Trudeau's "progressive" farcical climate change hypocrisy continues

It has been a fairly depressing and disturbing couple of weeks in the increasingly bleak news of how capitalism and corporations are destroying the planet.

Early in October the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that "warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people."

To call the report alarming would not be being alarmist enough.

As David Wallace-Wells noted:

Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”

Wallace-Wells went on to say "What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get."

On the heels of this comes news that the world's oceans are "warming much faster than previously thought...suggesting that global climate goals may be even harder to reach." Apparently:

This may have some grave implications for global efforts to meet the climate targets outlined under the Paris Agreement. Currently, world nations are striving to keep global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels, or a more ambitious 1.5 C if possible. Just last month, the IPCC released a much-anticipated report on the 1.5 C threshold, concluding that meeting the target will require an “unprecedented” effort from world leaders and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In Brazil the election of actual fascist Jair Bolsonaro has "terrified" many of the world's environmental scientists given his stridently pro-development views towards the Amazon rain forests, seen as the "lungs of the planet".
 
Here in Canada we learned that "Caribou, the iconic herbivore that graces the back of the Canadian quarter, is on a pathway to extinction in every region where it is currently found, says one of the country’s foremost experts on the species."

Notably:

Experts say a big part of the problem in Canada has been government reluctance to come to grips with the plight of the caribou at a scale that goes beyond single resource projects and their local impact on individual herds.
For example, last December, WWF Canada wrote to the Trudeau government, which opposes U.S. development on the Alaskan calving grounds of the Porcupine River caribou herd, which is part of the barren-ground unit, to ask why it has not moved to prevent mining projects on calving ground in Nunavut. The government has yet to respond.

This should not come as a surprise at all. Trudeau -- along with other Canadian "progressives" like Rachel Notley and John Horgan -- likes to talk a good game on the environment and climate change when it comes to admitting it is real or criticizing others for their inaction related to it, all while actually doing the opposite of what is required to put the breaks on humanity's headlong dash towards extinction.

Nowhere is the sham progressive "commitment" to doing anything to forestall the apocalypse more apparent than when it comes to the global human environmental catastrophe that is the Alberta tar sands and the now nationalized Kinder Morgan pipeline project.

Even setting aside its consequences for global warming we found out this week that:

Cleaning up the Alberta oilpatch could cost an estimated $260 billion, internal regulatory documents warn.
The staggering financial liabilities for the energy industry’s mining waste and graveyard of spent facilities were spelled out by a high-ranking official of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) in a presentation to a private audience in Calgary in February.

That is a lot of liability in defense of what are by definition dead end jobs extracting a finite resource in one province in the country.

But that is not the only liability that the public will likely end up on the hook for. Trudeau, of course, laid out $4.5 billion to buy the pipeline to ensure the project might proceed. Meanwhile, "the federal government's own "National Assessment of First Nations Water and Wastewater Systems" says $4.7 billion is needed, including an immediate infusion of $1.2 billion to deal with high-risk systems" in order to ensure clean drinking water on reserves.

When it came to this fundamental human rights issue the government has only been willing to pony up $1.8 billion over 5 years.

As Brent Patterson said on Rabble:

Here, we should look at the Trudeau government not flinching at spending $4.5 billion upfront to purchase the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline -- while acknowledging that the pipeline itself threatens the aquifer needed by the C'eletkwmx people in British Columbia for their drinking water.
As such, the Trudeau government made a conscious and deliberate decision that at the very least prioritizes a tar sands pipeline, not a human right, over clean drinking water for Indigenous peoples, which is a human right.
Any suggestion that the federal government does not have the money to ensure clean drinking water falls flat after it rushed to bail out Houston-based transnational Kinder Morgan, especially given building the pipeline could cost the government $15 to 20 billion.

In spite of all this Trudeau began November by assuring the Vancouver Board of Trade that Kinder Morgan will happen despite the "frustrating" setback of losing before the Federal Court of Appeal which temporarily blocked it due to a lack of proper consultation with First Nations and a half-assed environmental review process.

Trudeau even sought to frame the court defeat as a long term plus as it will create a "greater degree of clarity for businesses" in figuring out how they can get their climate change accelerating projects approved.

There is nothing new about this incredible hypocrisy and climate inaction -- other than a lot of talk -- from Trudeau, Notley and their ilk. What is truly dangerous about this destructive non-approach is not simply its implications for the environment. It is also that the right is catching on. Politicians like Doug Ford and Andrew Scheer are realizing that they too can admit that climate change is real, a serious problem, and that it needs to be dealt with...all while backing industries, policies and pipelines that are certain to make the situation much worse.

Neat trick that. 

See also: The staggering hypocrisy of 'progressive' politicians in Canada will come back to haunt

See also: Oil industry hack Rachel Notley's hypocritical concern for the "rule of law" now fully exposed

See also: John Horgan lets the facade drop with cynical, ugly comments after green-lighting Site C