Lytton, B.C. Melts. Satan Might Not Live There But Some Days It's Hard to Tell.

 

Two all-time records set on consecutive days.

Take the sea-to-sky highway to Whistler then on to Pemberton, the sometimes challenging Duffey Lake road, Lillooet and then Hwy 12 south to Lytton, where the route becomes Hwy 1 through Hell's Gate and on to Hope before heading back to Vancouver. On Sunday, Lytton shattered the old Canadian record with 46.6 degrees Celsius. Today it hit 47.5 C.

Even here on the island it's bloody hot.  Not Lytton hot but, for a chunk of rock out in the north Pacific, it's still abnormally hot. It's a reminder that, when it comes to global heating, the climate emergency, no place is out of reach.

We've been listening to our governments promising action on fighting climate change for almost 30 years and, whether Liberal, Conservative or New Democrat, it's been a diet heavy on greenwash.  Consider these excerpts from Barry Saxifrage's article in the National Observer last April.

Despite decades of Earth Days, international climate summits and even an epic economic contraction caused by a global pandemic, the amount of CO2 piling up in our atmosphere hasn't stopped rising. Or even slowed down a bit. Instead, CO2 levels have continued to accelerate upwards, unchecked.

...For example, in 1970, as people rallied for the first Earth Day, humans were increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere by an average of 0.9 parts per million (ppm) every year.

By 1992, when the world's nations gathered for the Rio Summit, humans were increasing it by 1.5 ppm per year — 60 per cent faster.

Now, after a quarter century of international climate summits (officially called United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COPs), we are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere by 2.4 ppm per year — nearly three times faster than during that first Earth Day. And last year, during the global pandemic, CO2 rose even faster still, by 2.6 ppm.

...Roughly a quarter of the CO2 we release gets taken up by increasing growth of bacteria, algae, plants and other photosynthesizing lifeforms.

Another quarter of our fossil fuel CO2 dissolves into surface waters, driving a lake and ocean acidification crisis. Our CO2 has already increased global ocean acidity by 30 per cent.

This acidification is causing widespread harm to many marine species, from corals to oysters. According to NOAA, the pace of ocean acidification is accelerating, as well. And if we continue with business-as-usual fossil fuel burning, they say that within the lifetime of today's kids, ocean acidification levels are projected to reach a level last seen millions of years ago in the Miocene, when they fuelled a global extinction event.

...By the 1990s, the decade that brought the Rio Summit and the Kyoto Accord, the atmosphere was gaining around 12 GtCO2 per year. Over the next decade, featuring the ill-fated Copenhagen Accord, CO2 poured in by an average of 15 GtCO2 more each year. And in the last decade (that included the global Paris Agreement), the atmosphere gained nearly 19 GtCO2, on average, each year.

...The unmitigated, ongoing failure by the current generation to rein in our climate pollution is forcing an ever-growing burden onto future generations.

We've used their future atmosphere and oceans as an open sewer for our billions of tonnes of fossil fuel pollution that we don't want to clean up ourselves. For scale, we dump 1,000 times more climate pollution into the environment each year than we do with our other big fossil fuel waste product — plastic litter.

It has gotten so extreme that the latest climate science now says the younger generation will almost certainly have to remove massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans to prevent long-term dangerous climate impacts. Not just "net zero," but the even more daunting "net negative."

How can they do this if we can't? How much will it cost them? Is it even possible?

A group of climate scientists, led by James Hansen and Makiko Sato, have studied just this question. Their peer-reviewed science paper, Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions, concludes:

"… The GHG climate forcing is not only still growing, the growth rate is actually accelerating … if large fossil fuel emissions are allowed to continue, the scale and cost of industrial CO2 extraction, occurring in conjunction with a deteriorating climate with growing economic effects, may become unmanageable. Simply put, the burden placed on young people and future generations may become too heavy to bear."

...Canada has been pledging to reduce our climate polluting for 33 years now. But we've never come close to meeting any of our targets.

Instead, we've increased our climate polluting by 21 per cent since we started promising to emit less.

...we are also the only member of the G7 that continues to pollute well above our 1990 levels.

Every other G7 country lowered emissions over [the past] 10 years, except Canada. Ours went up.

In fact, our emissions have now risen in each of the last three years the government has released data for: 2017, 2018 and 2019. We are literally still heading in the wrong direction.  Ottawa needs to bring in legally binding carbon budgets that cover every single year — starting with this year. That is not a radical proposal. It is exactly what our Commonwealth peer, the United Kingdom, has done starting way back in 2008. And take a look at where they are now.

What is radical is Canada's continuing refusal to cut our sky-high climate polluting even as accelerating CO2 levels push us ever faster into a chaotic and dangerous future.

Foreclosing the future for a generation just beginning to come into existence is a monstrous betrayal of the future and that is exactly what today's federal government, Mr. Trudeau's Liberals, is doing - just like every Liberal and Conservative government going back at least as far as the Chretien Liberals.

Justin Trudeau, with his Trans-Mountain pipeline and his government's venal continuation of subsidies, grants and deferments to the fossil energy giants is not on the side of the angels. He's on the dark side. He's selling out our future generations no matter how much greenwash he ladles out to his followers.