Federal and provincial governments in Canada want to be seen as climate leaders. Yet they continue to introduce policies and spend billions of taxpayer dollars to expand oil and gas production.
The images from the streets of Paris over the past weeks are stark and poignant: thousands of angry protesters, largely representing the struggling French working class, resorting to mass civil unrest to express fear and frustration over a proposed new gas tax. For the moment, the protests have been successful. French President Emmanuel Macron backed off the new tax proposal, at least for six months. The popular uprising won, seemingly at the expense of the global fight against climate change and the future wellbeing of our planet.
Everyday people in France want to fight climate change; they are more worried and outraged about the impacts of global warming than their European neighbors, according to the last European Perceptions of Climate Change report. They just don’t want low- and middle-income people to have to pay for solving a problem caused by multinational corporations.
Thinking in siloes about the climate and about our planet’s people puts us at risk of increasing climate disruption and massive loss of life. This year the climate meeting, COP24, is in Katowice, Poland, from December 3 to December 14.
Prepared for: COP24, Katowice, Poland; December 3-14, 2018
After more than a decade of speeches and assurances from global elites, the “green growth” approach to climate protection has failed to make any meaningful progress in addressing the climate crisis. Renewable energy is on an upward course, but overall energy consumption has continued to rise even faster; as a result, fossil fuel use continues to expand, emissions continue to rise, and nearly every major country is off-track to meet their Paris commitments.
