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I was told by my Prime Minister that’s it’s insensitive to bring up climate change in the wake of the Fort McMurray fire. But apparently it’s not insensitive for oil industry boosters to exploit the tragedy, writing moving accounts of how fossil fuel companies, after years of destroying a large chunk of Alberta’s forest, poisoning its rivers, making billions in profits, then laying off tens of thousands of its workers, heroically dedicated some of its pocket change to helping its workforce not die.
Even if acknowledging climate change is supposedly insensitive to the victims, let’s at least acknowledge who else benefits from that silence: fossil fuel corporations. If it’s “insensitive” to connect any given disaster to climate change, it shuts down any debate over who should pay for the damages and suffering caused by climate change fueled disasters.
Who should pay the victims of Fort McMurray? Or the refugees of islands now disappearing from sea level rise? Or the damages and lives lost in monster storms?
Should it be taxpayers? Or should it be the corporations who funded climate denial and deliberately obstructed action that would have slowed climate change?
The answer is clear, which is why the industry and its supporters don’t want anyone to ask it. So instead, they’re using the victims of those disasters to say “now is not the time to point fingers, unless that finger is pointed up and pressed to your mouth.”
But now is the time to point fingers, because we know where to point them, and we’re almost out of time.
This video originally appeared on The Toronto Star.
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