The Path We're On is Suicidal.

James Lovelock once depicted human beings as parasites that grow to numbers that overwhelm their host, Earth, sending the host into a powerful fever that, in turn, kills off the parasites. Uncontrolled growth, he argued, was self-defeating, ultimately suicidal.

The "S" word came up again this week, this time from the UN secretary general, Antonio Gutteres.

Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said.

Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year.

Carbon emissions need to be taxed, and trillions of dollars of “perverse” subsidies for fossil fuels and destructive farming must be diverted to green energy and food production, the report says. As well as systemic changes, people in rich nations can act too, it says, by cutting meat consumption and wasting less energy and water.

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is senseless and suicidal,” said Guterres. “The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses, and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth.”

Hmmm, "perverse subsidies for fossil fuels." That rings a couple of bells, eh?

Prof Sir Robert Watson, who has led UN scientific assessments on climate and biodiversity and is the other lead author of the report, said: “We have got a triple emergency and these three issues are all interrelated and have to be dealt with together. They’re no longer just environmental issues – they are economic issues, development issues, security issues, social, moral and ethical issues.

“Of all the things we have to do, we have to really rethink our economic and financial systems. Fundamentally, GDP doesn’t take nature into account. We need to get rid of these perverse subsidies, they are $5-7tn a year. If you could move some of these towards low-carbon technology and investing in nature, then the money is there.”

This meant taking on companies and countries with vested interests in fossil fuels, he said: “There are a lot of people that really like these perverse subsidies. They love the status quo. So governments have to have the guts to act”. 

Most of us still see politics in Canada as a contest between Liberal and Conservative but we've moved beyond that partisan struggle. Today that struggle is between the nation, the Canadian people and those who vie for the management contract. Frankly, the main contenders are both leading us down this suicidal path. That includes tens of billions of dollars of direct and indirect (i.e. hidden) annual subsidies misrepresented on the government books plus Justin Trudeau's infernal pipeline to "tidewater."

Meanwhile the outgoing head of the rich countries' club, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, says it's time to put a "big fat tax on carbon." 

Canada cannot pretend to being on the path to a low carbon future when it pumps tens of billions into annual fossil fuel subsidies and proceeds to build a high capacity pipeline for the sole purpose of flooding world markets with high-carbon, low-value bitumen. In every possible way, our government has Canada on the wrong side, the worst side, of this dangerous issue.