BOOK RAISES ALARM OVER CLIMATE INACTION

Nobody in the mainstream media ever asks Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Finance Minister Bill Morneau if they’re perpetrating an unprecedented crime on future generations.

Even after the Liberal government announced its intention to pay $4.5 billion to Kinder Morgan for its Trans Mountain pipeline system, coverage focused on the financial aspects of the deal, not its moral component.

But what if Trudeau, Morneau, and politicians like them are committing a crime of immense proportions on the young and those yet to be born by promoting greater use of fossil fuels?

Would the mainstream media become an accessory to the crime by drastically underplaying this threat to humanity?

These are two issues raised in a new book, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival, by B.C. authors Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth.

“The global climate change emergency deserves and requires a rapid global emergency response,” Carter and Woodworth declare.

They also make a case that it would be criminally negligent to do otherwise, given the trajectory of carbon-dioxide emissions, which now exceed 410 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Carter, a retired MD, is founder of the Climate Emergency Institute and was an expert reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment in 2014. Woodworth is a retired B.C. government medical librarian. > CHARLIE SMITH