Green government would cancel pipeline projects, move to renewable energy
Speaking at an event in Montreal, May says the Green plan would
modernize Canada’s electricity grid to supply renewable energy across
the country.
Tag Archives: climate crisis
Greta Thunberg: ‘The People in Power Refuse to Listen… We Will Make Them Hear Us’ | The Tyee
“What’s the point in educating ourselves and learning the facts when the people in power refuse to listen, to be educated, and pay attention to the facts,” I heard Greta Thunberg tell a crowd in New York’s Battery Park that organizers of the Global Climate Strikes at one point estimated at 250,000 people. “Everywhere I have been the situation is more or less the same, the people in power who write beautiful words are the same, the number of politicians and celebrities who want to take selfies are the same, and the promises are the same and the lies are the same.”
Trudeau could easily fit the cynical description of politicians offered by Thunberg. In June, the Liberal government passed a motion declaring that we are in a climate emergency, deeming the warming that’s affecting Canada two times as fast as the rest of the world a “real and urgent crisis.” It then approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil sands pipeline the very next day.
Nearby, a girl who couldn’t have been older than 10 marched solemnly with a sign that read: “We are all literally going to fucking die.”
Three Takeaways for Canada from the UN Climate Emergency Meeting | The Tyee
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was nowhere to be seen among the dozens of world leaders and executives who on Monday made speeches to the United Nations about solving the climate emergency.
Technically that’s because Canada is in the midst of a federal election. But it’s unclear if the Trudeau government, which is a long way from meeting the climate targets it agreed to at the 2015 Paris talks, would have otherwise met the UN’s criteria. More than 50 countries were reportedly rejected from addressing the Climate Action Summit because the plans they presented weren’t ambitious enough.
Even with this criteria, however, the consensus among experts and observers was that world leaders failed to make commitments strong enough to achieve the 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists calculate is necessary to give us a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Election Wrap: International Poll Flags Climate as Canadians’ Top Concern – The Energy Mix
[Neither side of that argument factors in the recent report that Canada’s energy efficiency industries already employ 436,000 people, twice as many as oil and gas.—Ed.]
36 Countries Expected to Announce New Climate Plans as UN Climate Summit Convenes – The Energy Mix
“This is the world we live in: Punishing heat waves, catastrophic floods, huge fires, and climate conditions so uncertain that children took to the streets en masse in global protests to demand action,” writes reporter Somini Sengupta. “But this is also the world we live in: A pantheon of world leaders who have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions, are hostile to protests, or use climate science denial to score political points.”
The “stark contrast comes at a time when governments face a challenge of a kind they have not seen since the beginning of the industrial era,” Sengupta adds. “In order to avert the worst effects of climate change, they must rebuild the engine of the global economy—to quickly get out of fossil fuels, the energy source that the system is based upon—because they failed to take steps decades ago when scientists warned they should.”