Editor:
In response to Mayor Walt Cobb’s column, “Climate liability campaign is hypocrisy at its finest.”
I know I am not alone in applauding various legal groups, including West Coast Environmental Law, for holding the biggest contributors of climate change accountable.
To shed light on the big picture, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the world’s top leading scientists, has warned we have less than 12 years to keep the global temperature from rising 1.5C.
Otherwise we will see the most terrifying and catastrophic impacts of climate change.
According to NASA, the global temperature has already risen nearly one degree since the late 19th century and mostly within the last 35 years, causing shrinking ice sheets, a virtual massacre of the world’s coral reefs, glacial retreat, sea level rise, extreme weather events, ocean acidification, human suffering and displacement, and extreme forest fires, to name a few.
READ MORE: Governor says Washington will continue to reject Trans Mountain
To touch on that last one, in the last two years, forest fires in B.C. burnt close to 2.6 million hectares, many homes were lost, and cost B.C. taxpayers about a billion dollars in fire suppression efforts alone. Costs, as well as forest fires, will undoubtably increase.
According to Canada’s National Inventory, 2016 numbers show the energy sector emits 572 megatonnes of greenhouse gases, which equates to 81 per cent of our country’s total GHG emissions.
Unsustainable industries that are the biggest culprits of climate change apparently are unwilling to be accountable for such effects.
Thankfully others are ready to hold them responsible, for the benefit of all life, including those who currently feel dependent on fossil fuels due to the propaganda to which they and others have become prey.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, for example, offers relatively short-term employment, much of its dirty product will be shipped overseas (providing very little usable benefit to us), and its associated GHG emissions will exacerbate the climate emergency that needs critical attention.
Cobb was elected leader to work for the best interest of Williams Lake residents. He needs to lobby higher levels of government to shift from fossil fuels to sustainable and renewable energy industries — which can actually create long lasting, well-paid jobs that don’t have the social injustice and negative health and environmental issues associated with outdated and unsustainable practices that will very soon leave us all behind.
Erin Hitchcock
Miocene
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