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Letter: Right intentions in addressing climate crisis

Letters to the editor
By Letters to the editor
February 18th, 2019

To The Editor:

The letter from Norm Yanke about our climate crisis is awful to read, sad and dismal in its implications — so much so that  I hesitate to comment. I want to weep at the depth of the insanity it endorses.

By his logic, no problem that is being made by other people’s desperate bad practices, requires us to do anything to remedy our own bad behavior — since ours is so much less severe.

Figure out the consequences of that logic, Yanke. You and your attitude are the problem, since you have no solutions. Let’s go on adding to global filth, since Africans do so much worse.

Sure, I know you care about other people’s poverty, I am sure you help that mom who is struggling. I am sure you have voted for government policy that reduces corporate capitalists’ excessive profit and takes from that wealth to re-distribute it more fairly. Your political attitudes have always revealed your care for the poor in other letters to the editor I have read from you over the years, your care for the environment, your care to make our economy more fair. Your reputation as a caring person is solid.

Sorry for the sarcasm (not) but such neanderthal reasoning as you reveal in your analogy is breath-taking in its ignorance and ill-will. You will of course agree with Justin T. and many Albertans that Canada must make the most of its trillions of barrels of tar-sands oil, for the sake of the wealth “we” will derive from it. I am as certain we must not pump it — leave it in the ground.

Canadian workers have benefited far less as a people from the bounty of our environment than a small minority of capitalists who “developed” our minerals, forests, fish, and furs over the centuries. Soon enough, “we” — our capitalist ruling class, I mean, – will make our water a “publicly-owned” resource we should put on “the global market” as a commodity for sale and “our” governments will collaborate in the “development”.

This is a conclusion one can easily reach from reading  history, a subject you clearly do not care to know. At least, Yanke, since you cannot offer solutions, keep silent when elected politicians show the right intentions in addressing the climate crisis. They deserve your respect, not your abuse.

Yours in dismay,

Charles Jeanes, Nelson, BC

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