Brace Yourself for What's Coming from Ottawa

 

The electioneering Libs are shelling out $1.3 billion to extend the Sky Train from Surrey to Langley. Hard to argue with mass transit.

That handout, however, is just shy of the $1.4 billion of new money for climate change mitigation and adaptation recently announced by Dame Cathy McKenna. And the climate money is to be doled out over 12 years. It's kind of pathetic.

Is it possible that our government knows there'll never be enough money to arrest and adapt to climate change in Canada? Greenwashing will have to do.

An op-ed in The Guardian predicts the British government is on the verge of telling the public that, when it comes to climate change impacts - heatwaves, tornadoes, persistent and worsening flooding - they're just going to have to learn to live with it. There'll be no answers. For those who tell themselves "they'll think of something," well, "they" don't see it that way.

Soon, a few of the more shameless newspaper commentators will urge the rest of us to “learn to live” with climate breakdown. Soon, a couple of especially sharp-elbowed cabinet ministers will sigh to the Spectator that, yes, carbon emissions should ideally be slashed – but we must make a trade-off between “lives and livelihoods”. Soon, a little platoon of Tory backbenchers will respond to TV pictures of another devastating flash flood or deadly heatwave by complaining about “fearmongering”. “Why is the BBC so doomy?” they’ll ask, as the death toll rises.

...Every year wasted in reducing carbon emissions pushes us further into extreme weather, environmental destruction and the loss of human and animal lives. These lessons appeared to have been fully imbibed by Boris Johnson and his chancellor, Rishi Sunak, when they vowed last March to do “whatever it takes” to tackle the pandemic.

...Selfishness is hardly a new characteristic of our politics. But what is striking today is how the politicians and commentators using it sneer at those who stand in their way. There is a cruelty to this politics that is breathtaking. The rightwing commentator Douglas Murray complained in the Sun on Sunday of Britons’ “terrible fearfulness”. He didn’t trace this to the fact that the country is mourning more than 150,000 Covid deaths.

Before Covid came along, Murray had a line in rubbishing activists who have the gall to sound the alarm on the climate crisis. A “fringe eco-lobby”, he declared in the Daily Mail, was committing “an abuse of children on a massive and unforgivable scale” by making them fearful of the future. The Covid deniers are, as often as not, also the climate deniers; who are – wouldn’t you know it? – the most extreme Brexiters.

...Lord Lawson, as Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, played a vital role in breaking the social contract that had underpinned postwar Britain, on everything from welfare to pay to pensions. What his successors are now doing is trying to dismantle what’s left of the ethical contract Britons still hold with each other. If they succeed, the politics of extreme individualism will make impossible the collective response essential to tackle social crises, from Covid to social care to climate.

...This smirking ignorance is possible for as long as those people who die, whether of Covid or climate breakdown, are brown or black or poor. But even the likes of Murray and Baker and Lawson can’t rely on that. Not when a flood can burst into a German care home and drown the residents. Not when a wildfire can consume one of the richest provinces in America and the world. Some bunkers you just can’t buy.