For the last two decades, Canada's managed forest lands have been logged faster than they have grown back. This imbalance has created a huge — and rapidly rising — new source of carbon dioxide (CO2) pouring into our already destabilized climate.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently dropped a bombshell announcement that should have garnered news headlines in the major global and US media, but did not. New WMO research concludes that “[t]here is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level for at least one of the next five years.”
140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases could be unleashed if fossil fuel extraction plans get green light, analysis shows
The fate of the vast quantities of oil and gas lodged under the shale, mud and sandstone of American drilling fields will in large part determine whether the world retains a liveable climate. And the US, the world’s largest extractor of oil, is poised to unleash these fossil fuels in spectacular volumes.
Unfortunately, this article doesn't make reference to right-wing "anti-vaxxer" and related protests, comparing them to, and distinguishing them from, the progressive protests covered here. But there is a lot of good info, and the last sentence of the article poses the key strategic task for all of us.
Techno-utopianism is popular precisely because it doesn’t challenge the status quo, and lets polluters off the hook
In seeking to prevent environmental breakdown, what counts above all is not the new things we do, but the old things we stop doing. Renewable power, for instance, is useful in preventing climate chaos only to the extent that it displaces fossil fuels. Unfortunately, new technologies do not always lead automatically to the destruction of old ones.
Almost all debate about taxes and climate change has focused on carbon pricing, eclipsing an uncomfortable truth: Canada’s tax system is undermining our ability to move quickly on the transition to clean energy.
"The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita."
The federal government, which halted new public funding for the pipeline, insists the transaction is not a change of course.
OTTAWA, Ont. — Trudeau Cabinet ministers recently approved a special C$10 billion loan guarantee to entice investment in the government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.
