G7 And Canada Sign A Climate Change Agreement That Is Beyond A Joke. It Is Disastorous For Future Generations

A Commentary from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

There was a time when we humans seemed unafraid to give ourselves very tight deadlines to accomplish what seemed, at the time, to be some very ambitious, if not almost impossible, challenges.

We placed these challenges before us, the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy once stated, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Indeed, Kennedy made that statement in the early 1960s when he announced that his country would put a man on the moon before the end of that decade and bring him back safely. And with all of the will and resources of government and the scientific community put forward, it was done.

An earlier U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, directed General Motors and other auto manufacturers in his country to retool their plants, within a matter of months, to produce tanks, bombers and other military vehicles necessary to combat the Nazi threat and attacks by a then hostile ‘Japanese Empire’ following the outbreak of the Second World War. And that too was done.

One could go on with example after example of how we seemed once capable of accomplishing some very spectacular things over a very short period of time. The Empire State building – to this day, one of the most iconic skyscrapers of all time – was built from ground to top in the late 1920s, with construction technology primitive to what we have to day – in 13 months.

A NASA photo of our earth taken from the moon in the 1960s when there still seemed some hope it would sustain us for at least a few more centuries, if not more.

These days, we can’t even rebuild a simple two-lane bridge on DeCew Road, crossing a channel of the Lake Gibson system in the Niagara community of Thorold, in that length of time – and I know that the people who were waiting and waiting and waiting, and were wondering why such a relatively small project took longer than the building of the Peace Bridge between Fort Erie and Buffalo in the 1920s.

This all leads me up to this total joke and travesty of an agreement leaders of the G7, including Canada, the U.S. Germany, Italy, Japan, Great Britain and France, signed this June 8^th, 2015 to end the use of gas, oil and other fossil fuels contributing to a breakdown of our earth’s climate by the end of the 21^st century.

By the end of the 21^st century?!!!!!

We will be lucky if there is enough ice left in Greenland to fill someone’s camping cooler by then. By then, the way we are going, the severe weather conditions we are already facing around droughts, flooding, damaging winds, etc., will be a state of life for anyone who is still alive to endure them. Half the lower lying coastal communities on this continent will be covered in water. 

So the G7 leaders sign an agreement this June 8^th, calling for an end to fossil (carbon) fuel use by the end of the 21^st century!

And, of course, even Canada’s Prime Minister Tar Sands, Stephen Harper, signs it. And why shouldn’t he. If the end of the century is the target, he and his rancid government are not going to be around to he and his Tar Sands government can just go on doing what it has been doing for the past decade on moving to energy that is not about emitting carbon to the atmosphere – almost nothing.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosted the G7 summit, reportedly want an agreement that called for a full fossil fuel phase-out by 2050, which might have gone a lot more way to saying; ‘Hey, we better get started on phasing in more non-fossil fuel energy sources like wind and solar now. But she apparently also wanted to come out of the summit with some agreement on the topic from all seven, and Prime Minister Tar Sands and the leader of Japan were not interested in a 2050 deadline.

So we have one that goes to the end of this century when a majority of climate scientists around the world say those living on the planet will be living a hellish life around severe weather conditions, catastrophic drop offs in food supplies, etc. well befre then.

But who cares. Harper can come back home now and say during the weeks and days leading up to this October’s federal election in Canada that he signed this joke of an agreement. And for many of his hardcore, base followers, especially those with interests in the tar sands, petro industry, that will be more than enough.

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