Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Progressives vs Global Warming

Up until 2014, progressives (the people who recognized the danger for what it was) had made little headway against the factors causing global warming. There'd been scattered protests, there'd been books, media campaigns, blogs, petitions.

But it was in 2015, six months after the IPCC's Fifth Assessment, which detailed how global warming had arrived, its consequences would be horrendous, and it was then self-sustaining; that progressives really got it in gear.

2015 in Canada saw a series of rallies, with literally HUNDREDS of people converging on downtowns in major cities across the country on July 1st, demanding action. These rallies were capped-off by one big rally in Ottawa on July 31st, right before the election campaigning for the scheduled October 15th election began. 20,000 people told the politicians from all the parties that they were keeping an eye on them and that their statistically insignificant numbers would be voting for the party with the best position in confronting human-caused climate change.

After a bitter campaign, marred by widespread, blatant harpercon fraud, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau formed a minority government. stephen harper hanged himself in the bedroom closet on Sussex Drive, being found hanging there naked by his wife who read the post-it note on his chest which said "Fuck you! I always wanted to die this way."

(The Conservative Party of Canada met for a leadership convention in February, 2016, where it was revealed, to their great surprise since they'd been believing their own fraudulent polls and election results, how unpopular they were. The gathering was attacked by a mob of Calgarians ... an indication of the hatred for them around the country ... and Pierre Poilievre, Julian Fantino and Jason Kenny required hospitalization from being assaulted with baseball bats. Peter MacKay had lost his seat and had dedicated himself to dog-breeding, which involved himself and unnatural acts with dogs in the neighbourhood.)

Elizabeth May's tireless campaigning raised the Green Party's share of the vote by 2% which translated into her keeping her seat and Bruce Hyer losing his to the NDP.

Thomas Mulcair kept the leadership even though his strategy of impersonating the Liberal Party of Canada after the Liberal Party of Canada's mewling, hypocritical neo-liberal bullshit had alienated moderate Canadians everywhere, saw the party fall from Official Opposition to 21 seats. Freed from any threat of having his words affect policy, Mulcair's NDP soon affected a greater devotion to social justice and environmentalism.

It didn't matter because Justin Trudeau teamed-up with the rump of Conservatives to continue subsidizing the Tar Sands, to build bitumen pipelines across the wilderness and to build super-tanker ports off the British Columbia coastline.

Progressives realized they couldn't depend upon the politicians anymore dammit. A series of creative protests by small bands of environmentalists kept the pressure on. (Try to imagine the "pressure" of a banner hanging from a public building saying "Action NOW on Climate Change! Stop the Tar-Sands!")

Direct Action in British Columbia slowed down the construction of the bitumen pipeline to the sea, until the RCMP staged an incident where provocateurs threw a rock past the police line and this "justified" tear-gassing and brutally beating the demonstrators present, with First Nations' activists being singled-out for extremely gruesome treatment.

Justin Trudeau furrowed his brow and bit his lower lip (in a stunningly fetching expression) and opined about how troubled he was from violence originating from any side and that he hoped things would be peaceful from now on.

Peaceful it was, since civil liberties were suspended in the area (making it the third "Charter-Free Zone" since the signing into law of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms). First Nations and Environmentalist organizations which had been infiltrated or spied-upon for years up to this point, were raided and their members arrested and held without charges as accessories to commit terror or some-such bullshit.

Literally THOUSANDS of activists (in a country of over THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE) protested ineffectually over this trampling of citizens' rights.

By this point, worldwide floods and droughts (plus financial market speculations) were causing the prices of basic foodstuffs to shoot through the roof. A campaign, ineptly led by Ezra Levant, was started to convince poor Canadians that eco-anarchists who impeded the refining of bitumen and who advocated expensive subsidies for renewable energy were behind the price rises. It didn't matter that Ezra Levant was so dreadfully incompetent with this portfolio. Our oligarchic media gave him and his colleagues ample air-time to spew their bullshit and grassroots political hacks spread the word on cyber-space and social media.

Ignorant people didn't know what to believe, especially given the distractions of world-wide explosions of TERRORISM around the world (which was actually poor people in South America, Africa and Asia rioting for food hand-outs so that they and their families wouldn't starve to death).

Justin Trudeau convinced himself and self-deluding Liberals that the only reasonable course of action was to take money from other social programs to pay for food rations for the poorest. Taxing rich people and corporations to obtain revenue was seen as "irresponsible."

Ungrateful rich people across Canada bitched that their taxes were too high as they "invested" in fraud-based derivatives and pushed up real-estate prices in Toronto and Vancouver, until a financial scandal somewhere else in the world sparked another world-wide market crash. Trudeau then decided that the only responsible thing to do was to conduct a $20 billion bail-out of Canadian investors, so as not to suffer lasting economic harm. The GST was raised along with EI premiums, in order to pay for this.

(The NDP was prepared to vote against this, fulminating on the injustice of it all, until the Conservative Party decided to fuck with them. Pretending that they gave a shit about the opinions of their middle and working-class chump supporters, the Conservatives voted against the bail-out, forcing Mulcair to have to whip his caucus into supporting what he'd condemned only days earlier. The bail-out passed.)

At this point, the last polar bear died, prompting Ezra Levant to say that the Arctic was safer than ever. The perma-frost melted in an explosion of methane into the atmosphere.

Activists were split. Some advocated a concerted take-over of the Liberal or NDP parties. Others joined the Green Party which would see it's seat numbers soar from 1 to 6 in the 2019 election. Many "radical" activists scorned the neo-liberal sham of electoral politics and insisted that their internet activism and occasional rallies were the only game in town. The remnant that attacked the Liberal Party found themselves swamped in a sea of pathetic, corporate-type, deluded, amoral sociopaths who insisted that Justin Trudeau was all-seeing and wise and dreamy and a Liberal therefore good and politics is about the art of the possible.

Attempts to infiltrate the NDP were destroyed by engaging the activists in widely separated meetings that were announced at short notice and dominated by boringly-dressed union gold-brickers who bent procedures to ensure that the activists would stymied until they could be physically attacked at the party's convention.

Asia descended into chaos as powerful countries attacked each other in wars over resources. Washington provided as much assistance to its allies in these conflicts to try to ensure their victories in these struggles. Meanwhile, elites in the USA, Canada and Europe patiently contained desperate floods of refugees (condemned as disease-ridden carriers of terrorist ideologies) in Africa and South America, as they waited for starvation and violence to depopulate these areas, and thereby open them up to colonization by the lucky few in their own societies who could afford to purchase estates there.

Lack of food, lack of money to pay for air-conditioning in summer, lack of money to respond to power-failures in the deep cold-snaps of winter, also culled the herd in North America and Europe. The casualties were mainly among the youngest and the oldest of the lowest income quintile. This was seen as a virtuous process, because poor people weren't stuck with babies they couldn't afford and, meanwhile their measly inheritances from dead parents helped sustain them for another year.

Crumbling enclaves of wealth walled themselves off into armed compounds, as civilization collapsed around them.

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