Transportation

It’s not just the megarich: increased spending power leads us all to inflict environmental damage. It’s time for a radical plan

Sept 13, 2019 - I premise my analysis on five statements:

September 12, 2019

While many Canadians are looking to the October 21st federal election for solutions to global climate disruption, the climate plans from the four major parties offer none.

Any genuine solution will require reining in an economic system that demands eternal growth in a finite ecosystem, mitigating or adapting to multiplying environmental and social disasters, and drastically reducing consumption. Deadline: yesterday!

The New Deal and World War II are reminders of past transformative times, reverberating in current severe hardships and extreme dangers. Emergencies can bring clarity and reason about what to do, though at the opposite end, crises can elicit the worst outcomes, such as outlined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.

A Green New Deal can’t deliver economic or environmental justice without tackling the housing crisis. We should go big and build 10 million beautiful, public, no-carbon homes over the next 10 years.

Humans are pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate. But climate change is a cumulative problem, a function of the total amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the sky. Some of the heat-trapping gases in the air right now date back to the Industrial Revolution. And since that time, some countries have pumped out vastly more carbon dioxide than others.