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.
With the world focusing on climate change leading up to the COP21 United Nations gathering in Paris at the end of November, some Indigenous elders in Canada say it’s an issue that they’ve been witnessing unfold for decades.
Francois Paulette from Smith Landing First Nation in the Northwest Territories (NWT) has been speaking out about changes to the landscape in his home territory.
“The north is a very sensitive, delicate place with impacts from pollution to the air and water,” said Paulette.
Lost in the political fallout from President Barack Obama’s decision to once and for all reject Keystone XL is the fact that there is no longer an economic context for the pipeline. For that matter, the same can be said for any of the other proposed pipelines that would service the planned massive expansion of production from Alberta’s oil sands.
Suncor Refinery outside of Fort McMurray with the Syncrude Refinery visible in the background. Photo by Colin O'Connor, Greenpeace.
Alberta and its oil sands needs to be the focus of the Trudeau government's climate action if it is serious about helping limit dangerous planetary warming to two degrees this century, warned a national group of environmental thinkers.
[Webpage editor's note: A good summary of the history of this project.]
After seven years of acrimonious court battles, profligate spending and hardball political lobbying, the Keystone XL pipeline is dead. U.S. President Barack Obama rejected the proposal, as most suspected he would.
"Several years ago, the State Department began a review process for the proposed construction of a pipeline that would carry Canadian crude oil through our heartland to ports in the Gulf of Mexico and out into the world market," said Obama in a press conference on Friday November 6.
[An important article: "I would argue that it's much more likely to come from social protest than from the eventual exhaustion of natural resources."- says Chris Williams - read the full article - Editors]
We are now officially living amid the sixth great extinction, according to scientists, but the global economy has still not shifted to prevent climate change's existential threat to human civilization and much of the biosphere.
