Yesterday I presented the first of two “Am I wrong?” queries regarding the climate crisis. If you accept my facts, I said, you will see the massive challenge we face in transforming human assumptions and ways of living on Earth.
To see our fate clearly, we must face these hard facts about energy, growth and governance. Part one of two.
No one wants to be the downer at the party, and some would say that I am an unreformed pessimist. But consider this — pessimism and optimism are mere states of mind that may or may not be anchored in reality. I would prefer to be labeled a realist, someone who sees things as they are, who has a healthy respect for good data and solid analysis (or at least credible theory).
Shiri Pasternak suspected corporations likely won more injunctions than First Nations did in land disputes.
But she was shocked after she and her fellow researchers began crunching numbers.
The team at Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank, reviewed nearly 100 injunction cases. They found corporations succeeded in 76 per cent of injunctions filed against First Nations, while First Nations were denied in 81 per cent of injunctions against corporations.
Countries across the world need to make their 2030 emission targets much more ambitious if the world is to stand a chance of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a major research report says.
And Canada is one of the biggest laggards, far from reaching its own targets which are themselves far from enough to keep warming to that level.
[Editor: At our meeting we, (those attending the Vancouver Ecosocialist Group meeting of Nov. 10, 2019), agreed to endorse and post to our website and social media the denunciation below of the coup attempt against Evo Morales.
You’ve probably never even heard of two of Canada’s more effective provincial and city-scale climate policies—and that’s probably not a bad thing.
The BC Energy Step Code and the City of Vancouver’s Zero Emissions Building Plan are both building regulations introduced within the past two years or so by the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver, respectively.
