BC NDP MLA Selina Robinson. Photo courtesy Province of British Columbia/Flickr. “They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it. You know, there were several hundred thousand people but other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have
Continue readingAuthor: Nick Gottlieb
Canadian Dimension: Canada has gone from complicity through silence to active participation in genocide
Guided-missile destroyers in the Gulf of Aden. Photo courtesy the United States Department of Defense. On March 20, 2003, US President George W. Bush addressed the world: “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Stop the genocide in Gaza
A Palestinian flag is seen on the rubble of a building destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City’s Rimal district, October 10, 2023. Photo courtesy AFP. I work, write, and do politics around climate change and ecological collapse every day. I firmly believe that a small handful of people are
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Ecuador just showed the world what it means to take climate change seriously
In August, millions of Ecuadorians voted in a landmark referendum to halt oil exploration and development in the Yasuní National Park in the Amazon rainforest, one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth. Signs urging the public to vote “Sí al Yasuni” or “yes” appeared across the country. Photo courtesy
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The climate emergency is a crisis of capitalism
On May 17 2023, the day this photograph was taken, the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) from the Government of Canada measured 10+, the highest rating possible. Photo by Dwayne Reilander/Wikimedia Commons. If you’re reading this, it’s almost guaranteed that you are experiencing the season we used to call “summer”
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada should embrace the degrowth imperative
Wind turbines in East Pubnico, Nova Scotia. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Something big just happened in Europe, but you probably didn’t hear about it. Major media outlets refused to report on it. It wasn’t a protest, or an act of climate sabotage, or any of the things you might normally
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The terrifying math of the incoming El Niño
Tree ridge in flames during the 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, California. Photo courtesy Peter Buschmann/United States Forest Service/Wikimedia Commons. One and a half degrees is dead. The world will blow past that milestone in the next year. At least, that’s what climate scientist
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Four-day work week: Reformist or revolutionary?
Office workers in the early 1980s. Photo courtesy the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Flickr. The British Columbia Green Party is the closest thing to a left-wing political party (at least, with any seats) we’ve got in Canada. So I did a double-take when I saw that the World Economic
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: BC’s logging industry is using mill closures as a political tool in its fight against regulation
Timber harvesting in British Columbia. Photo from iStock. Two narratives about BC’s disappearing forests and logging industry have made national news over the last few months. On the one hand, headlines report that the province’s NDP government, under the new leadership of David Eby, is finally getting serious about protecting
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: New book shows why Indigenous leadership must be at the heart of Canada’s just transition
The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman and Bronwen Tucker Between the Lines, 2023 When new oil and gas projects are approved in Canada, whether it’s an individual drill pad, a sour gas line, or a massive
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The lesson we should have learned from ‘Silent Spring’
Fertilizing, May 1972. Photo by Charles O’Rear from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project/US National Archives/Flickr. Last year marked six decades since the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring, the book often credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement (at least in North America). One impactful line from
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada and Saudi Arabia are partners in climate inaction
Photo by Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an investigation into Saudi Arabia’s comprehensive campaign to perpetuate the global fossil fuel economy. It was a grim look at how one of the world’s largest producers of oil is using a diversity of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Disruptive action on the climate deserves our support
Anti-oil protesters throw tomato soup on van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Screenshot from Twitter. Earlier this month, a pair of young activists with a group called Just Stop Oil threw soup on a Van Gogh painting at a gallery in London. I am tempted to not even clarify this, but the painting
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: New documents reveal callousness of fossil fuel execs—and Canada’s complicity
“The Shell Skull” by Andreas Metz. Photo by Andreas Metz/Flickr. The United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform just held the third hearing of its investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s multi-decade campaign to block climate action by funding misinformation and misrepresenting their primary business operations. In advance of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada’s home energy retrofit funding woefully inadequate
Suburbs in Toronto. Photo by Jan Buchholtz. Retrofitting existing buildings is one of the only tools for mitigating climate change that virtually everyone can agree on. There are large numbers of poorly insulated buildings using fossil fuels for water and space heating. Abandoning those buildings would be a colossal waste,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: What Canada’s media gets wrong about the fossil fuel industry
Photo by Matt Jiggins/Flickr Last week, the Liberal government took the first steps toward actualizing the emissions cap they promised during the last election for the oil and gas sector. In response, the Globe and Mail—as well as many of Canada’s other major media outlets—published a flurry of articles culminating
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Extreme heat is all of our problem
A bright orange sky in Vancouver. Photo from Shutterstock. From June 25 to July 1, 2021, temperatures soared past 40 degrees in BC, setting records all over the province. The heat wave broke Canada’s all-time temperature record three days in a row, finally settling at 49.6C in the village of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The false hope of carbon capture and storage
A carbon capture plant built by Climateworks in Hinwil, Switzerland. Photo by Adam Sébire/Keystone/Redux. Carbon Engineering, the carbon removal start-up based in Squamish, BC’s “Outdoor Recreation Capital,” recently announced an exciting new use of their direct air capture (DAC) technology by one of their partners in the US. The partner,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The climate progress narrative is the newest tactic of global warming denialists
There’s no evidence that the vast majority of countries, particularly the world’s largest emitters, are on track to meet their emissions reductions commitments. So why are we pretending otherwise? Photo from Shutterstock. According to a paper published by the journal Nature at the beginning of this month, just a few
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How a global ‘climate non-cooperation campaign’ could strike at the heart of fossil capital
Demonstration during the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, in Copenhagen, Denmark, December 17, 2009. Photo by Kris Krüg/Flickr. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February, painted a stark portrait of worsening global warming and the concomitant
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