Editor-in-Chief Linda Solomon Wood of the National Observer is calling on the Trudeau government to push forward with its $100 billion climate plan in her recent Opinion piece. Her message to Justin Trudeau is quite clear. “Canada’s government can and must boldly lead the way.”
Message to Justin Trudeau: The Climate Can’t Wait
Opinion: The Liberal government was expected to unveil an ambitious $100-billion green spending plan, plus major changes in environmental regulation in the upcoming throne speech, according to a Global News report. But now the government seems to have shelved that plan, over fears of being perceived as taking advantage of the pandemic to execute its climate agenda, according to information obtained by Global News.
The idea of this is infuriating and it’s wrong.
Global News sources say the government will still focus on a structural recovery that will include a “green” and “clean” recovery plan and industrial strategy. But that is not enough. Now is the time to act, and to act boldly to come out of the Covid-19 economic crisis with a smart green stimulus package. Read her full article here….
Impossible to Ignore
The climate catastrophes we’re witnessing daily in media coverage are just too big to ignore. We’re in “a season of climate-fueled disasters,” reports the New York Times. In the states of California, Oregon and Washington, more than 5 million acres have burned with months left in the normal fire season.
For decades, climate journalists focused on the science of climate change, which proves the planet is warming and forecasts the consequences. Now, to an ever increasing degree, being a climate reporter is about catastrophes, reported in real time. https://t.co/kaROgALHFu
— John Schwartz (@jswatz) September 17, 2020
And while the American West is burning up, the Gulf Coast is under siege during this hurricane season which NYT describes as “hyperactive”. Just days ago, as many as five major storms approaching coastal regions could be seen on radar. Hurricane Sally has already caused massive flooding along the Alabama-Florida coastline.
Sally makes landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama, as the slow-moving Category 2 hurricane batters the US coasthttps://t.co/PunWQLfsWD pic.twitter.com/vR3vDhfAVh
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) September 16, 2020
Elsewhere around the globe
“We are seeing the emergence of some signals that would have had almost no chance of happening without human-induced climate change.” — Sonia Seneviratne, climate scientist at Swiss University ETH Zurich
But it’s not just the U.S. that is under siege from fire and water. The Arctic is warming at twice the pace than the rest of the world. For the first time on record, portions of Siberia reached over 38 degrees Celsius (100° Fahrenheit) leading to the worst fire season ever.
In the Canadian Arctic, “the last fully intact ice shelf collapsed losing more than 40% of its area in just two days at the end of July,” reported Reuters. “Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year in particular has been 5 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average.”
In Europe, sweltering heat—with record day and night time highs—forced cities to declare red alerts.
Earlier this summer, carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa reached a new record high of 417.16 ppm in May. The May 2019 monthly average was 415 ppm up from 411 ppm in 2018. Rising GHGs are one of the primary causes of global heating.
Of course these climate-related events have long been predicted by climate scientists. “The planet, it’s screaming to us…When are we going to start listening?” asks Camilo Mora, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“It must be strange to be young in this world,” observes Solomon Wood in her OpEd. “I live in a household with three teenagers…Yet I still can’t wrap my mind around what it’s like to be them, coming of age during a pandemic, explosive wildfires, racially-based murders, rising extremism, polarization.”
Reflecting on what it must be like to be young in this world, Solomon Wood writes that “the scariest thing of all, [is] how normal it is beginning to seem.”
Related articles:
Why is the NDP failing to push the Liberals for climate action?
The Last Chance To Get Climate Policy Right
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
