George Monbiot is one of my heroes.
The breadth of clarity he brings to issues is quite refreshing. He has finally given in to pressure, thankfully, to start taking shots at our wonderful, glorious, selfless, polite and all-around loving country.
Canada is a climate criminal. Stephen Harper and the Conservative-Liberal coalition government are the don and mob standing guard for the tar sands, not thee, or thee, or thee, or anyone else who has to live on the planet.
It’s not brain surgery. We have all this dirty oil that takes insane amounts of energy to extract and process. It is environmentally devastating and requires oil to sell beyond a reasonably high price to justify the billions of dollars of investment to get at it. And peak oil’s supply crunch should provide that high oil price.
That sure sounds like the better mousetrap!
Except that we’re trying to get off oil as it is. And here sits Canada, poised to become an even greater pariah state than any of the OPEC nations or Axis of Evil members because we want to further aggravate climate breakdown by processing more oil so we can get rich. Screw everyone else, the ice caps, ice shelves, glaciers, sea level residents, the poor, etc.
We can finally be a world power, but not in a good way.
Bad Canada. Bad.
Almost a century and a half of reasonable progressiveness that makes us all think that on the whole, Canada is a swell chum. But when we look at how easy it is to suck all that gunk out of the prairies, embrace the cash and screw everyone else, maybe it’s time we started to think of our nation not so much as good, with some bad times [residential schools, cultural genocide, internment camps, disenfranchisement, supporting foreign evil-doers], but on the whole bad, with aberrations of niceness [peacekeeping, apologizing too much, Anne Murray].
So let’s make the bad man stop.
Stephen Harper’s email address is HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
His phone number in Ottawa is 1.613.992.4211 and at his constituency office, you can call him at 1.403.253.7990.
His Conservative-Liberal coalition co-leader is Michael Ignatieff, whose email address is IgnatM@parl.gc.ca
His phone number in Ottawa is 1.613.995.9364 and at his constituency office, you can call him at 1.416.251.5510.
You need to contact these criminals this week because the Copenhagen climate summit starts on the weekend and we can’t be the deal breaker. None of us could live with ourselves if we let it happen.
I suggest you email them both with explicit instructions to agree to the highest level of cooperation possible, not the minimum, and that we have to resist tar sands free lunch and leave it in the ground because there’s a catch: everyone pays, and we don’t want to be the ones delivering the bill.
And when you call their office, be nice to their staff because they are having to field the calls of thousands of angry Canadians.
Exercise your democracy and free speech, because everyone else’s hope for a better life for themselves and their descendants is depending on us not to ruin Copenhagen.
Then, on 12.12.09 find or start a vigil and gather to encourage world leaders to not destroy our descendants’ quality of life through greed, selfishness, fear or inaction. Time is running out.
December 4th, 2009 @ 7:01 am
[...] Our notion of progress requires growth and improvement. We measure this in expansion of GDP and trade. But we are so divorced from the ramifications of our lifestyle that despite all the canaries dying in coal mines, we still might screw up Copenhagen beginning this weekend and leave the meeting with a world lacking unity on averting climate breakdown. And Canada may end up being the spoiler. [...]