The shocking photograph of Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkey beach made many wake up to the horrifying reality of the crisis but, although most of us now know that millions of people have been displaced from their homes in the nation to escape civil war and persecution, there are many who may not actually understand what is happening over in Syria.
That’s why this helpful cartoon has been produced in an attempt to try and help people understand the situation in the country and how and why it has happened and escalated to such an extent.
Representatives of nearly the entire U.S. fossil fuels industry lined up on Thursday to help the federal government wage a legal battle against a group of young people—aged 8 to 19—who are demanding climate policies that respect the rights of current and future generations.
The military is not just a prolific user of oil, it is one of the central pillars of the global fossil-fuel economy. Today whether it is in the Middle East, the Gulf, or the Pacific, modern-day military deployment is about controlling oil-rich regions and defending the key shipping supply routes that carry half the world’s oil and sustain our consumer economy.
Business, environmental and community groups are pushing for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shut down a pair of pipeline reviews before heading to Paris for climate talks.
The City of Burnaby, the Georgia Strait Alliance, Greenpeace Canada and the Natural Resources Defense Council are among 100 groups seeking a halt to National Energy Board reviews of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion and TransCanada’s Energy East proposal. In a joint letter sent Thursday to Trudeau, the groups say the reviews should be put on pause until fundamental flaws in the process are fixed.
“The TPP is an act of climate denial,” said Jason Kowalski, the U.S. policy director at 350.org.
“It denies the scientific imperative to leave fossil fuels in the ground by granting corporations incredible powers over the sovereign right of countries to fight climate change on their own.”
At issue is the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism included in the trade deal. ISDS’s allow foreign investors to use a secret tribunal to launch a lawsuit if they believe government actionsmight affect their future profits.
Any global climate change deal reached in Paris next month will be legally binding and have a concrete impact, France’s foreign minister said on Thursday, reacting to US comments that questioned the status of the accord.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, was quoted as telling Wednesday’s Financial Times that December’s agreement was “definitively not going to be a treaty”.
But his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius, said on Thursday that, unlike previous negotiations, the Paris talks were not just “hot air” and Kerry was perhaps “confused”.
This column is part of a package of special coverage of climate change issues by CBC News leading up to the United Nations climate change conference (COP21) being held in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11.
G20 countries are spending $452 billion US a year subsidizing their fossil fuel industries and are undermining the world's effort to combat climate change in the process, according to a new international report by an environmental advocacy group.
