Accomplish the Impossible or Experience the Unthinkable

It is abundantly clear that people and governments are not reacting appropriately to the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

In North America, Obama’s administration appears to be bowing to pressure and backtracking on climate action while Canada remains a moral renegade obstructing climate talks so it can continue to wallow in the filth of the Alberta Tar Sands (among other things).

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, gave a powerful fifteen minute speech about the climate crisis at the last Global Greens Conference.  Spend a very worthwhile fifteen minutes watching this video (give her a minute to switch gears from her intro).

excerpts…

“According to the World Energy Outlook, published by the International Energy Agency, if all governments maintain current commitments, by 2030 emissions will be 27% higher than in 2005…Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere will double over pre-Industrial Revolution levels at 550 ppm, making it inevitable that global average temperatures will increase by 3 degrees Celsius. And it only goes up from there — 3 degrees inevitably becomes 4, and 4 degrees triggers 5 degrees and so on in a run-away greenhouse effect.

We must avoid allowing levels to reach 550 ppm. To do this, according to the IEA, we must ensure that the year 2015 is the last year in which GHG emissions rise. They must peak and drop sharply from there.

The World Energy Outlook concluded with this warning: “The primary scarcity facing the planet is not natural resources or money, but time.”

…

We must accept the challenge of doing the impossible. The alternative is unthinkable.”

While we may hear about arctic permafrost melting and “methane time bombs”, less consideration is given to the climate change disasters already occurring in semi-arid places like Africa where people increasingly cannot grow food and do not have access to water and where wildlife is dying from thirst and starvation.

Those who hail from the global north have been carelessly killing off people and wildlife in the global south, one way or another either through lifestyle habits causing desertification, colonization or resource exploitation (these days by unchecked Canadian mining companies), for centuries. Nothing seems to change except our accelerated path to catastrophe along with the depth of our utter complacency and collusion.

Back to May’s speech in which she refers to the consensus statement of the first international scientific conference on climate change, held in 1988:

“Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war.”

Twenty-one years later and we haven’t done a thing except to make everything worse.