Politicians ignoring too many climate change factors
Re: An inconvenient truth.
The election silly season has started with both provincial and federal parties setting out their stall on various issues.
Our provincial government have given themselves a further 21 years of inactivity by passing their electric vehicle legislation. On the federal side we have the parties publishing their positions on climate change. The similarity of these policies is that with one face they imply that we should move away from the fossil fuel industry, whilst stating that we should build more refineries (sans pipelines) with their other one. Mind you, these are the politicians who, when young, embraced the new technology of the diesel-powered bus and destroyed the transportation corridors which had been planned and used by our forefathers. Building parking lots instead.
Looking at the 2017 emissions from Stats Can. we see that Canada produced 716 megatons of emissions. Combining the oil and gas (195) with transportation (174) for 51.5 per cent of the total means that 48.5 per cent or 347 megatons are being largely ignored by the politicos.
They have chanted that climate leaders don’t build pipelines. Achieving nothing. Whereas the E.U. have embraced pipelines and lower emission fuels, which has in part, according to the Sierra Club, allowed them to lower emissions by 23 per cent from the 1990 levels. They have also improved their rail transportation systems. Whereas, we are still producing 57.4 megatons from coal fired power stations. How many coals fired plants worldwide could have changed to natural gas had we taken the same attitude as the Europeans is of course debatable.
Unfortunately, the inconvenient truth is that climate change is a global problem. Too many politicos have used it as a means of getting elected whilst doing virtually nothing to solve the actual root of the problem. Had they done something constructive during the years since the first climate change conference in 1979, emissions would not have increased by nearly 82 per cent worldwide and we would not be in the predicament we now find ourselves in.
Ian Kimm
Duncan