Sleepwalking toward our 2020 climate targets

Today's Toronto Star contained a pretty grim-looking article, which should be essential reading for every Canadian citizen:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1047635--sleepwalking-toward-our-2020-climate-targets


Some people will read it with interest, and most will go on as if nothing is really wrong.  After all, the sun will still rise tomorrow, right?

I'd like to make my first blog post not a whine session, but rather a call to action.  There are two types of people - complainers and doers.  But people need to know why to do, and that must almost always be a result of some kind of complaining.  But it's all about where we choose to focus the majority of our energy.

I think it's fair to say that most people in Canada are apathetic of any issues beyond paying their own bills.  And with good reason - the middle class is shrinking before our very eyes.  The days of going to school to get your piece of paper and having a job handed to you are long over.  Big business is regularly given tax cuts that are said to create jobs and stimulate the economy, but anyone watching carefully enough knows the biggest corporations are laughing all the way to the bank and outsourcing the jobs to countries with little (or non-existent) labour laws.  Before the last election, one of Canada's political parties suggested an incentive for companies to create jobs here - pay them a dividend AFTER the job is created, not before.  I'll give you a clue - this party has never been in power on the federal level before, although they've almost always left surpluses on the provincial level.

Plenty of people live by this so-called "golden rule" - never talk about politics or religion.  But if we all did that, the earth would still be flat and we'd all be reading the bible as non-fiction.  We NEED to talk about these things, as it's the only way any kind of forward momentum can happen.  By making these subjects a common part of our discourse, only then will we learn from each other and realize what our collective needs and goals are.  The emphasis on the individual and our singular need to accumulate money and material things has eroded away our biological need for the group.  I wonder what it is going to take for us to rediscover this basic need of ours?

People are talking about it in virtually all corners of the world.  It's kind of like the Bahai faith - in small numbers, but widespread.

Feeling cautiously optimistic.