I wonder if Prime Minister Carney and Premiers Smith and Ford enjoy irony. Because they recently delivered up a big dish of it. About the same time they enthusiastically announced new pipelines, the forest fire season exploded. Those pipelines mean the export and burning of ever more fossil fuels, the very product that’s causing more frequent and more intense wildfires.
We are not alone in enjoying summer skies of smoky grey or dirty orange rather than the pristine blue of tourist posters. Fires and heat domes are rampant across Europe from the British Isles to the Iberian peninsula to France to Russia to Turkey.
Fires rage across the U.S., also, but that hasn’t prevented Republicans from blaming all the smoke on us. President Trump, right on cue, has threatened more tariffs. This from a president who vigorously promotes fossil fuels, actively opposes renewables and undermines fire research.
American Republicans are not about to accept responsibility for the enormous amount of greenhouse gas their nation has sent into the atmosphere. Or for all the oil they have bought from Fort McMurray. But then neither are we. Along with the Americans and the Australians, we are the major per-capita polluters in the industrial world.
The escalating destruction from forest fires should have made the results of our common irresponsibility painfully obvious. In 2016 Mother Nature sent a message directly to the heart of our fossil fuel folly. She burnt Fort McMurray, capital of the tar sands, to the ground, the costliest disaster in Canada’s history. The target could hardly have been more symbolic. Nonetheless, our political leadership chooses to ignore the message.
The PM certainly knows that we are in a crisis but banker Carney has yielded to politician Carney. He claims to be seeking energy sovereignty for Canada, something the country already has. His deal with Smith is less about ensuring enough energy for ourselves and more about about making a ton of money at the expense of global society. Smith is just doing what she always does, shilling for the oil industry. And Ford … well, you can’t expect to much.
Or maybe they all just like a good fire. In any case, Mother Nature is sending us yet another message as I write, a surging wildfire season, and our leaders respond by literally adding fuel to the fires.
To be fair, not all of our leaders manifest pyromania. In June, a growing alliance of nearly 300 mayors and councillors representing more than half of all Canadians hosted an urgent Climate Summit in Edmonton. The alliance, called Elbows Up for Climate, met to discuss how to protect their communities from fossil-fuelled disasters and economic shocks.
They issued a joint statement after their deliberations. The statement outlined the disasters their communities faced as a result of climate change, stating “Our local communities and economies are burning. We need federal leadership on climate, not backsliding.”
They emphasized the need to invest in projects to prevent the fires, floods, storms and droughts brought by climate change. They suggested a national energy grid powered by renewable energy, building two million zero-polluting non-market homes, mass heat pump and solar installations and a national clean transportation system. Ambitious proposals, but the prime minister wants big projects. Here they are. Nation building, not nation-burning projects. No irony here.