Shadow Cabinet Green Party of Nova Scotia Climate Change Critic
I am a proud member of the Green Party of Nova Scotia (GPNS), a past provincial candidate, and part of the Anthony Edmund's GPNS Shadow Cabinet holding the Climate Change Portfolio
Hothouse Earth
We are entering a ‘hothouse Earth stage’. And according climate researcher Johan Rockström, “It may be very difficult or impossible to stop the whole row of dominoes from tumbling over. Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if ‘Hothouse Earth’ becomes the reality,”. As the evidence mounts to become irrefutable, climate change has ascended the stage with record heat waves, forest fires and glacial melting. But in the inimitable words of Al Jolson, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.This summer of global heat should give us all pause. The environmental noose tightening around our collective necks is really beginning to bite in earnest. Record setting temperatures, forest fires, deadly algae blooms, and torrential downpours tell us clearly, that our climate is destabilizing and we are on a deadly track for much worse if we do not stop our fossil fuel love affair. What is exacerbating the heat is Populist politics, championing a continued lack of action on global warming concerns. The new Conservative government in Ontario, Trump in the US, along with a host of other right wing demagogues, in conjunction with an almost somnambulant media, have pushed hard against any climate change mitigation. According to a new paper published August 6, 2018 in National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the possibility of a ‘Hothouse Earth would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene’. According to one of the authors, Johan Rockström, “It may be very difficult or impossible to stop the whole row of dominoes from tumbling over. Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if ‘Hothouse Earth’ becomes the reality,”
Where does this leave us? Right now, under pressure from the political right, the Trudeau government is caving even further than before. The inexplicably inadequate climate change mitigations of the past decade will be further watered down, a pipeline for the tar sands is becoming a reality, and the environment is being sacrificed on the alter of business. The media, from the CBC on downward, can scarcely bring up the topic of climate change without conflating it with the economy. Every climate change story brings out usual suspects cow-towing to the fossil-fueled, Neo-liberal chant of ‘jobs will be lost’ or ‘we need carbon based fuels to finance climate change mitigation’, instead of treating a global crisis as a global crisis screaming for significant action.
We are approaching what will likely be a new El Nino in the Pacific over the next year. And baby, if that happens, it is going to be ‘burn baby, burn!’ all over again. We have so little time, so few resources allocated to do it, and so much to do. Time to step forward and m ake a difference, change the narrative.
I got involved in politics quite a while back because I saw that the only way to affect change was through the political process. I had been a lifelong educator, lecturer, keynote speaker, author, learner, documentary film maker, and media personality. During my tenure in trying to bring about the absolutely necessary changes to the way we live our lives here in the Western World I saw a massive resistance by vested interests, to keep the business as usual. I came to the conclusion that as long as those who made the decisions were allowed to continue to make decisions based on vested interests and ignore the massive input from scientific studies, that nothing would change. The levers of power were in the hands of those who measured value in our our society from the rubric of money.