Tag Archives: 1.5°C

Environment, Politics

Canada’s largest labour organization adopts climate action plan at tri-annual convention

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Despite differences of opinion, a clear majority of delegates voted to adopt the Canadian Labour Congress’ (CLC) proposed climate action plan at its tri-annual convention in Montreal.

On May 9, workers representing local, regional and national unions weighed in on a climate action plan that will shape the mandate of Canada’s largest labour organization for the next three years. This is the first time the CLC, which represents more than three million workers across the country, has devised action plans as well as policy resolutions for different topics, including climate change, Indigenous justice, affordability, infrastructure, health care and organizing.

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Environment

Canada’s Environment Minister says the federal government will take a ‘long, hard look’ at upping its climate target following IPCC report

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As the world stares down an ongoing and rapidly worsening climate crisis, wealthy countries like Canada must hit the “fast-forward button” and push up their net-zero emissions deadlines to 2040, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said Monday.

Guterres’ remarks accompanied the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the last of this decade — which shows the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 C “is achievable,” he said. “But it will take a quantum leap in climate action.”

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Forests, Opinion

The Quadra Project: Protecting Old Forests

At least 1,000 people, representing more than 220 diverse organizations and First Nations from British Columbia, attended the United for Old Growth March & Rally in Victoria on February 25. They marched from City Hall to the BC Legislature, demanding the implementation of the Old Growth Strategic Review, a comprehensive 2020 study that recommended the immediate protection of the remnant old growth forests in the province. Not one of its 14 recommendations has yet been implemented.

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Environment, Opinion

The Quadra Project – 1.5 Degrees Celsius

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016, with the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, with an aspirational target of 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

At the COP 27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, only a few countries have updated their required annual carbon cutting emission targets for this year, and the United Nations’ Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has described present efforts as so “woefully inadequate” that we are setting the world on track to “catastrophe”. Indeed, current CO2 emissions are rising at 1- 2% per year rather than going down 5-7% per year. Even under the voluntary “nationally determined contributions” of individual nations, emissions are expected to rise by 2030, in contrast to the nearly 50% reduction needed to keep the temperature rise at 1.5°C. At present emission levels, we are committed to a global temperature increase of 2.8°C by the end of the century.

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Arts, Environment, Opinion

The Quadra Project: A poem for our time

The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.

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