Declare an emergency, get business out of government, and let progressives organize our future so that we can have a future. The year 2030 is just four years away, and we have a lot of emissions to lose and a lot of changes that need to be made.
Fossil-fuel production and use must be reduced by half by 2030. And with fear and fatigue—and in an increasingly insecure world—nobody even wants to think about this sword over our heads, and what we owe our future generations. Economic actors were already backing away before Donald Trump’s corrupt negligence.
The tragedy Mark Carney warned about was stranded assets, financial loss, and maybe economic collapse—does he not understand the evil damage we are doing over the horizon to our only home and every future generation? How Canada, as a major producer, must be responsible? And the need for urgent, unthinkably radical action?
Waking up and transforming our economy must mean powering down, not biz lust to be an energy superpower, sufficiency not abundance, a managed decline, not an energy transition, and societal and economic evolution, not more extra-activist mega-projects.
Economic realities, post-COVID inflation, cost of living, and now U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA economic warfare are all fuelling a renewed neoliberal surge.
The DOGE initiative is an ideological wrecking ball set to destroy the U.S. government—arguably the most important government in the world— and threatening the health and security of the majority of Americans, along with multitudes globally.
In Canada the meager momentum of climate mitigation is stalling out. As the gloom of winter sets in it’s easy to be depressed, but in defeat there are seeds of future mitigation success if we wake up and get serious about what is at stake.
As things worsen and slip-sliding away gets impossible, real mitigation will eventually be considered and then—if the disaster chaos doesn’t make it impossible—implemented. But not bending the curve early enough will mean doing the right thing will happen far too late.
Climate change is accelerating and the effects are getting worse. We may have already crossed a threshold to Hothouse Earth. But in the real world, it’s still the economy, stupid.
Maybe we should quickly rethink our mitigation plans, and shift to how to actually rapidly reduce emissions—not just pretend.
In our lifetimes, we will come to know that we failed to effectively mitigate. We will be losing everything we care about, know and love. There will be regret that we didn’t act to stop the evil when it was still possible. Wake up.
We need a wartime-style emergency-coalition government with a strong, unified, all-on-the-same-page approach to fight climate change.
Watch what happens in Australia this summer, and then what happens in the Northern Hemisphere next year.
When it comes to mitigating climate change, no more kicking the can down the road unpunished.
