Today, youth, hopefully accompanied by people of all ages, will take the street across Canada and the world to demand concrete and immediate action on climate change. The necessity of this strike comes from the timid response, to say the least, of world leaders to the climate change crisis, one of the biggest environmental and socio-economic problems our species has ever faced. As states maintain the status quo of unrestrained economic growth powered by fossil fuels, young people, who will have to live with the potentially disastrous effect of climate change, have little choice but to take the street in the hope of saving our future. The situation is aptly summarised by 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg during her speech at the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”
Continue readingTag Archives: climate change
Canadians in Paris – Some Thoughts on the Paris Agreement
When the COP 21 (the 21st session of the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC) started this fall in Paris, I had little hope we would accomplish anything. In all honesty I spent more time thinking about what would happen if the world couldn’t agree on something concrete in Paris. However, the international community realised it was no longer possible to postpone or ignore the issue. We needed to act now, and to my great relief we did through the last minute adoption of the Paris Agreement and the accompanying COP 21 Decision.[1] It is of course not the best agreement, and on its own it is clearly not enough to stop catastrophic climate change. But it is a first step that binds the international community, and a much needed signal that we need to take climate change seriously. In this post I will first briefly summarize what the Paris Agreement entails. I will then offer some thoughts on what the Agreement means for Canada.
Bye Bye Miss Environmental Law
This past year brought a lot of change and sometime stagnation in environmental law. For someone who tries to wear the mantle of environmental law scholar I should have been stimulated or at least productive in my writing and my comments. And I must say I have been in a way through my more “official academic” writing. However my public silence except for the occasional twitter comment has a reason beside my overcharged schedule. I haven’t participated to the public debate mainly because I have nothing good to add and my mental health requires it. I try to stay optimistic as much as possible about our future, but one cannot ignore the facts: the dire situation we are in and our stagnation. There is little I can do or say that will change the will of the public, the government or the international community. Therefore, out of self-preservation, I stay silent in order not to plunge into pessimism and depressive thoughts. But I am a stubborn academic and I am opinionated; in the end expressing my anger and dissatisfaction is probably more constructive, if only for myself.
The International Rule of Law Part Deux: Good Faith, Kyoto and Canada
It has been a while since I wanted to write this post. As work and graduate applications kept my mind away from this blog, the situation that inspired this post evolved, evolved further, ended and restarted. In the end, I’m glad I waited as the developments made this topic much more interesting. That topic is the involvement of Canada in the Durban Conference negotiations and its Canadian climax: the repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol.[1]
After what can be considered many failed attempts to agree on the next step to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change[2] (UNFCCC) (basically the replacement of Kyoto after its end), the State Parties to the UNFCCC met in Durban, South Africa, at the 17th conference of the parties (COP17), hoping that some agreement could be reached over the pressing issue of climate change. The Copenhagen Conference resulted in what many considered a sad failure. However, it seemed that the international community had matured sufficiently to reach something concrete in Durban. Sadly, that statement does not apply to Canada, who seems to have regressed in it international maturity level since 2006.