A green future for all.

Much is made in a recent piece in my local paper of the "number of fires" occurring in Canada this year being fewer, it seems, than in certain other years. To bolster the writer's claim that this is evidence wildfires are hardly harbingers of climate catastrophe, the historic size, duration, intensity, and earlier and later occurrence of these fires are not mentioned, a classic case of cherry-picking evidence.

Similarly, the piece's offering adaptations such as "flood-control measures" ignores the catastrophic future for cities situated on ocean shores as the Earth's seas rise due to the cryosphere melting and warming oceans expanding. Relocating cities of millions of people and their associated infrastructure inland is a task the monumentality of which is unimaginable.

Other adaptations the piece suggests, such as "air-conditioned community centres," ignore the fact that wet bulb temperatures (35°C and 100% humidity) are fatal to workers who labor outside. The economic consequences of temperatures of this magnitude will also be immense.

"[T]ackling problems as they come up", as the piece suggests, is reacting to symptoms as opposed to correcting the root cause, which as everyone knows in the case of climate change is burning fossil fuels. One must ask why the author of this piece is so dead-set against correcting this fatal flaw in our economic system.

The piece claims environmentalists wish to "dismantle our technological civilization," but environmentalists propose preserving our technological civilization by substituting wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and other sources of energy for fossil fuels to power civilization with green electricity.

Studies estimating "the cost of Net Zero by 2050 at $275 trillion globally" are claimed, further, to doom the possibility of a green transition, but such an enormous undertaking represents tremendous opportunity for worker productivity, economic growth, and prosperity for people everywhere around the world.

Finally, "a person gaining a deepening sense of peace and a willingness to help others, as well as protecting the climate and the planet," is presented as unrealistic nonsense, but these happen to be the core civilizational values that enabled human beings to survive for the four million years preceding finance capital's plunder of society's productive capacity.

Oops! "There is no such thing as society." I forgot.

I leave analysis of the rest of this socially hostile screed to others.