Did You Hear the One About... ? Canada's Recovery Plan, First Impression.

 


I spent much too long yesterday going through the O'Toole Conservatives' campaign platform, a.k.a. Canada's Recovery Plan.  For starters I tackled the Tories' environmental platform. It makes for dense reading, perhaps not unintentionally. It could be written to discourage scrutiny by the knuckle-draggers in the Tory base.

One word stood out - "Biden." Fellow Irishman O'Toole promises to either follow Biden or work with Biden to solve Canada's environmental challenges providing that can be done without disrupting the economy. To be blunt, the more you read the less convincing O'Toole's pitch. Then again, the Liberals' environmental performance hasn't exactly set the country afire... oh wait, it has.

The Conservatives and Liberals remind us of how out of touch Canada's political leadership is when it comes to climate change. They drive home the point that whatever action we can muster will be a bottom up struggle. Time may be running out for these fossil fools.

Ipsos Mori has just released a study that found 74 per cent of respondents in the world's wealthiest countries believe we're at a dangerous tipping point and need to shift our priorities away from economic profit for profits' sake.

The Ipsos Mori survey for the Global Commons Alliance (GCA) also found a majority (58%) were very concerned or extremely concerned about the state of the planet.

Four in five respondents said they were willing to step up and do more to regenerate the global commons.

The lead author of the report, Owen Gaffney of the GCA, said the results showed strong global support for urgent, decisive action on the climate and nature crises.

“The world is not sleepwalking towards catastrophe. People know we are taking colossal risks, they want to do more and they want their governments to do more,” he said.

“The findings should provide G20 leaders with the confidence to move faster to implement more ambitious policies to protect and regenerate our global commons.”

This snapshot of global public opinion was taken in April and May before the northern hemisphere summer of record-breaking heatwaves, floods and fires, and months before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of “inevitable and irreversible” climate change owing to human activities.

It's not that the people of the wealthy nations are particularly enlightened. They're not. The numbers are significantly higher in less affluent states.

Among G20 nations, 73% of people believed human activity had pushed the Earth close to tipping points. Awareness of these risks was markedly higher in the less wealthy countries – Indonesia (86%), Turkey (85%), Brazil (83%), Mexico (78%) and South Africa (76%) – than the richest countries – United States (60%), Japan (63%), Great Britain (65%) and Australia (66%).

Overall, more than half (59%) of respondents believed nature was already too damaged to continue meeting human needs in the long term.

People are beginning to feel that “nature is hitting back”, wrote the Kenyan environmentalist Elizabeth Wathuti in a foreword to the report.

Would that our leaders shared the sense of urgency of those they rule.  The public knows this is an emergency, a dire crisis. Their leaders - not so much.

Comments

  1. LorneAugust 17, 2021 at 9:04 AM

    Anything that threatens to ignite discontent from a party's base is off-limits, Mound. Hence, the moral vacuum at the top.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibAugust 17, 2021 at 12:10 PM

      I'm convinced, Lorne, that the fight to restrain climate change is going to have to be a bottom-up effort. The political caste is an obstacle, not a solution. One climate scientist recently said that at this stage "winning slowly is the same as losing." Climate delayers are now the real enemy.

      Delete
  2. TrailblazerAugust 17, 2021 at 8:14 PM

    Ipsos Mori has just released a study that found 74 per cent of respondents in the world's wealthiest countries believe we're at a dangerous tipping point and need to shift our priorities away from economic profit for profits' sake.

    Yet our politicians do nought to solve the problem.
    Perhaps the problem is that our politicians are really not the ones making the countries decisions?

    Or your vote counts!! really!

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibAugust 18, 2021 at 11:10 AM

      My theory is that we're witnessing an inevitable result of the neoliberal era - a failure of governance. The rise of the corporate state put paid to leaders of vision, ability and courage. Instead we would up with grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard, technocrats, petit fonctionnaires, glorified clerks. Harper, Scheer, Trudeau and O'Toole are all of this mold.

      When a major threat emerges their response is one of modulated accommodation that never reflects the real measure of the emergency.

      Delete
  3. TrailblazerAugust 18, 2021 at 4:15 PM

    glorified clerks. Harper, Scheer, Trudeau and O'Toole are all of this mold.

    They all sold out to the devil, such is the want of power and greed for money.

    TB

    ReplyDelete

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