall, we might be able to avoid being crushed by the falling rock or anvil. Let's stop all the name-calling and denial, listen to the experts, seize the challenge, and make the commitment to meet the IPCC target. 

That baseline target, cutting emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, is not even on our government's radar. They have no plan to meet that target even as they ramp up extraction, transmission and export of high-carbon, high-cost, low-value bitumen. If you want to know where they stand on looming climate catastrophe you need look no further.

The economic, social, and environmental consequences of whatever governments do or don't do now will be enormous, but we have to do all we can to keep from hitting bottom. As Abraham Lincoln said: "Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality."

ONE MILLION Species at Imminent Risk and That Includes You.

Yeah, you. Not the grandkids. Not some generation in the future. You. Your generation. In your lifetime, however that should be measured. You.  This time you've got skin in the game, your own hide.

A UN scientific panel is about to release a jarring report. We are heading for extinction.

The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken. 

Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature. 

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate. 

The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear, according to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The report appears to bolster arguments calling for a fast end to the neoliberal order so popular among western governments including Canada's. We are attacking our host, this planet, our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth. There is no other and when we abuse it, it will exterminate us. It's that simple. There is no easy fix. There is no, "oh they'll think of something."

It all comes down to the same problem. We have to learn to live within the very finite bounds of our planet's ecology. At the moment we're consuming Earth's resources far beyond the planet's carrying capacity. We are gutting our own life support systems.

Because it's so important, I will repeat this once more. The evidence of our predations is everywhere. It is visible to the naked eye from the International Space Station where crew members can see from the viewing cupola the clearing of vast swathes of forests, farmland transformed into barren desert, the rapid spread of wildfires, rivers that no longer reach the sea, algae blooms in our rivers, lakes and coastal zones. We can see it at our docks as we "fish down the food chain" eliminating one species after another. NASA's Grace satellites measure surface subsidence caused by the emptying of our ancient aquifers, nearly irreplaceable groundwater siphoned off for irrigation, often without a second thought.

We can see what we're doing in what should be the alarming loss of other life forms. In the 40-year history of the neoliberal order ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney mankind has so monopolized Earth's territory and resources that we have seen a loss of more than 50 per cent in the numbers of creatures, both terrestrial and marine. We're squeezing them out of their habitat or rendering it uninhabitable.

This has to stop or it will stop us.

...the report is a compilation of reams of academic studies, in this case on subjects ranging from ocean plankton and subterranean bacteria to honey bees and Amazonian botany. Following previous findings on the decimation of wildlife, the overview of the state of the world’s nature is expected to provide evidence that the world is facing a sixth wave of extinction. Unlike the past five, this one is human-driven. 

Mike Barrett, WWF’s executive director of conservation and science, said: “All of our ecosystems are in trouble. This is the most comprehensive report on the state of the environment. It irrefutably confirms that nature is in steep decline.” 

Barrett said this posed an environmental emergency for humanity, which is threatened by a triple challenge of climate, nature and food production. “There is no time to despair,” he said. “We should be hopeful that we have a window of opportunity to do something about it over these two years.”

This time it's not just your grandkids who will pay. This is also coming for you. It's time to wake up.

Watson, a British professor who has headed both of the UN’s leading scientific panels, said the forthcoming report will delve more deeply than anything before into the causes of nature collapse, chief among which is the conversion of forests, wetlands and other wild landscapes into ploughed fields, dam reservoirs and concrete cities. Three-quarters of the world’s land surface has been severely altered, according to the leaked draft. Humanity is also decimating the living systems on which we depend by emitting carbon dioxide and spreading invasive species.

We've had plenty of warnings and they've all been ignored. The Living Planet Reports of 2014 and 2015 documented the loss of terrestrial and marine life across the planet. Each was flushed down the Memory Hole within days.  If you want to refresh your memory, you can read more about them here, here, here and here.

Morneau, Trudeau, Scheer - the lot of them - are disciples of perpetual exponential growth. They measure their success by whether we achieve at least a three per cent annual increase in Gross Domestic Product. Nothing else much matters to them. It should matter even more to you because it, as much as anything else, is driving us ever faster to extinction. There is no way to sugar coat this.

It's our choice. We either choose to live in harmony with this world and its finite ecosystem or we perish along with so many other species upon which our own survival depends. We are already outside our ecosystem by a factor of 1.7. It's called "overshoot" and, in graphic depiction, it looks like this:

We're on our way down and, as you'll see, the path becomes increasingly steep. Odd that we haven't heard much about any of this from our leaders as they instead spend their time mud wrestling over meaningless carbon taxes.

This isn't a theory. This is as real as concrete. Why are we letting these people drive us off the cliff?

What Yesterday Meant to Me

Since that first time I heard Greta Thunberg, I sensed that something wonderful might be about to happen.

Eventually she inspired a resistance. The school children's revolt and then Extinction Rebellion - children and adults saying there no longer could be, nor would be, tolerance of the status quo.

As altruistic Britons were refusing to move, they were arrested, charged and taken into custody - for what is genuinely trying, in a most modest way, to save humanity by changing minds.

And it worked.

With more than two-thirds of the population now realizing that the UK was in a climate change emergency, Jeremy Corbyn took that as his cue to table a motion calling on Parliament to declare a state of national climate emergency that easily passed in the House of Commons bolstering similar declarations from Wales and
Scotland.

As Westminster was declaring a national emergency, across the Atlantic, Canada's finance minister, Morneau, was beating his chest over fracked gas, LNG, as proof of Canada's ability to deliver on big carbon-energy projects. The prime minister, meanwhile, was begging Alberta premier, Jason Kenney, to save emissions caps by promising to just look the other way on bitumen extraction.

Brits take pride in their "stiff upper lip" image, the "Stay Calm and Carry On" national mantra. The people of the UK aren't afraid to look over their shoulder and spot what's coming and, when they did, they demanded action.  Canadians, apparently, aren't made of such stuff. All we have to hear are empty threats such as "this will hurt the economy" and we're in full rout. It seems we don't care if this cherished economy or that small fraction represented by fossil fuels has led us to a cliff edge. We're not stopping.

We don't care. Not enough of us anyway. Sure, we're worried about climate change but not enough to insist that real measures be taken to at least give us a chance at a soft crash landing. Ah, the kids'll figure out something. They'll have to with the future we're bequeathing to them.

Maybe we can still change but the clock is quickly running out and our governments aren't courageous enough to declare climate change a national emergency even though Canada is vulnerable. We have the longest coastline of any nation, from sea to sea to sea. Our vast forests are being ravaged by heat waves, unreliable snowcap and summer precipitation, mass infestation by pine beetles and other pests that are now moving steadily out of the West toward the Atlantic. The Arctic ice and snow that once kept our tundra and permafrost stable is disappearing, giving rise to the release of potentially massive quantities of methane and CO2. To the south, "once a century" floods are now becoming once every few years, our "new normal." Science now shows that the prairie petro-provinces are looking at a future as parched wasteland. Mega drought imperils our domestic food security. Our essential infrastructure is in decay and in no shape to withstand the severe climate that is even now setting in. Even our fisheries are being changed as native species migrate in search of colder waters. Wildfire smoke now perfumes the skies of the West, forcing ordinary Canadians to shelter indoors at what used to be the very best time to be outdoors.

But no, we don't have a climate change national emergency and, if we do, we're too cowardly to deal with it.  We won't change, not in time. When we go to the polls this October look for 70 per cent, perhaps more, of the vote to go for the very worst petro-state parties, the Liberals or the Conservatives.

Yesterday was a bittersweet moment, one eagerly awaited. I'm proud of the British people for forcing their politicians' hands. I wish we were made of that same stuff.

BRITAIN WINS! Parliament Declares Climate National Emergency

From CNN:

Lawmakers in the UK Parliament have declared "an environment and climate emergency," making it the first country in the world to do so, according to the opposition Labour Party. 

The motion was called by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

WE DID IT! Thanks to pressure from the Labour Party, the UK just became the first country to declare an environment and #climateemergency. Now it's time for real action to tackle climate change. Share this. pic.twitter.com/hOheWxQQHf—  

The Labour Party (@UKLabour) May 1, 2019

I realize I've flogged this story pretty relentlessly lately but I only did that because it's so important for life on Earth, all life on Earth.

What we need to do now, here in Canada, is turn on the petro-pimps, the fossil fuelers and their political handmaidens and tell them they have no place in Canada's future. They won't switch their allegiance back to the people of Canada and our future until they fear us again. As Jeremy Corbyn put it this morning, "we have no time to waste."

And what did we accomplish on the climate emergency front today? Why, it was Bill Morneau boasting about how our fracked gas/LNG venture shows that Canada can still deliver on big, carbon-energy projects. And then Justin went groveling to Jason Kenney.

Ottawa is vowing to exempt certain non-mining projects that use steam to extract crude from deep under the earth — known as in-situ projects — as long as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney maintains a hard cap on emissions from his province's oil sector.

Is that a prime minister you can respect?

May Day. M'aidez. Mayday.

p.s. yes, I know, Scotland and Wales previously declared a climate change state of emergency.

Global Warming Has Been Setting a Trap For Us Since the Early 1900s.

New research shows that global warming has been transforming our soil since the early 1900's. The NASA-Columbia University study itself is available here.

Global warming has been fueling droughts since the early 20th Century, when soils started drying out at the same time across parts of North and Central America, Eurasia, Australia and the Mediterranean, new research shows. 

The researchers say the surprising early-century findings provide the clearest signal yet that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are changing the hydroclimate in ways that can devastate agriculture, health and livelihoods. 

... in the first half of the 20th Century, something different was starting to happen. Soil moisture decreased across all those areas at the same time — a nearly unmistakable sign that it was driven by rising global temperatures, the study's authors said.

The drying went through a hiatus from 1950 to 1975 due to another man-made phenomenon - aerosols. Then we realized we were going to destroy the ozone layer and life on Earth.... oh dear.

But now the drying is back and it's back big time.

Many of the areas expected to dry out as the planet continues to warm are centers of agricultural production, and some could become permanently arid. "The human consequences of this, particularly drying over large parts of North America and Eurasia, will likely be severe," the authors wrote.

But Eastern Canada is going to remain wet, really, really wet, just like it is right now. Just don't tell Kenney or Moe what's coming. Hell, they brought it on themselves.

The study concludes that this signal is “likely to grow stronger in the next several decades,” adding that the “human consequences of this, particularly drying over large parts of North America and Eurasia, are likely to be severe.”

I know, let's tell them it's a plot by Trudeau and those damned Liberals to turn their provinces into a lifeless wasteland.

Guess what we can do to make Alberta's future even more hellish? Keep burning them fossil fuels, that's what. Oh well, those knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathers wouldn't have it any other way.

Pipelines Are a Lousy Bet

From National Public Radio, NPR:

A new report by an energy watchdog group says companies are betting over a trillion dollars in risky gas pipeline projects. 

Global Energy Monitor says these projects are hugely expensive - so the payback is over decades. Climate scientists say we need to stop burning fossil fuels completely by 2050. 

That means the pipelines could become stranded assets for the companies. 

Enbridge Energy is engaging in a particularly risky expansion, according to Ted Nace, co-author of the report. He says Enbridge, the world's third largest pipeline company, has a heavy debt load. 

That could leave the company at risk of needing government bailouts if global demand for natural gas stays stagnant, or falls. 

Nace says investors are already turning away from fossil fuel projects over concerns about climate change.

"We've No Time to Waste"

Jeremy Corbyn, today, in the House of Commons.




This should make us all disgusted with our federal parties and our petro-provinces alike. The Liberals, and their apologists, have no excuse for perpetuating the petro-state, including subsidies to the wealthiest companies on the planet, the fossil energy giants.