That giant sucking sound
THE EDITOR, Madam:
COP26, the climate change conference, has over 30,000 in Glasgow, Scotland, representing over 200 countries and their governments, businesses, NGOs, faith groups and many more. Much of the discussion is likely to be heated, and sceptics may be excused for wondering if it’s only more hot air being expelled while trying to curb the planet’s hot air. It’s an inconvenient truth that a freshly elected prime minister led his delegation to COP20 in Paris to proudly declare “Canada’s back !!”That was Justin’s Trudeau’s introduction to the world’s stage.
That was then and this is now, Canada’s promise to reduce greenhouse gases has failed, being the only G7 country with increased emissions since 2015. Canada is not alone in breaking Conference of the Parties (COP) pledges. At the Earth Summit held in Stockholm 49 years ago, some shrill delegates declared that the world would be killed by pollution in a few years. Similar dire warnings were echoed at the Rio Convention in 1992, and at every annual COP since the first one held in Berlin in 1995. COP3 produced the Kyoto Protocol; at COP16 it was the Copenhagen Accord; and from COP20 came the Paris Agreement.
Of course, climate change is everywhere, as everyone feels the intense wrath of Mother Nature with wild temperature fluctuations and increasing storms and precipitation.
Broken promises and bad decisions by politicians all around the globe are a part of daily life, causing problems such as the supply chain issues that presently has global trade tied up in knots. We should recall words uttered by Texas billionaire Ross Perot who was strongly opposed to the North America Free Trade Agreement. Perot joined the presidential race as an independent in 1992 with a trademark slogan of ‘That giant sucking sound’, meaning jobs from America and Canada going to Mexico in favour of low-cost labour. Politicians and business leaders everywhere all figured they were smarter than Mr Perot, as about that time millions of well-paid manufacturing jobs began disappearing from Western democracies over the Eastern horizon to new factories in Asia, where low-cost labour is in abundance, and where no politician really bothers about pollution nor that giant sucking sound.
BERNIE SMITH
Parksville, BC Canada