Perth-Wellington NDP Federal and Provincial Riding Associations
OPINION
Perth-Wellington Riding Association welcomes input from our community. Opinions expressed on these pages are those of the author.
Invisible Enemies
By Mike Sullivan
I am a recent transplant to Stratford, and I love it. I was the NDP MP for York South – Weston (northwest Toronto) from 2011 to 2015, and a candidate in 2008 and 2015. Before 2011 I was a Union rep for CEP (now Unifor) and before that I worked for CBC Radio. After the 2015 election I completed a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University.
Speaking of the Environment, many of you may have heard of a phenomenon called ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change’. More simply, people accidentally changing the climate of the planet, mostly by burning oil, coal and natural gas (fossil fuels) stored in the earth’s crust for millions of years. That burning produces carbon dioxide (CO2), which in turn (along with other ‘greenhouse’ gases), traps the heat from the sun, warming the planet and changing the climate. We get more frequent extreme weather events, which in turn cause floods and other mayhem on our homes. Scientists measure the quantities of CO2 in the air and the oceans, and provide alarming reports every few months about how much worse things are and what we might expect to happen in the distant future if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
Trouble is, much like the coronavirus, the enemy is invisible. We cannot see CO2. Nor smell it, taste it, hear it or feel it. And the effects are slow and insidious. We hear about wildfires in California. We hear there are more frequent and more powerful storms. We see images of polar ice caps shrinking. But still, here in Stratford, we cannot see the pollution we emit from our cars, lawnmowers and homes. If we could, if CO2 were a shocking pink or muddy brown, or smelled of decay, we would know each time we started our internal combustion engines or fired up our furnace, that we were emitting a powerful poison for our planet.
Governments help us understand invisible enemies. In WW 2, our governments made us understand that the atrocities far away in Europe were a threat to us, and we acted together. Right now, governments are making us understand that a new invisible enemy, the coronavirus, is a threat that will kill many of the people it touches, and we see the results of this virus in nursing homes and hospitals. And (hopefully) we will act on the advice to stop the threat.
But CO2 is a threat which governments do not seem to be taking seriously, so why would we? Our governments have made promises to the world every year for the past 25 years, and we have never kept any of the promises. The promises are named after the city the UN meets in. We are on track to miss our Paris target, like we missed Copenhagen and Kyoto.
Very powerful non-governmental actors (Oil and Gas interests) make a lot of money selling us fossil fuels. They have convinced some governments that the country (read the economy) will be doomed if we stop extracting and selling fossil fuels. Economic theorists posit that by taxing fossil fuels, demand will drop naturally. But political parties wage entire election campaigns warning that our life will be ruined by such a tax. Even our present Prime Minister, who has introduced a small tax, does not seem serious about the threat. He famously told a roomful of Oil and Gas interests, in Houston, not to worry, because ‘No country would find 173 Billion Barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.’
I don’t have a magic bullet. I do know that if we keep electing governments who aren’t serious about the threat, Canadians won’t take the threat seriously.
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Authorized by the official agents of the Perth-Wellington Federal and Provincial NDP Riding Associations
