*The Great Barrier Reef and the Salish Sea have been thrown under the bus by Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau, Australia and Canada respectively, for more global heating subsidized fossil fuels.
What can be done to protect our only home from roasting to death?
It’s so hot that more starving Russian polar bears are entering into towns hundreds of miles away from the sea. On Monday, another heartbreaking report of a climate refugee with its paws caked in mud, emaciated, exhausted and frantically searching the streets of Norilsk, Russia, for food.
This is the world of the far north that our addiction to global heating fossil fuels has sentenced to perish the masterpiece cold-adapted apex predators, the polar bears. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.
The Arctic is now warming so quickly that it is 70 years ahead of the worst-case global heating projections. The thawing Arctic soils are bleeding uncontrollably. Mega amounts of potent heat trapping methane and laughing gases are launching the planet into runaway climate.
One second they declare a #ClimateEmergency and the next second they say yes to expand a pipeline.
This is shameful.
But of course this is not only in Canada, we can unfortunately see the same pattern everywhere…https://t.co/zVbWXnLBSQ— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) June 19, 2019
Also on Monday, the Canadian parliament issued a non-binding Climate Emergency motion. On Tuesday, Trudeau incongruently committed Canadian taxpayers to rebuilding the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX), an additional subsidy of $7.4B. The rebuilt TMX will guzzle 890,000 barrels a day of Alberta’s subsidized tar sands petroleum to the port of Vancouver, British Columbia.
TMX is a decrepit pipeline that Canada bought from Houston-based Kinder Morgan for $3.5B last year. Legendary conservationist and leader of the Australian resistance, Dr Bob Brown, explained it to me like this: “We need to make money out of killing the planet in order to save it!”
The corporate greed and insouciance of exposing children to the risk of fossil fuel poison is unconscionable and utterly unacceptable.”
The politics surrounding the TMX are perverse. It’s currently slated to run through the grounds of both Watson Elementary and Vedder Middle School. Originally, Kinder Morgan offered the Chilliwack School District $30,910 and a $7,700 signing bonus to agree to run an updated pipeline under the schoolyards. Upon refusal, Kinder Morgan sweetened the offer to $136,350 with a $34,000 signing bonus. That, too, was rebuffed.
The corporate greed and insouciance of exposing children to the risk of fossil fuel poison is unconscionable and utterly unacceptable.
That subsidized planet-cooking pipeline has just sentenced the marine life to an accelerated acidification of the Salish Sea and the extinction of the critically endangered South Resident orca pod. The 700 percent increase in super oil tanker propeller noise will deafen our brethren, the masterpiece orcas.
Meanwhile across the rainbow bridge in Australia, Morrison has greenlighted the Indian owned Adani Carmichael coalmine to break ground and fricassee the remaining 50 percent of one the Seven Natural Wonders of Earth, its Great Barrier Reef. In addition, that new subsidized Queensland coalmine will poisonEarth’s largest continental aquifer, The Great Artesian Basin.
In January, Australia recorded its hottest month ever. In the face of unrelenting heatwaves that choked and boiled to death millions of animals across the nation, why would the Prime Minister allow poisoning of the aquifer that feeds Queensland, New South Wales, Northern Territory and South Australia, or, 22 percent of the Australian landscape?
Furthermore, both the Adani coalmine and the TMX are illegitimate because they have violated the Original Peoples rights as caretakers, opposing thedestruction of their Mother Earth.
Neither of these horrible carbon burning projects would occur without massive government subsidies benefiting unscrupulous profiteering bankers.
It’s high time for all of us to stand up and protect the Gen Zs, the animals, the fresh water, the oxygen, the coral reefs, the ancient forests, the wetlands, the mangroves, the sea grasses, the oceans and the soils that feed almost 8 billion earthlings.
Join non-violent movements like Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future, School Strike 4Climate, Sunrise Movement, 350.org, Sea Shepherd, David SuzukiFoundation and the Bob Brown Foundation.
The science is overwhelmingly lucid. Over the next decade, we must decelerate fossil fuel emissions quickly to a zero-combustion global economy, or, our only home will become unlivable. We need a revolution!
#Resist
#ConsumeLess
#NoMorePipelines
#NoMoreCoalmines
#GoVegan
#FridaysForFuture
#SchoolStrike4Climate
#WaterIsSacred
#ClimateBreakdown
#ZeroCombustionEconomy
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Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning broadcaster, distinguished conservation biologist and author.
Dr Reese Halter’s latest book is
Love! Nature
Tweet @RelentlessReese
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