Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jonathan Watts interviews David Wallace-Wells about the existential threat posed by climate breakdown - and our gross failure to act in the face of a disaster of our own making:

The sense of speed comes across very strongly. It is as if people have got used to seeing the climate crisis as an old horror film with slow-lurching zombies but, in your version, the zombies are the much faster, scarier ones you see in modern horror films. You address the risks of heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, dying oceans, economic collapse and conflict, and suggest the climate problem driving them has super-accelerated beyond what many people think.

That is the thing that first opened my eyes to the change. When I learned the astonishing fact that more than half of the carbon we have emitted into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels was emitted in the past 25 years, that really shocked me. This means we have burned more fossil fuels since the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) than in all of the centuries before – so we have done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance. That is a horrifying fact. It also means we are engineering our own devastation practically in real time. How much will depend on how we act, how we behave, how we respond.

- And Marc Lee calls for British Columbia to take the lead in ensuring that climate action matches the severity of the crisis.

- Simon Dyer, Christopher Ragan and Blake Shaffer point out how last week's Supreme Court of Canada decision on priorities in bankruptcy does little to address the broader issue of unfunded environmental liabilities. And Andrew Nikiforuk highlights the crisis in oil and gas liabilities resulting from Alberta's past willingness to let corporations avoid paying to clean up the messes they've made.

- PressProgress offers a warning about the regressive anti-worker policies we should expect if Jason Kenney ever gets a chance to govern Alberta.

- And finally, Martin Patriquin writes that we can't expect right-wing politicians who rely on fake news to be part of the solution in trying to combat it.