Climate tokenism is far more dangerous than climate denial.

With no time left to waste, governments barely pretend to do what must be done.

Fire photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash, edited by author

You can’t simply expand greenhouse gas emissions willy nilly any more while the public is ever more conscious of climate change. They won’t stand for it. Instead, you have to increase them quietly while looking in public like you are doing the opposite. Governments have learned to excel at this particular sleight of hand. As a result, climate hostile politics is dying, but “not actually climate leadership but plays like it on TV” is firmly at the wheel, steering us towards apocalypse with smiles on our faces. Here’s a look at how Canadian politics provide us a perfect example of climate tokenism which is ultimately more dangerous to us now than the discredited it’s-a-big-hoax version.

Scientists are calling the heatwave that just obliterated a ton of records in Northwestern North America the most extreme in the entire history of world weather records. Not only is our world the hottest it has been since the invention of the thermometer, and likely millions of years longer than that, but we have now reached the point where extreme weather is wiping entire towns off of the map. Will this finally be the unignorable moment that humanity starts taking the crisis seriously? Certainly a day of…