Some Gallows Humour

For technical reasons related to the site, I can't put up the cartoon here, but if you click on this link, you will see something from the Far Side's Gary Larson that is both funny and relevant in a macabre kind of way.

A Larger Perspective

In these uncertain times, we are all seized by concerns about Corvid-19. The prospect of death invariably focuses the mind, especially in the short-term.

Facilitated by fossil-fuel propaganda and an often uncritical media, it is unfortunately easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, one that we have been warned about for a long time - climate change. The following letter, from the print edition of the Sunday Star, strives to achieve a perspective all would be wise to adopt:

Don’t let deniers frame way we talk about climate crisis
Toronto Star 15 Mar 2020

Unconscionable dithering on climate action and on Indigenous rights has caused immense and wholly needless pain, conflict and disruption for Canadians in recent weeks.

It’s 2020; scientists say we absolutely must transition to safe energy as quickly as humanly possible, just to give humanity a decent chance at a future (not to guarantee a livable future, which is already out of reach).

Despite this, multiple levels of government, and three different self-styled progressive parties, are prepared to trample the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), to force through yet another pipeline on behalf of brazen and unrepentant fossil fuel profiteers. All in the middle of a climate crisis. Worse yet, in a flailing attempt to shore up their transparently myopic stance, fossil interests, and their allies in politics and the media, are blasting out vicious invective to confuse and divide Canadians, with a wilful and criminal disregard for any resulting violence. We need look no further than recent propaganda from fossil fuel companies and their allies, including endorsements of sexual violence against teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, and acts of brutal physical violence against earth protectors.

Moreover, this petro-cabal has gleefully spread outright fabrications to vilify Indigenous protectors and their allies, such as claims of “paid protestors” and epithets like “thug.”

The fossil industry pours huge amounts of cash and effort into convincing the public that “energy” means only fossil fuels, that “jobs” must be fossil fuel jobs, that safe alternatives do not exist, and that regular folks acting out of concern for their children and the planet are funded by foreign interests, hell-bent on destroying all that is good in the world.

We do not need to argue that this is a grossly irresponsible invitation to violence; we can point to several examples where earth protectors, merely repeating science and/or defending UNDRIP, have been threatened, intimidated and attacked by people who have been made angry and confused by fossil propaganda, specifically designed to make us angry, confused and divided.

It’s time that the industry, politicians and the media renounce this dangerous disinformation.

The future of all life on earth depends on it.

Patrick Yancey, Antigonish, Nova Scotia

A Corona Public Service Announcement

Some good advice here:

Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled

Kenneth Copeland is on the job!

No crisis is complete without #FakeChristian charlatans using it to make a tax-free buck. Notorious conman Kenneth Copeland will “cure” #coronavirus over your TV — if you send a love offering! Glory! pic.twitter.com/UZGWEsnGvm

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) March 12, 2020

When Is Discrimination Not Discrimination?

Answer: When it occurs in Quebec.

Question #2: Where is teaching tolerance, respect and understanding considered contrary to the public good?

Answer: Quebec

It would seem that in La Belle Province, a little learning is a dangerous thing:

Since 2008, elementary and high school students in Quebec have taken a mandatory course aimed at cultivating respect and tolerance for people of different cultures and faiths.

But after years of relentless criticism from Quebec nationalists and committed secularists who say the ethics and religious culture course is peddling a multiculturalist view to impressionable young Quebecers, the provincial government is abolishing the course.

Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge and his colleagues see a course aimed at fostering “the recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good” as contrary to Quebec values. Ardent critics of the course

have long described [it] as a type of mental virus, contaminating a generation of young people by making them amenable to Canadian multiculturalism and other pluralist ideas.

Oh, the horror of promoting a pluralistic society.

Nadia El-Mabrouk, professor at Universite de Montreal’s computer science department...suggested in a recent interview the course is partly responsible for the fact that, according to polls, young Quebecers are less likely to support Bill 21, the legislation adopted last June that bans some public sector workers, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols on the job.

Others within that 'distinct society' see this for what it is. A teacher of the course, Sabrina Jafralie, says it

...explains to students that Quebec is filled with people who have different driving forces. It doesn’t teach young people to be religious, she said, it simply explains why other people may be.

The course exposes students to religions from around the world, and according to the teaching guides, “attention is also given to the influence of Judaism and Native spirituality on this heritage, as well as other religions that today contribute to Quebec culture.”

“But what the government is trying to do,” Jafralie said, “is in fact replace the ability to investigate and explore religiosity, with their own new religion — which is secularism.”

In any other jurisdiction, such an agenda would be denounced as blatant discrimination and racism. I guess the special status that Quebec occupies within our confederation spares it that opprobrium, however.

Vive la difference, eh?

A Missing Sense Of Urgency

After taking it out of the library twice, I have finally mustered the psychic strength to begin reading Bill McKibben's Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? A grim read, its central thesis is that things are very bad, but it is still not too late to do something about it. That is, if we can muster the will to tackle this massive threat to our existence.

On a related note, the other night, while watching the ongoing perfervid coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus now sweeping the world, I couldn't help but wonder why, if governments can so quickly mobilize in the face of immediate threat, they can't seem to muster the same resolve and resources to combat the much greater dangers posed by climate change.

Of course, part of the answer lies in the economic treadmill no one wants to exit from, as well as the fact that humans have a great capacity for cognitive dissonance, refusing to acknowledge, despite all of the meteorological evidence to the contrary (floods, droughts, wildfires, intense storms, soaring world temperatures, etc.), the dire peril we are in.

Serendipitously, yesterday I came across a piece by Owen Jones entitled, Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.

Despite rising sea levels, Arctic wildfires and increasingly common killer heatwaves, to name but three manifestations of climate change, we still lack a sense of urgency. What if we did finally come to our senses? In Britain, it might look like this:

What would be mentioned in that solemn prime ministerial speech on the steps of No 10, broadcast live across TV networks? All homes and businesses would be insulated, creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and reducing emissions. Electric car charging points would be installed across the country.

A frequent flyer levy for regular, overwhelmingly affluent air passengers would be introduced.

This would only be the start. Friends of the Earth calls for free bus travel for the under-30s, combined with urgent investment in the bus network. Renewable energy would be doubled, again producing new jobs, clean energy, and reducing deadly air pollution. The government would end all investments of taxpayers’ money in fossil fuel infrastructure and launch a new tree-planting programme to double the size of forests in Britain ...

Owen Jones concludes his piece with this:

Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.

The pessimist in me says that nothing will change, and the world will continue its headlong plunge into the climatic abyss.

The residual optimist in me, a very faint presence nowadays, hopes I am wrong.

It Makes Perfect Sense

While many bemoan the fate of the Teck Resources Frontier tarsands project as yet another example of restrictive regulatory measures, others, as the following letter from the print edition of the Toronto Star suggests, say its death makes perfect corporate sense.

Free market now realizes carbon reserves best left alone

Re Regulatory process blamed for oilsands mine’s end, Feb. 28

Canadians who haven’t followed B.C. Premier John Horgan, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau down the rabbit hole understand that the collapse of the Teck Frontier proposal is a positive indication that the “free market” is functioning as it should.

Corporations, investors and shareholders are belatedly coming to realize that it is in everyone’s best interest that most of the world’s carbon reserves — include Alberta’s oilsands — be left in the ground.

Only in Wonderland would politicians employ massive taxpayer subsidies to subvert the marketplace and promote uneconomical, climate-destroying fossil-fuel projects; $16 billion to buy and build the Trans Mountain pipelines, plus $6 billion to construct Coastal GasLink.

The truth is, pipelines don’t end at a terminal. Every pipeline is a conduit to the sky, ultimately dumping its carbon into a dangerously overheated atmosphere.

Only by changing the ways that we produce and consume energy can we hope to avert climate catastrophe.

Mike Ward, Duncan, B.C.