Difficult, impossible not to be challenged.
• Read also: The United States experienced its warmest winter on record
• Read also: El Niño expected to worsen food insecurity in southern Africa
For a 9e consecutive month, the Earth broke global heat records.
Even the oceans are overheating. You don’t need a doctorate in climatology to understand that when the average reaches 21.6°C, our oceans are too hot.
Species are dying. Hurricanes form more easily. Floods are flooding our cities more frequently.
Our forests are being consumed in the flames of drought caused by overly mild winters.
We already know this, experts have been telling us this for years.
But as long as you don’t live in Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, it’s theoretical.
As long as we don’t see thousands of deer eating our Christmas tree farms, it’s theoretical.
As long as our ski resorts compensated by giving us nice fake snow, it was all theoretical.
But how long will we persist in playing the ostrich and burying our heads in the sand?
Point of no return
According to several experts, the point of no return has already been crossed.
The famous threshold of 1.5°C set by the Paris Agreement has been systematically exceeded for 12 months.
It will take decades for our oceans to return to a more normal temperature. In the meantime, the effects will increase.
- Listen to the Latraverse-Dubé meeting with Emmanuelle Latraverse, via QUB :
The extreme phenomena that are making headlines are just a taste.
I know it, you know it, and yet we continue to believe that recycling and composting are enough.
We feel good about ourselves by buying electric cars which are getting bigger and bigger.
If all humans on Earth consumed as much as we do, it would take 3.7 planets to meet demand!
What turn?
The Legault government is absolutely right to place Quebec on the path to the great electric shift.
Renewing the engines of our economy is not only a laudable ideal, it is an economic imperative.
But the controversy surrounding the Northvolt plant reminds us that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
Whether it is this megaproject or the lithium and rare metal mines that will have to be exploited, the dams that will have to be built, the wind farms that will have to be developed, there will always be a price to pay.
Ecosystems will be flooded, roads will have to be built, fresh water sources weakened, sublime landscapes scarred by this new energy race.
The nobility of ambitions will not spare decision-makers from the heartbreaking debates around the environmental cost of these economic projects, however green they may be.
Because the technological shift required by the fight against climate change cannot turn into a vast headlong rush.
One day or another we will have to change our lifestyle habits.
Consume less, consume better, travel differently, the list is long and intimidating. It shakes the foundations of our modern comfort.
Far be it from me to plead for degrowth here.
We just need to dare to confront reality, to give up magical solutions.
But the most difficult thing will be to think about it more than the few hours that last the ecoanxiety driven by today’s alarmist report on the state of the planet.