Liberal, Tory, Same Old Murderous Story.

The theme of this year's UN climate summit, COP27, will be adaptation, a very diplomatic way of saying what to do now that you've shit your pants.

Adaptation is the red-headed step child when it comes to the climate emergency unfolding before our very eyes. Our leaders, including the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, are skilled at crafting a Potemkin facade to mask the dire and woefully unprepared dangers of the climate crisis.  Justin will tell us he's got this sorted. His government will focus on cutting emissions from the extraction and processing of bitumen from the Athabasca Death Sands.* That's Canada's commitment to emissions.

That's not to say the Liberals aren't also focused on adaptation such as our aging and decaying essential infrastucture. A new bitumen pipeline to "tidewater" is infrastructure, isn't it? There's digging and welding galore, all that infrastructure stuff.  By the time the Canadian people have been fleeced, we might just have the greatest, most lethal infrastructure to be had, a real showcase to demonstrate Canada's commitment.

"Polluter Pays"? Fuck that. The fossil fuel giants are lucky if they can eke out a paltry 3 billion dollars in profits per day. That's right, per day. Every day. And Justin is not going to burst that bubble, is he? Thanks to governments like our own these giants have been sucking at the public teat for 50 years, half a century.

The vast total captured by petrostates and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. The huge profits were inflated by cartels of countries artificially restricting supply.

Did you know that, for the first time ever, Canada will log +30 C temperatures at all of our coasts, the full sea to sea to sea business? We can't say we haven't played a role in that achievement. We have, have we ever.

Best we give this a pass. Why upset the proles? If they knew the fate being bequeathed to their grandkids they would be storming the Bastille. And it wouldn't be like some jackass trucker convoy either.

As Monbiot wrote last week, killer heat is our new normal, even in the UK. And you know where you stand when your political elite and your media hunker down and shut the fuck up - for now anyway.

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust.

This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything, but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely into our silent retreat.

It's not a passive silence. It is "an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. 

In the history of Canada there has never been anything like this. We have never had governments, federal and provincial, across party lines, so betray the very people who elect them to high office "for our own good."

This governance does not come cheap. It arrives with a butcher's bill claiming ever more lives, especially the lives of the weakest, poorest and most latitudinally disadvantaged peoples in this global charnel house we have created. Canada's response to their plight is revealed in the Athabasca Death Sands and the conspiracy of silence by those who blatantly ignore the injunctions that, at the very least, the dirtiest, highest carbon fossil fuels must be left in the ground.

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.

So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. Let’s abandon the timidity and tokenism. Let’s stop bringing buckets of water when only fire engines will do.