This week, more than 246 fires are burning in BC and people are being evacuated from their homes.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the best scientists in the world, have also announced that our human-caused changes to our weather patterns, resulting in the heat and drought we are feeling here in BC (causing deaths), are locked in for 25 years. They ask that politicians and fossil fuel companies stop all expansion projects so future impacts can level out, so our children might have a chance of surviving.
Yet, our politicians act as though everything is fine. We just need another election (federal) to distract us from needed emergency action to address the catastrophic impacts happening right now. Our provincial leader and elected followers are also absent without leadership or regard for life, as they put $998 million of our tax dollars toward subsidies to fracking companies (with only $198 million in oil and gas royalties), set to increase the catastrophic flames in BC and other parts of the world.
Under premier John Horgan’s government, subsidies for fracking and LNG are up 79 per cent over the last year of former premier Christy Clark. He just keeps cutting old-growth forests and reducing our chances for carbon uptake from those trees, clean drinking water, and disregarding other forms of life in the forests, completely at our mercy.
Young people deserve more. We need to demand whatever government is in power to stop all subsidies to fossil fuels (including LNG) and move these funds into renewable energy, public transit and affordable housing. Canada has the largest carbon footprint in the world.
Personally, we need to reduce or stop travelling all over the planet, buy small if not all electric or hybrid cars, reduce our consumption and waste, and give our children and grandchildren and all the other species that are suffering and going extinct a chance. Wake up, Canada.
Sheila Harrington, Main Road
Lasqueti Island
