“The most important question raised by the climate summit may be: Does the power to change the world belong to the people in the conference rooms of Le Bourget or to the people in the streets of Paris?” – Rebecca Solnit, “Power in Paris“
B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s own climate change advisors will recommend a hike in the province’s carbon tax to avoid a complete blowout of a year 2020 climate target due to an aggressive push to build a highly polluting liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, National Observer has learned.
The government is expected to make the premier’s Climate Leadership Team’s report public Friday at 1 p.m. in Victoria, ahead of Clark’s trip to Paris for the UN climate summit next week.
Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this month, when representatives from all the world’s nations gather for COP21, the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (U.N.F.C.C.C.), and the eleventh session of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol.
Faced with the greatest threat to our planet, we cannot afford a bad deal, and we say, with the rest of humanity, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” And even if an acceptable deal is reached, it will provide only a temporary solution to the climate crisis. A permanent solution lies in the world’s turning away from capitalism, a mode of production that insatiably and incessantly transforms living nature into dead commodities, creates destabilizing growth, and promotes over-consumption.
With the Paris climate conference only days away, a Canadian climate action strategy is now urgent and overdue. The CCPA’s Climate Justice Project has been researching climate solutions for the past seven years. We conclude that an aggressive approach to tacking carbon emissions can also be a good employment and industrial strategy for the nation – a green industrial revolution that can improve well-being for everyone in Canada.
How times have changed in 2015. Just days away from the Paris climate conference, Prime Minister Trudeau met with the Premiers to talk about working together to make Canada a leader on climate. Compare this to PM Harper, who never met with the Premiers, championed the oil and gas industry, and if anything was a disruptive force in global climate negotiations. And leading the march to Paris?
The French government is trying to silence social movements, but we refuse to go quietly, says campaigner Pascoe Sabido.
In the days after the tragic events on 13 November in Paris, everything concerning the climate talks was in limbo. A state of emergency was called. Would the summit go ahead at all? What would it mean for the mass mobilizations being planned?
