climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet
Today Toronto350.org was at the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) to call attention to the need to shift investment away from fossil fuels. We can’t build a prosperous future with fuels that wreck the climate, and the billions we are putting into fossil fuel development now will prove wasted in the long term.
My photos from the event are on Flickr.
Graham Henry, one of the organizers of the fossil fuel divestment campaign, has an op-ed in the Toronto Star today: Universities should get out of the fossil fuel business
At UBC, faculty have spent the last week voting on whether or not to endorse fossil fuel divestment.
We should get the result today. A strong positive turn-out would be a help for the campaign at U of T.
First Nations, with our constitutionally protected aboriginal and treaty rights, are Canadians’ last best hope to protect the lands, waters, plants, and animals from complete destruction – which doesn’t just benefit our children, but the children of all Canadians.
Palmater, Pamela. “Why are we Idle No More?” in The Kino-nda-niimi Collective. The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement. Arbeiter Ring Publishing; Winnipeg. 2014. p. 40 (paperback)
To sum up, petroleum rents might well enable the oil states to buy the rest of the planet (or much of it) and to live on the rents of their accumulated capital.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer) 2014. p. 462 (hardcover)
An excellent panel about First Nations reconciliation in Canada tonight has left me wanting to read a whole lot of things.
To begin with, that includes The Winter We Danced, especially the chapter by Pamela Palmater.
I also need to read a lot more about the Tsilhqot’in ruling.
The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can’t be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage. And in the process, with many others fighting similar battles, we’ll help build the architecture for the world that comes next, the dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent. Eaarth represents the deepest of human failures. But we still must live on the world we’ve created – lightly, carefully, gracefully.
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But the greatest danger we face, climate change, is no accident. It’s what happens when everything goes the way it’s supposed to go. It’s not a function of bad technology, it’s a function of a bad business model: of the fact that Exxon Mobil and BP and Peabody Coal are allowed to use the atmosphere, free of charge, as an open sewer for the inevitable waste from their products. They’ll fight to the end to defend that business model, for it produces greater profits than any industry has ever known. We won’t match them dollar for dollar: To fight back, we need a different currency, our bodies and our spirit and our creativity. That’s what a movement looks like; let’s hope we can rally one in time to make a difference.
McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 2010. p. 212, 219 (softcover)
Yesterday, The Globe and Mail published an encouraging article on fossil fuel divestment:
As University of Toronto student Ben Donato-Woodger recently said, “It is a structural injustice against young people to have people who won’t be paying the price make judgments that will harm the next generation. Failing to divest would be a clear act of not caring about their students.”
The article also points out how: “In the past five years, the TSX with all its oil and gas constituents has significantly underperformed the TSX 60 excluding fossil companies” and “Over the past 10 years, the performance is almost identical with or without oil and gas in the index”.
[S]itting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society.
Quoted in: Solnit, Rebecca. “Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution“. The Guardian. 23 December 2014.
Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel – and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution“. The Guardian. 23 December 2014.