Will Justin Fish or Will He Continue to Cut Bait?

 

The master of over-promising and under-delivering, Justin Trudeau, will need something better than glib assurances and fanciful aspirations when president Biden convenes his virtual summit on climate change this week.

Between Biden's summit and the COP26 climate conference in Britain this fall, world leaders and would-be leaders will be expected to produce concrete plans to slash emissions in the dwindling time remaining. Targets are just weasel words, readily forgotten. We've been playing that game in Canada since the days of Jean Chretien.

Meanwhile, as our leaders fiddle the planet burns. The World Meteorological Organization has just released its State of the Global Climate 2020 report.  It makes for grim reading.

“All the key climate and impacts information in this report highlight relentless, continuing climate change, an increasing occurrence and intensification of extreme events, and severe losses and damage, affecting people, societies and economies,” said Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary general.

Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the UK, said: “What is notable is an emerging picture that climate change is gathering pace: [ice is] melting more quickly and heat is accumulating more rapidly in the ocean, while CO2 increases, which are driving these changes, are becoming progressively larger over time.”

Prof Chris Rapley, at University College London, UK, said: “The 1.5C Paris guard-rail is close to being breached. The way we are running human affairs is destabilising the climate system, with predictable and increasingly dire consequences. It’s time for an uprising of concerted action to fix politics – managing the climate crisis will follow.”

2020 was a year of climate records shattered, the most recent of a succession of record-setting years. For our federal and provincial governments this is water off a duck's back. We can't get Ottawa to cut subsidies to the fossil energy sector much less deal with the tar pits of Athabasca.

Comments

  1. TrailblazerApril 20, 2021 at 5:12 PM

    Justin will cast bait as in freshwater fishing.
    He is incapable of deep sea fishing or thinking.
    Justin is a career politician by gift of his father Pierre.
    He has little else to offer.
    In short , he is in deep above his head.

    Like them or not , is adversaries represent something , Justin puts in appearances now and again just to remain within the public's eye.
    He is but a poor imitation of most USA politicians!

    FWIW
    The proposed super league of soccer is about to be shut down.
    It proposed a football version of american politics!
    Is it not time we demand the same from our politicians?

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibApril 21, 2021 at 9:41 AM

      The other day I looked at the current crop and their predecessors. Did David Lewis and Ed Broadbent really beget Jagmeet Singh? John Diefenbaker and Robert Stanfield, Scheer and O'Toole? Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, Iggy and Justin? Across the board I see a sharp decline in the calibre of leadership and just as we're embarked upon uncharted waters with dangerous shoals.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more

"Creeping Normalcy" in the Plague Age

Image
  Britain is experiencing a new wave of Covid cases, 40,000 per day .  Yet it hasn't caused much reaction from the public. It sounds like the legendary stiff upper lip, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" resolve. Health officials think it's something much more troubling. “We’re in a phase where we still have large numbers of people dying from this disease,” said Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh. “But it has gone into the background. We’ve become used to something that has not gone away. I think there’s been a desensitisation to the mortality.” On Thursday, the UK reported more than 45,000 new coronavirus cases – the most since mid-July – and more than 800 deaths were reported in the past seven days. Hospitalisations are rising, with one-fifth of ICU beds occupied by Covid patients, and the latest figures showed an estimated 200,000 pupils absent from school. The UK is faring far worse than its European neighbours, with a rate of death
Read more