A day after the UN panel of climate experts reported global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, British Columbia Premier Horgan repeated a bullshit claim that his government is on the path to climate justice, ensuring a secure future not just for us, but for our children and grandchildren.
Humans are “unequivocally” to blame, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said. Rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions could limit some impacts, but others are now locked in.
The deadly heat waves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe…
U.N. climate change report sounds ‘code red for humanity’
John Horgan and his NDP colleagues want us to believe that British Columbia does not share the Earth with 194 other nations. They pretend BC can escalate production of fossil fuels and suffer no ill effects as long as consumption of our coal, gas and oil occurs elsewhere. Apparently, someone else will sacrifice “wealth creation” so humanity can survive.
It is not so easy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that our part of the world will be severely impacted by worsening climate change.
Drought and wildfires and loss of fertile farmlands have already resulted in soaring food prices. It will get worse as California loses its place as North America’s agricultural powerhouse. That state produces “a sizable majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on.”
Premier Horgan vaguely promises actions to meet “ambitious” targets that will build a cleaner BC. Perhaps that will be done by not counting emissions—a favourite trick of government and industry. But real action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would not involve offering subsidies and incentives to increase production of fossil fuels. A transition is needed from fossil fuels to non-destructive renewable energy now, in British Columbia, Canada, and the rest of the world.
Horgan’s hollow promises to fight climate change are matched by the idiocy expressed in Ottawa. Yesterday, CBC reported Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson’s defending the decision to put at risk Vancouver’s inner harbour and vast tracts of wilderness so that Alberta can increase production of the world’s dirtiest oil. According to Wilkinson, Canada needs an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline to fight climate change.
Get that?
It’s like an alcoholic choosing to increase liquor consumption to ease the pain of waiting for a cirrhotic liver to heal.
I expect a 2021 federal election will be called days from now. Voters have a chance to change Canada’s direction. To do that, we must demand every candidate commit to:
- An immediate end to direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies,
- An end to income tax write-offs taken by financial institutions when fossil fuel investments and loans go bad,
- Carbon taxes applied to all industrial processes consuming fossil fuels,
- A 5% annual reduction in production of coal, oil and gas,
- No new or upgraded coal mines or export facilities,
- No imports of American coal for export,
- No new oil and gas fields,
- Major investment in green energy storage technologies,
- Massive expansion in geothermal, wind and solar power generation.
Party leaders will refuse those measures but elected caucus members can make them happen, if we elect the right MPs.
We know what needs to be done. Doing it might be painful; not doing it will be catastrophic.
Categories: Climate Change
in-sights.ca 
I hesitate to post again but that picture of Horgan and his family is
such a joke and so dishonest. It has been said “people deserve the
government they elect” so what does it say about the people of BC?
Until the deep pockets and well to do in BC are impacted I can’t see
anything changing. It is the capitalistic model of living driving us to the
bring of extinction. We are all on the Titanic. The only difference is that
the poor and everyday working people are in the engine room and the
rich and powerful in Horgan’s group are on the top floor. They get the
entitlement to be the last to go.
The link provided lays out the bold face lie being depicted in the Horgan
photo op. If he is reelected the people of BC get exactly what they
deserve. Are we that stupid? I won’t be surprised.
https://unfccc.int/news/cut-global-emissions-by-76-percent-every-year-for-next-decade-to-meet-15degc-paris-target-un-report
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Sure, I’m going to get a little screedish here but…
I have no dogs in this. Dogs, in this case, being people I’m leaving behind.
So this is easy for me.
Climate change is going to happen. It’ll happen in fits and starts, but it’ll happen worse for poorer countries… at least until it’s our turn.
Nobody seems to mention this, but COVID is, to me, a remarkable facsimile of how climate change will work, in who will get it the worst and who will avoid the worst of it for the longest. Mostly, we in the rich Western nations and some Asian countries will fare best for the longest (This is why the USA can sit on vaccines and let them expire, while African nations… eat cake).
Then, finally, it’s going to get really nasty.
I’ll be nearing the end of my life by that point. So what do I care?
For those who think I’m cruel or indifferent, I say, “Look around”.
A few decades back, we – that is, our society – obliged people who were mentally ill to leave the institutions where they were housed under the guise of ‘granting them their agency and autonomy’ and now they’re sleeping in the street. We gave them their “rights” that we liberal democracies so love to promote. Of course, this benevolence cost us taxpayers less (union nurses are so expensive!) and made those formerly housed citizens ‘consumers’ and therefore market participants; they were monetized, if less anesthetized.
At one point we had banks and the Grand Banks. Now we have banks and Food Banks.
For 40 years the ‘citizen’ to ‘consumer’ pipeline has been in place.
I hated it, and I still hate it. All of it.
Never driven a car. Never owned one. Hate them. I eat meat, though. By my rough math, I figure I’m on the low energy consumption side of things, all in all. And certainly compared to the number of people I see daily while I ride the bus, sitting in their cars, all by themselves…
This morphing from “citizen to consumer” is why many Americans lose their minds while shopping – because they have to wear a mask. The idea that anything should interfere with consumption is … untenable. Many many Canadians are not so far off from this same ‘I HAVE MY RIGHTS!’ (to shop) attitude.
Government wandered away from our lives for the past 40 years.. and *now* it wants to tell us ‘what to do?’ (PS: I’m fully vaccinated.) I dont blame (and won’t shame) people for this attitude. They have been taught that government ‘gets out of the way’ because it has.
It’s largely abandoned us to the market. It signed trade agreements that enabled corporations to sue it if its laws in any way hobbled their ability to make profits. It let private contracts between corporations and individuals reign supreme.
You should read journalist Matt Stoller’s Substack piece on Ashliii Babbitt, the woman who was shot on January 6th. Ms Babbitt made a crucial mistake signing a document that invented a new type of loan that she had sought for her pool business. It allowed the company she got it from to charge her interest of over 150%, because ‘technically’ it wasn’t a loan (those details were in the fine print) and so therefore it wasn’t usury. She took them to court. She lost. These “Terms and Conditions” and legal jargon now invade every conceivable product. You sign them when you open the package. Oh – and you cant repair them because technically, that thing you bought doesn’t belong to you.
But hey – you’re ’empowered’. You know what’s best.
We’re all consumers now.
We’re all on our own, sinking or swimming based on our ability to read the fine print. And our beloved government lets it all go on and on.
The sovereign state was (and is) on its knees. Globalization made it useless, stupid, redundant, an impediment to free flowing capital and ‘financial innovation’ like credit default swaps and other frauds. The ones all those clever, highly credentialed pension fund mangers bought…
But *now* the government wants to assert it’s rule over its citizens? It can’t seem to prevent ‘tax avoidance’ (formerly known as ‘tax evasion’), or find money launderers, or make regulations to protect us, or make rent or housing affordable, but it can tell Jim Bob and Karen to wear a mask and get vaccinated or … never get on a plane to Puerto Vallerta ever again?
I see their anger. It’s legit. Rules for the little people, laissez-faire for the conglomerates.
Such as it is…
Anways, I see things. People want things. They want status, prestige and nice things. I honestly can’t figure out why. It only occurred to me the other day, that at the middle age I’m at, I can’t remember the last time I ever wanted something that somebody else had. For reasons I can’t explain or understand, I don’t ‘want’ much of anything. I just.. don’t.
I read, I work, I just kind of go about my life.
Even the endless stories about how ‘the rich’ aren’t paying their fair share doesn’t bother me. Would the world better if we redistributed Bezo’s 150 billion so that everybody in North America got an extra 50K?
I don’t think so. I think people would buy another truck. Or more jewelry. Or another TV set. Or order more knock offs from Amazon. Or fly everywhere. Just, you know, for “fun”!
The wants people have are insatiable. One house. Then another one – maybe on the Sunshine Coast. For vacations. Set it up right and you can probably get a fair chunk written off ! Maybe use a trust to buy it and get that ‘family office’ thing working so the kids never have to worry…
Yeah, ‘concerned about the environment’ people do things like that too, don’t they…
People are people, everywhere you go. I don’t care. Nothing surprises me.
The way the world was seemed pretty stupid to me when I was 10 years old.
It seems even dumber now. Honestly, it made no sense then and it makes no sense now.
It can only end – and badly.
And all those much vaunted ‘rights’ we like to yammer about about are going to be very much tested.
Sometimes for fun I like to think about that time China banned over 500 models of cars in early 2017 because they didn’t meet the governments fuel standards. Remember how much hollering and screaming corporations made because the government was sticking it’s nose into the mark.. oh. wait…. That didn’t happen.
The reader is left to contemplate the reasons why for themselves.
But I do believe that’s the kind of state we’re going to need going forward. It will be ugly.
I read the political philosopher John Gray, whose books Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals resonate with me a great deal. Humans will continue doing as they have done because all other options are horrifying. The Dark Mountain project has an interesting idea. They’re striving to develop a culture for the ‘post’ climate age. We have conventions and customs to protect us from the ugly truth that all of this stuff is going to end. It will.
But it should be interesting to see how they hold up while it does.
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One just hates to post replies these days because it always revolves around premier Horgan and his cohort of yesterday’s politicians, given jobs, they are incompetent to do and are the main reason the NDP is moribund in a yesterday’s politic.
In BC’s burning interior, it seems that if your areas voted Liberal, no fire support and if your area voted NDP, fire fighter’s a plenty.
If you defy the NDP and stay behind to protect your life’s investment, Mr. Huff n’ Stuff Farnsworth, feigns indignation, stamping his lil feet like a spoiled child.
Under the equally incompetence David Eby, ICBC new no-fault insurance has pegged the life of a child who is killed in an auto accident at $14K per parent. $14 thousand dollars per parent, which hardly pays for a funeral, let alone years of therapy for the parents if they remain married (after a child’s death, many marriages break down).
That the NDP cares, is hypocrisy in itself; Horgan’s NDP do not care, they do not give a damn and the province shows it.
But I digress, Horgan only sees climate change as a vehicle to increases taxes, user fees and alike, and any sort of action to actually mitigate climate change, such as an affordable regional transportation plan for metro areas and the province, or investment in solar/wind and tidal power, is ignored.
We thought the Liberals were bad: Horgan once thought of BC Liberal Lite, is nothing more than a Federal liberal in drag.
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that line about the alcholic made me laugh, its sad on the one hand, but it truly does describe what is going on politically with the enviornmnent. We do not need another pipeline. that stuff isn’t even oil, its tar. It needs to be left in the ground. Why ship it to other countries. In case the politicians haven’t heard, the earth rotates so if there is dirty air, we go through it from time to time. Then there is wind which blows dirty air around the world. Perhaps if we walked some of those people out into the fire zones they could see the smoke doesn’t stay in one spot. I don’t want any more pipelines. Let the other countries figure out what they are going to do, lets not help them make our lives worse.
At the rate things are drying out on the Prairies, I do wonder where we will get our wheat and beef.
With the lack of water becoming an issue, that maybe the reason they keep building the Site C. It isn’t about the electricity, but about the ability to sell water at some future day. However, that would be dumb because I recall from NAFTA 1 there was a clause which stipulated once they started selling the americans water they couldn’t stop.
Politicians need to realize we can live without oil, not well, but we can but no one can live without water for more than 3 days. I’d be a whole lot more concerned about water in this world than keeping Jason Kenny happy with his delusions of being an oil king. He’s never going to look good in those flowing robes the saudi’s wear.
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I am thoroughly disgusted and disappointed in premier Horgan’s response to the 6AR report. It is unequivical that we need to stop and change direction. Mr. Horgan believes BC can blindly continue on our current path. That is denial on a surreal level, and tells me that his government needs to be replaced with one willing to do the hard, painful necessary work forge a different path forward.
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I assume the pic of John is with family. How do you do that?
It is like smoking in the car with the windows rolled up and the kids
are in the back seat asleep. He must have some sociopathic
tendencies to be able to do that. Politicians have no skin in the
game so they can say what ever they want.
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