Climate Change

With less than 100 days until high-level UN climate talks take place in Paris, key leaders from the global climate justice movement have come together with a joint statement that affirms their belief that only mass popular mobilizations across the planet demanding a drastic reckoning with the world's fossil fuel paradigm will suffice when it comes to confronting the increasingly dire and intertwined threats of neoliberal capitalism and planetary climate change.

The Canadian Medical Association will divest its holdings in fossil-fuel companies, a move doctors hope will send a powerful symbolic message that climate change is an urgent health concern.

“Given the health impacts of fossil fuels, we have to take a stand,” Courtney Howard, a board member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and a physician practising in Yellowknife, said in addressing the CMA’s general council meeting on Tuesday.

Attendees at the International Islamic Climate Change Symposium in Istanbul from 20 countries produced, and 60 of them signed, a declaration this week warning of the dangers of climate change and urging urgent action to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

But, I fear the press reporting on this meeting is exaggerating its significance.

Below is a translation from the August 20 edition of the Montreal-based newspaper, Le Devoir.

EDMONTON - New research suggests that this week's restrictions on withdrawing water from the Athabasca River for oilsands use are a preview of what the industry will face under climate change.

Alberta's energy regulator has suspended a total of 73 temporary industry licences to take water from the Athabasca because of low flows.

A recent paper published in the journal Climate Change suggests such disruptions will become more common and increase by up to 40 per cent by mid-century.

What’s that they say about the first casualty of war? You can obviously say the same for Canadian elections.

Since her common-sense quip that most of Canada’s tar sands reserves will have to stay in the ground, Linda McQuaig has been vilified by much of the political establishment and (rightfully) defended by a minority of voices in the media.