McKibben: Stop Swooning Over Trudeau - The Man Is A Disaster For The Planet

[hatrack]

EDIT

Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F).

But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.

Last month, speaking at a Houston petroleum industry gathering, he got a standing ovation from the oilmen for saying: “No country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Yes, 173bn barrels is indeed the estimate for recoverable oil in the tar sands. So let’s do some math. If Canada digs up that oil and sells it to people to burn, it will produce, according to the math whizzes at Oil Change International, 30% of the carbon necessary to take us past the 1.5C target that Canada helped set in Paris.

That is to say, Canada, which represents one half of 1% of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget. Trump is a creep and a danger and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/stop-swooning-justin-trudeau-man-disaster-planet

[GliderGuider]

1. ...says the man who has has never told the whole truth about climate change

Last edited Tue Apr 18, 2017, 05:41 PM - Edit history (1)

You earned the nickname "McFibben", Bill.

350 much?

Fuck you and your pompous, supercilious arrogance.

[NNadir]

2. I'm not accustomed to agreeing with you all the time, but here, I agree.

He's another one of those, "it's easy, but an electric car and a solar roof, and it will be wonderful!" kind of guys.

I don't know anything about Trudeau, but I have little use for McKibben.

Addressing climate change will not be easy; it is probably the most dire challenge humanity has ever faced as a whole. We may not be able to do anything, but we have to work at it, and McKibben's rhetoric is just silly from what I've seen of it.