Climate change can’t be ignored
“Why announce carbon taxes now? New taxes? We’re in a pandemic!”
You can almost hear the tone of the response.
No, wait — you can hear it. Here’s Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s reaction: “I can’t understand for the life of me why anyone would want to put a burden on the backs of the hard-working people in this province. This carbon tax is going to be the worst thing you’ll ever see.”
But have a little pragmatism with your outrage.
Yes, we’re facing a global pandemic with a rising toll in Canada. Yes, that pandemic has massive economic implications for countries around the world, Canada included.
And a huge amount of the federal government’s attention and resources are being directed at trying to get the pandemic under control in this country.
But that doesn’t mean everything else just stops.
Climate change is happening, and you can’t simply ignore the issue.
Even the federal Conservatives seem to now understand the need for climate action, even if the current carbon tax method is not to their liking.
“Conservatives know that protecting our environment is critical. We agree with the goal of reaching net zero by 2030. Let’s protect our environment and natural spaces,” Conservative Leader Erin O’toole tweeted after the Liberals announced their plans to increase the carbon tax by $5 a tonne every year for the next eight years, while also increasing grants to families to offset rising costs caused by the tax. And it’s not only climate change. As much as we’d like things to stop, the pandemic doesn’t mean that everything else happening in the world is simply on hiatus.
As oceans advocacy group Oceana pointed out on Tuesday, pandemic or no pandemic, plastic waste is continuing to flow into the world’s oceans and fresh water — with
10 million kilograms of that ocean-clogging plastic coming from Amazon packing material (air pillows, bubble wrap and other plastic packaging).
In 2019, Amazon generated
21.3 million kilograms of plastic waste in Canada alone — and the pandemic certainly did nothing to stop or slow that, as online sales and shipping spiked in Covid-affected 2020.
We can try and get a handle on the plastics problem now — a problem being exacerbated by the immense growth in, and disposal of, plastic-based personal protective equipment like masks and gloves — or we can reap the whirlwind that plastic is creating in our ocean environments when it’s too late to do anything about it.
The same is true for climate change. Yes, the pandemic is the most serious issue facing governments right now.
But it’s not the only issue, and it’s not even the most serious issue facing the world stretching on out into the future.
If we focus on just one battle, we’ll succumb to a larger environmental threat.
“... the pandemic doesn’t mean that everything else happening in the world is simply on hiatus.”