It’s not the first time we’ve noticed: when the forests are burning, the stars are great. Monday night’s sun was neon orange with a blurred outline. As of Tuesday morning, it was still unusually enlarged.
Posted at 1:41 am. Updated at 5:00 p.m.
On Monday in the café, it’s as if a color filter had been applied to the window: the outside looks artificially yellowed, thanks to the fine particles that reach us via the many routes of the fires.
The same fine particles are changing the view one can have of the world as far away as New York, where the Quebec smog appeared to color the sky on Monday evening. Again, the photos are great… Even if the atmosphere in the US Northeast is the most polluted it has been since 2019.
Some refer to these dangerously beautiful images as images from the end of the world. This is undoubtedly the sign of the end of the world: almost every summer for years we broke a heat record that had been set the summer before. The new world will be much less temperate. As the saying coined by “I don’t know who” goes, “Don’t say this summer is hot, say it’s the coolest of years to come…”
Are these wildfires an undeniable effect of climate change? Scientists keep saying it: It’s difficult to take an event and say: Here it is, it’s related to global warming… They say that extreme climate events will increase, the cause of global warming.
Is what is happening in Quebec “extreme”? As it appears. Two years ago, a Canadian heat record was set in Lytton, British Columbia: 49.6°C, in a “heat dome” environment. A few days later, the village of Lytton was destroyed by a gigantic forest fire. Hello symbol…
I know, I know: we have to “fight” climate change. The problem remains the lack of political will. Here and elsewhere. This is the short version.
The long version says that political will is just the dog’s tail. We are the dog. We who choose. We who give legitimacy to our rulers. The dog decides on which side to wag its tail. I mean that our priorities impose on those of the political parties competing for our votes…
The environment, the climate? Far, well, far behind tax cuts, access to health care, pothole filling and everything else that makes up the bulk of the voter buffet.
The environment, the climate? This has priority… Number 28.
If you doubt it, answer this question: Does this country, whether at the provincial or federal level, have a government that has been losing out on environmental and climate issues for 20 years?
Answer, and I would like to be contradicted: No … On the contrary.
Take the QAC. François Legault’s party conducted its election campaign with a program and campaign promises that showed no climate ambitions. No big deal, he won a supermajority of 90 MPs.
Let’s take Alberta. The Conservative candidate was elected prime minister and vowed to fight anything the federal government might push through as a greenhouse gas reduction measure.
Take the federal government. The Liberal Party of Canada poses as a climate advocate. His Environment Secretary Steven Guilbeault was the face of the fight against climate change for a generation, warning of the dangers of global warming and even climbing the CN Tower to hang a banner: CANADA AND BUSH CLIMATE KILLERS…
After becoming Minister, Steven Guilbeault approved the now-stalled Bay du Nord oil drilling project off the coast of Newfoundland.
PHOTO SEAN KILPATRICK, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Steven Guilbeault, Secretary of State for Environment and Climate Change
Upon his appointment as Minister, Steven Guilbeault agreed to extract one billion barrels of oil from the seabed. Hundreds of thousands of people could leave their tanks for a BIXI tomorrow morning, that won’t make up for those billion barrels of oil.
However, it’s a pretty simple equation: The more we dig to extract gas and oil from the ground, the less attractive clean energy becomes to investors and the longer it will take to catch on. Mr. Guilbeault knows this principle, he could talk about it for hours without even looking at his notes.
Mr Guilbeault might have preferred to resign rather than authorize that billion barrels, like a French environment minister who was fed up with devouring snakes did a few years ago. But Mr Guilbeault seems to be a big fan of snake tartare.
So we can blame politics. I do. We can hold individuals in positions of responsibility accountable. I do.
But we citizens still need to examine our conscience: if Mr Guilbeault was able to give the green light to a project that will add a billion barrels of oil to Canada’s carbon footprint, it is largely because there is no political price tag for such a decision.
The environment, the climate, it’s wonderful for the cover of the political marketing plan. But it doesn’t pay off politically. And that’s not the fault of Steven Guilbeault, nor of all the Environment Ministers of the past three decades, nor their Prime Ministers, but the fault of those who vote. Our fault.
As long as there is no political price for climate half-measures, we will continue to tackle the climate crisis with political half-measures.
Half-hearted measures have “paid off” for more than 30 years, since the Rio summit that imposed the climate on consciences and the public.
And I doubt that the smell of burning forests will change anything about this reality, nor will the dangerously beautiful images that emerge from it.