Category Archive

  We humans are really bad at responding to the necessity of long term change.  It doesn’t help that we also happen to be locked into political systems that strongly bias short term thinking and solutions.  I’m thinking when most of Florida is underwater and New York City looks more like Venice the powers that be *might* acknowledge that we have a bit of climate situation on our hands.

Canada is not much better, Andrew Scheer leader of the Conservative party during a Town Hall:

“He promised tax reform and reiterated his opposition to the Trudeau government’s carbon tax, which he called “a cash grab, not an environmental plan.”

“Scheer had to get out of his vehicle and walk to the venue in Nisku, Alta., because of a 22-kilometre convoy of truckers protesting Trudeau’s carbon tax and environmental policies. Scheer sought to reassure people by promising to scrap the prime minister’s carbon levy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Awesome.  Because the weak half measures started by Trudeau and the Liberal Government definitely need to go.  Why is it that when it comes to climate change conservative types all of suddenly need to compete to see how can fiddle the fastest while the world burns?

In Counterpunch John Davis writes this on our climate situation:

“Naomi Klein optimistically wrote, way back in 2014, in This Changes Everything, “There are ways of preventing this grim future….but the catch is these will involve changing everything….it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth”.

Five years later, it is no longer a matter of preventing a grim future. The careless extension of what the American Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘The Dithering’ – those decades when we understood the atmospheric CO2problem but totally failed to address it – guarantees its imminent arrival. The catch now is that the climate is changing everything for us.  We have already liberated enough carbon in the atmosphere to put the weather on disaster auto-pilot for the next millennium. We can but batten down the hatches, stockpile provisions and close the fire-doors. The weather is the effective change-agent, not we nor our politicians. The pretense that humans are in charge has finally to be abandoned. We await our fate possessing only crude materials of resistance and, thus far, almost no political will to emplace them.

The most salient function of government is the protection of its people – our allegiance to the Republic depends on its successful manifestation. The present regime appears totally committed to the denial of our climate reality and its power to inflict terrifyingly real damage on our underfunded and aging infrastructure and to the people that that infrastructure supports. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey, Thomas, and Michael, should each have been a wake-up call, a weather 9/11. Instead, they have proven to be opportunities for official prevarication, dissembling and hand-washing. From George Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, to Trump’s notorious paper towel toss (in post-Maria Puerto Rico) there is a through-line that speaks of the government’s dismissal of the seriousness of these amplified weather events and their wider implications. The validity of the updated death toll in Puerto Rico of almost 3,000 was, predictably, denied by the president – while estimates of the toll continue to rise. A Harvard study now puts the number of Maria-related fatalities at over 4,500, as of year’s end. The climate has far exceeded the lethality of 9/11. Its death toll, in fire, flood, drought and wind is ever rising, as each season’s disasters inexorably add bodies to the statistical burial mound.”

The weather gives exactly zero fucks about borders and national security, and ‘rogue’ nations.  Every nation is going to have to work together to survive the coming up climactic upheavals.  I certainly hope our unerring dedication to fossil fuel industry will be worth it.