The Dangers of Climate Change

The latest estimates of carbon utilization show that we are over-budget regardless of what we do regarding new sources of fossil fuels.

We are still playing with fire!

A new study from Oil Change International reveals how we are doing so. Bill McKibben [comments on]: Trudeau can’t charm his way around the mathematics of climate change, reflecting on The Sky’s Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production (a 20160922 summary of a downloadable pdf article available as a link at this site).

The key findings:

• The potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal in the world’s currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 2°C of warming.
• The reserves in currently operating oil and gas fields alone, even with no coal, would take the world beyond 1.5°C.
• With the necessary decline in production over the coming decades to meet climate goals, clean energy can be scaled up at a corresponding pace, expanding the total number of energy jobs.

As such, McKibben points out the duplicity of the Canadian government in its current fossil fuel plans; it simply is not compatible with a healthy world, despite the rhetoric of the Paris goals.

And McKibben is not even as aggressive in his suggestions of “war-time mobilization” as is The Climate Mobilization of which I am an advocate.

What will it take for a wide-spread demand for effective responses? More super-storms? A national/international catastrophe? Likely Canada will not act until the USA acts.

At this time in history, we need states-persons, not politicians! States-persons look to what is needed in the future (not simply what is wanted); politicians look to the next election!