Tag Archives: Greta Thunberg

Drunk on Fossil Fuel

Climate change

Stephen Lewis at the University of Manitoba

At the recent Climate First tour talk in Winnipeg recently, the last  speaker of the evening was the well known Stephen Lewis. Even though I have heard him speak a number of times, I felt sorry for him because he had to follow the earlier brilliant speakers. I need not have feared. Lewis, is a passionate speaker.

He pointed out that when David Suzuki had asked him to speak with him on this tour, Suzuki pointed out that both of them had reached an elderly age.  They were the “silverbacks” that could speak the unbridled truth. Neither of them has to suck up to anyone anymore. Neither is seeking grants or power. So they can speak truth to power.

Lewis started out by talking about Greta Thunberg who had inspired him. Recently, at the UN she had spoken passionately, with obvious great emotion, in a shaking voice and said to the people of power that were gathered there:

“How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I am one of the lucky ones. People are suffering and people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you to continue to look away and say that you are doing enough when the politics and solution needed are nowhere in sight? You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency but no matter how sad and angry I am I do not want to believe that because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, you would be evil and that I refuse to believe…If you chose to fail us we will never forgive you.”

Thunberg said she should be back at school rather than at the UN, but she had to come, because “old people were stealing her future”. How would you like to face your grandchild 30 years from now with such a charge? These old men are what Lewis referred to as “political ideologues lurking around drunk on fossil fuel.” Who wants to be one of those guys?

First, Lewis mocked the political leaders of the world that showed up at the Paris conference on Climate change in 2017 for their mouthing of self-serving homilies. He said that this led him to “incandescent up.” Lewis concluded, “These world leaders are criminally suicidal.”

Lewis contrasted those leaders with James Hansen from NASA who spoke at an international conference in Toronto in 1988 when he told people that he was 99% sure that climate change was caused by human activities.” And as Lewis concluded, “Had we taken him seriously in 1988 we would not now be speaking of self-immolation as we are doing.”

And that really is a pity. Had the world listened and acted 30 years ago, the problem would have been manageable. For 30 years corporate interests have obfuscated the issues and poisoned us with lies by deliberately selling us doubt. That this was done deliberately really is despicable. I really wonder how we allow this happen. Should this not be a chimer? Does this not show capitalism at its predatory worst? Partly as a result, for 30 years our political leaders have not helped us to act, and now we all have to pay the price. As Lewis said, “for 3 decades the governments of the world have betrayed human kind.” Now we have to transform completely the political world. Nothing else will be good enough. It is too late for easier measures.

The 2018 UN report has made things clear:  we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% before 2030 and 100% by 2050. And that won’t be easy. That is why we need radical action, such as the Green New Deal! At the Paris accord in 2017 the world’s leaders said they wanted to hold average temperature rise to 1.5ºC but could absolutely not accept more than a 2ºC rise. They recognized that such a rise would be intolerable. Yet little is being done.

Lewis also pointed out, like the other two speakers, that the destruction of the planet and climate change are intimately connected.

Lewis joined Thunberg in saying “given we are in an emergency as Parliament has acknowledged, all parties should put aside party in favor of the country, as they would do if we are at war.”

Lewis made a rousing finish by saying, “I am with Greta Thunberg against the club of old politicians against all the odds and defiantly filled with hope.” Again the crowd gave him a standing ovation. It was a great way to end the 3 talks and the crowd rose with thunderous applause.

Hard Truths: Climate Change and Indigenous People

Climate change, Indigenous Issues, New Attitude to Nature

 

The second speaker at the Climate First Tour rally in Winnipeg was new to me. Apparently she is a frequent commentator on TV. I guess I either don’t watch enough or watch the wrong programs. She was Dr. Dr. Pamela D. Palmater a Mi’kmaw citizen and member of the Eel River Bar First Nation in northern New Brunswick.

Today I learned that she was a passionate speaker and ardent advocate for those urging us to do something significant about climate change. She said that she was pleased to be sharing the stage today with 2 of Canada’s Warrior Grandfathers,” as she called David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis  Well, that might be true, but she fit right except that she is obviously much younger than her partners today. Later when I did a little research about her, I saw a picture of her with a shirt that read, “She Warrior.”

Today she told us, “I need to talk about hard truth.” The truth she wanted to convey was this: “Canada is killing its own people and the planet and we must do something to stop it.” I think she meant to refer to the conclusions of the recent Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. That report concluded that there were reasonable grounds for concluding that Canada was guilty of genocide against Indigenous women and girls (it did not actually say Canada was guilty because such a statement is legally significant and ought only to be made, it is thought, by a court of law). That is a hard truth. Many Canadians, including many of my friends resist that conclusion. It is hard for me to accept. Secondly, her comment refers to the fact that Canada is participating in the active destruction of human life and many other species on the planet by permitting greenhouse gas emissions to rise unchecked. This is another hard truth though not as difficult for many of us to accept. It is still a harsh indictment of Canadians, though we are far from the only ones facing such indictments.

Palmater also said that these are “the only two issues we should be talking about in this election are ecocide and genocide!” Everything else pales into insignificance. I accept that too.

Palmater also argued, “the pain of climate change is felt first in the north and first there, to indigenous people.” I think that is difficult to dispute as well. Even though indigenous people are the first and perhaps worst affected, this is rarely discussed when climate change is discussed. Just like the unfortunate fact that the people first affected by climate change, around the world, are often the ones who have done the least to cause climate change, it is true this climate injustice is seldom faced with any rigour or sincerity. Our attitude really can be summed up by the expression, ‘It sucks to be you.’ Hardly the most rational response.

According to Palmater, it is time we also faced the ugly truth that “We can’t live without the planet, but the planet can easily live without us.” As a consequence of this uncomfortable truth, we must face the fact that if we are facing a climate emergency, we must change our ways to save not just our descendants, but our species. If we think our species is worth saving.

To really face up to this challenge we have change our system of exploitation of the natural resources of the planet, and convert to working with nature, rather than against it. The colonizing system of which we are an integral part shapes transforms all human systems, and all human interactions with others. That system is so totalitarian it cannot be escaped.

We have to realize, Palmater said, “the planet is crying too.” I always think that if the planet could talk it would speak like the broadcaster in the film Network, “I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” This really should be the motto for the earth rather than the populists.

According to Palmater, we also have to realize that the issues of genocide and ecocide are closely. This is the same position taken by others such as Anthony Hall in his magisterial  2 volume history of the relationship between European invaders, Native Americans (in the broad sense) and the natural world in the western hemisphere. I will return to this subject later. As Palmater succinctly put it, “Damage to Indigenous Women and Girls is damage to the planet too.”

All of the three speakers tonight agreed that we are much past the time when we need to debate policies.” It is too late for that. We have to act and we have to act with speed. We can’t allow debate to slow us down though we have to think critically about what we are doing. We can’t plunge ahead blindly. I wish we had more time to debate policies, but we have been dithering around for two many decades. Partly those delays were caused by the energy sector’s very successful decades long policy of spreading doubt about the science. Now we have to live with the consequences of that delay. It sucks to be us!

The problem with emergencies is that they often require a quick action. They leave little time for reflection. You can’t mull your way through an emergency. Or as Palmater said, “Best intentions don’t matter anymore—only action.” At this stage I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with her hard truths. But she wasn’t finished delivering them. She was just starting. This is precisely what Greta Thunberg has been saying. We need action. We have to treat an emergency like it is an emergency. Canada has said this is an emergency but it has not acted like it. If it did it wouldn’t spend $4.5 billion on a pipeline. It would spend $4.5 billion or even more, on transitioning away from fossil fuels. As Palmater bluntly put it, “In the end we either do or we die.”