Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Benjamin Israel, Jan Gorski, Nina Lothian, Chris Severson-Baker and Nikki Way highlight the reality that increased extraction from the tar sands is fundamentally incompatible with any attempt to meet reasonable greenhouse gas emission targets. And Jonathan Watts reports on new research from the UN Environmental Programme showing that the fossil fuel industry has caused far more carbon pollution than previously recognized.

- Alex Verman calls out Canada's front of friendliness covering up a pattern of aggressive exploitation by the mining industry:

Canada is continuing its practice of colonialism and primitive accumulation. What’s more, Canada is violating international laws around military occupation and around the rights of Indigenous people. Right now, as I write this, members of Wet’suwet’en nation are still resisting, facing mass arrest and state violence, to protect their lands from privatization at the barrel of a gun. But for Canada, this is business as usual. The siege on Wet’suwet’en is a microcosm of what makes Canada “Canada.” The logic of resource extraction, led by private companies and enforced by the state, is what motivates Canadian policy and justifies Canadian national identity. Canada is three mining companies in a trench coat, wearing a stupid hat and carrying a gun.

Scratch the surface, and that’s all that’s underneath it. Canada is fake. But the consequences are real.

- Samuel Alexander muses that capitalism can't be squared with an adequate response to our environmental crises. And Umair Haque worries that we're exhibiting the patterns of a society without a future.

- Finally, Primrose Riordan and Jamie Smith write about the control exerted by Australia's coal lobby even in the wake of its devastating wildfires. Bob Edwards points out the UK's massive subsidies to offshore drilling operators. Michele Bertelli reports on Italy's dumping of massive amounts of plastic waste in Malaysia. And Andrew Nikiforuk examines the identified environmental destruction to be expected from the Teck Frontier mine if it ever goes ahead.