The provincial election is over. Once again, as in 2017, the first-past-the-post electoral system has offered up a fortuitous result.
Neither major party has firmly addressed the climate crisis; the Conservative Party thinks it’s no big deal, and the NDP can’t stop approving more and more fossil fuel extraction. Neither has received a majority.
The Green Party, for which addressing increasingly disruptive changes in Earth’s climate is a priority, has two elected members, and waits for the leaders of the Conservatives and NDP to present them with meaningful climate proposals.
The crisis is real, and we humans have created it. The very functions of the planet we live on are disturbed. These impacts will go far beyond our capacity to handle them successfully unless we address them today.
The human causes are clear: a culture of natural resource exploitation coupled with a misguided belief that nature exists for human use alone; unsustainable economic growth and development; and deforestation and massive changes in land use (such as destructive farming practices).
At least 3.3 billion persons’ daily lives are “highly vulnerable” to climate change. Today people are 15 times more likely to die from extreme weather events than a few decades ago.
Two years ago in Pakistan, climate-intensified monsoon rains flooded 75,000 square kilometres, displaced 33 million people, destroyed 897,014 houses and damaged another 1,391,467. Floodwaters drowned 1,164,270 livestock and washed out 13,115 kilometres of roads and 439 bridges. They caused 1,739 deaths, including 647 children, and an additional 12,867 persons were injured.
Ocean-bound island nations are being flooded out. Ocean flood events will increase 10-fold by 2050, even if greenhouse gas production declines.
Millions of fellow humans are becoming climate refugees.
But this is not just a faraway problem.
The heat dome in 2021 killed 619 people in BC, and a total of 1,400 people in Western Canada and the U.S. Lytton set an all-time high temperature record for Canada (49.6°C); the next day it burned to the ground. A billion marine animals were cooked to death.
A few months later torrential rainfall from “atmospheric rivers” tore out all B.C.’s major north-south highways, overnight causing empty shelves in Interior grocery stores and a wave of panic buying. Repairs to the damaged roads has cost well over $1 billion.
This past summer nearly 90 per cent of B.C.’s Interior struggled under drought or abnormally dry conditions. The summer before that, wildfires burned 2,840,000 hectares of forest (larger than Greece), displacing tens of thousands of citizens, and devastated the tourist industry.
Next year Canada will undergo an estimated $25 billion economic loss due to climate-related damages.
Ill-informed politicians fail to understand that ignoring the climate crisis endangers the human economy and the health of future generations.
Indigenous physician Dr. Shannon Waters summed the situation up: “Mother Earth needs to be recognized as foundational to the health of all beings because the ecosystem is our health system.”
Any party that doesn’t commit to decisive actions to address the climate crisis is a liability for all.
Warren Bell is a long-time family physician in Salmon Arm with a consuming interest and involvement in community and global affairs.
