It's a mad, mad, mad world
Has the time come for some of Canada's older political journalists to call it quits?
I haven’t posted anything on Substack for more than four months, mainly because I’ve been so busy with our Pancouver website. It offers me a welcome relief from the insanity of the political and media worlds, as well as an opportunity to write about good people whose stories would otherwise go untold.
This morning, I woke up with a bunch of random thoughts running through my mind. I’ve decided to spill 10 of them here.
Many in my generation need to give serious thought to stepping aside from covering politics. Collectively, they did a very poor job in the lead-up to the climate catastrophes unfolding all around us. Let’s see if the next generation can do better. I don’t think they can do any worse than the current crop of aging reporters and columnists in national and provincial press galleries when it comes to reporting on global heating. One of the only ones with a major outlet who did a decent job covering the climate was Jeffrey Simpson. He retired many years ago from the Globe and Mail. Justine Hunter of the Globe and Mail is another one who put in a solid effort with her climate reporting. They’re the exceptions.
One of the next-gen political reporters, Dan Fumano of the Vancouver Sun, has revealed that Mayor Ken Sim has hired a longtime right-wing spin doctor as his new director of communications. It will allow Mayor Ken to continue acting like a reasonable guy as his political flame thrower scorches anyone who raises concerns about City of Vancouver climate policies.
Politics is a sordid business. It attracts more than its share of lowlifes. Charlatans tout carbon capture, utilization, and storage as a solution to global heating. This enables them to justify continued fracking of natural gas so that it can be liquefied and sent on ships to Asia. Meanwhile, The Climate Book, compiled by Greta Thunberg and released this year, speaks the truth about CCUS, as it’s often called. The world’s biggest plant in Iceland, she writes, will capture about three seconds’ worth of each year’s carbon emissions, according to climate scientist Peter Kalmus’s calculations. “But there are still only twenty or so small carbon capture and storage plants running worldwide,” Thunberg adds, “some of which have been shown to actually emit more CO2 than they capture.”
Here’s another Thunberg quote that caught my attention: “Carbon capture and storage is a key part of the strategy to which we seem to have blindly entrusted the future living conditions for life on Earth as we know it. Another key part is to cut down trees, forests, crops and other living biological organisms and ship them around the world to be burned for energy while we capture the carbon dioxide in huge chimneys and somehow transport and bury that CO2 underground or in cavities underneath the ocean floor. This process—known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS—is, of course, extra-beneficial to policymakers, as the huge emissions from burning wood are excluded from national statistics.”
I’m tired of well-intentioned CBC journalists putting a happy face on climate solutions like carbon capture, utilization, and storage when we are in such deep trouble. These CBC journalists are nice people. They want to do the right thing. But they should really ask themselves if sugar-coating the magnitude of the problem is truly in the public interest.
Can the media and politicians please focus more attention on the relationship between having children in western industrialized countries and our climate woes? Look at this chart, which came from a 2017 paper, “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions”. It was published in Environmental Research Letters.
In the meantime, the National Post continues quoting Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg and University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick slamming efforts to achieve net-zero emissions. The national newspaper ignores Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson, who has actually figured out how to do it.
True climate heroes like University of Pennsylvania researcher Michael Mann, Greta Thunberg, and Vancouver’s own David Suzuki and Seth Klein urge us not to give up. They maintain that we all have a responsibility to keep trying to save humanity in the face of the political insanity. But I must confess that it’s hard to remain hopeful when the climate still merits so little media and political attention, even as communities are being burned to the ground. Does that make me a bad British Columbian?
I like writing about the arts because it is often a forum for telling the truth. In that spirit, I will complete an article this week on the Pancouver site about Mairy Beam’s new play, The Judge’s Daughter, which is a work of fiction inspired by a B.C. Supreme Court justice. Here’s the blurb on the Vancouver Fringe Festival website: “This play takes place over a few weeks in the Whistler ski cabins of Judge Kelly Saint Patrick, and her lawyer husband, James Brown. When their daughter, Erin, falls in love with an activist, tensions arise. A sudden death raises the morality of jailing anti-pipeline protesters. It’s time for judgement and the audience is the jury.” Tickets are available here.
Mairy’s play is being released as the cost of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project has surpassed $30 billion. Its annual upstream and downstream emissions will exceed the yearly total for the entire province of British Columbia, according to a 2014 study for the City of Vancouver by resource economist Mark Jaccard. I’m old enough to remember when the pipeline promoters were claiming that this project would cost $5.5 billion. The federal government bailed out the Texas-based energy giant, Kinder Morgan, many years ago, which means taxpayers are on the hook for these costs. How many homes could have been built for the $30 billion being spent on this pipeline?
I haven’t written about COVID-19 in a while, but I hope to find time to post something about a group called Do No Harm BC. Check out its Twitter account here.
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