"A territory that has 0.5% of the Earth’s population plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget"
When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada's leaders
have reached a new low
Bill McKibben
Canada elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.
The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have ever carved on the planet’s surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that the mine was nonetheless in the “public interest”.www.theguardian.com/...
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Canadian Tar Sands Resistance
Indigenous peoples (known as First Nations) in Canada are taking the lead to stop the largest industrial project on Mother Earth: the Tar Sands Gigaproject. Northern Alberta is ground zero with over 20 corporations operating in the tar sands sacrifice zone, with expanded developments being planned. The cultural heritage, land, ecosystems and human health of First Nation communities including the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray First Nation, Fort McKay Cree Nation, Beaver Lake Cree First Nation Chipewyan Prairie First Nation, and the Metis, are being sacrificed for oil money in what has been termed a “slow industrial genocide”. Infrastructure projects linked to the tar sands expansion such as the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline, threaten First Nation communities in British Columbia, Canada and American Indian communities throughout the United States. Community resistance is growing and Indigenous peoples throughout North America have mounted substantive challenges to tar sands expansion.www.ienearth.org/…
Canadian wilderness
Here’s how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada’s prime minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” That is to say, Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. Ottawa hides all this behind a series of pledges about “net-zero emissions by 2050” and so on, but they are empty promises. In the here-and-now they can’t rein themselves in. There’s oil in the ground and it must come out.
This is painfully hard to watch because it comes as the planet has supposedly reached a turning point. A series of remarkable young people (including Canadians such as Autumn Peltier) have captured the imagination of people around the world; scientists have issued ever sterner warnings; and the images of climate destruction show up in every newspaper. Canadians can see the Australian blazes on television; they should bring back memories of the devastating forest fires that forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray, in the heart of the tar sands complex, less than four years ago.
TAR SANDS = Disaster for the Climate, Indigenous Rights, and the Environment
The only rational response would be to immediately stop the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. It’s true that we can’t get off oil and gas immediately; for the moment, oil wells continue to pump. But the Teck Frontier proposal is predicated on the idea that we’ll still need vast quantities of oil in 2066, when Greta Thunberg is about to hit retirement age. If an alcoholic assured you he was taking his condition very seriously, but also laying in a 40-year store of bourbon, you’d be entitled to doubt his sincerity, or at least to note his confusion. Oil has addled the Canadian ability to do basic math: more does not equal less, and 2066 is not any time soon. An emergency means you act now.
In fairness, Canada has company here. For every territory making a sincere effort to kick fossil fuels (California, Scotland) there are other capitals just as paralyzed as Ottawa. Australia’s fires creep ever closer to the seat of government in Canberra, yet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, can’t seem to imagine any future for his nation other than mining more coal. Australia and Canada are both rich nations, their people highly educated, but they seem unable to control the zombie momentum of fossil fuels.www.theguardian.com/...
Bill McKibben is an author and Schumann distinguished scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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The planet is now rapidly moving towards an uninhabitable future... But that future is NOW. Our leaders are not taking this crisis seriously, or taking action, and are thus failing us, and future generations, as well as planet Earth. The end of our present societies means the end of human and animal lives and the potential death of planet Earth. We have little time left to alter our societies, governments, and to prevent this catastrophe happening. Our Methods: Uses of nonviolent resistance to protest against climate chaos, biodiversity loss, and total ecological collapse. inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, and Extinction Rebellion. To create support worldwide and a sense of urgency, to tackle total ecological breakdown. Protest and Direct Action to deal with the inaction of world governments. Making a commitment to saving the planet, and trying to create a sustainable Green future for all.
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Friday, Feb 7, 2020 · 1:10:46 AM +00:00 · Angmar
The COP26 climate conference can still be a success. Here's how
There are millions of people who care deeply about this issue in the UK and beyond. Extinction Rebellion and the pupil climate strikers have changed the terms of the debate over the past year. It’s up to all of us, including our brilliant NGOs, to ensure this moment sees the biggest mobilisation on the climate emergency in British history.
You may wonder what the point of mobilisation is if the geopolitical forces are so badly aligned. The answer is there is no other option. The only way we will get change on this issue is showing government that there is a big political coalition that believes this really matters. Positive momentum from Glasgow is essential. We all need to step up. We all need to own it.
Our future, and that of our children and grandchildren, is in the balance. Only by acting now can we prevent future disaster.
www.theguardian.com/...
• Ed Miliband is Labour MP for Doncaster North and a former climate change secretary. He was the former head of the Labour party 2010 - 2015.