What will it take to stop these murderers?

Killing for profit is murder. Even if the death occurs not directly from the criminal’s hand, but as a result of the crime, it is murder especially if the criminal knew his crime-for-profit would most likely cause death.

Despite countless environmental and health reports over at least five decades, emissions continue to rise and no hardline policies are in place to force major emitters to seriously cut down the deadly toxins and greenhouse gases they emit.

According to a leading Australian climate change expert, Tim Flannery, climate-changing gases in the atmosphere have already reached critical levels. This level was not expected for another decade. Those charts and projections many of us find so alarming will have to be adjusted to take this new information into account.

"What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that can potentially cause dangerous climate change,'' Flannery told the broadcaster late Monday. (ctv.ca, Oct. 9, 2007)

"We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change. That's what these figures say. It's not next year or next decade. It's now.''

"We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade, that we had that much time,'' Flannery said. "I mean, that's beyond the limits of projection, beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001,'' when the last major IPCC report was issued.

As scientists work to understand what this new information means to global climate change, we fail to grasp that this crisis must take precedence over conventional economic policies.

"It's a worldwide issue. We've had growing economies everywhere, we're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels,'' he said. "The metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course clearly with the metabolism of our planet.''

And how about our own, dear, dear country that had such a reputation for being environmentally conscious that we were often portrayed in films such as Canadian Bacon as the goody-goddies of the world? Well, it would be incorrect to say we are doing nothing. We are adding to these emissions at an alarming rate, with no solid plan in place to reduce emissions or examine alternate energy sources. We don’t even keep the bulk of our fuel for ourselves, but ship it out for the profit of a few, increasing the need to “develop” yet more sources of fossil fuels.

William Marsden, a Montreal journalist and author of "Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)," ...says Alberta is giving up control of its oil assets to foreign investors and private business, with little effort to ensure its economic or environmental future is protected.

"This is really crazy what's happening in Alberta today. We have a province that is actually destroying itself in the effort to get every last drop of oil and gas out," Marsden says. "We're shipping it to the United States -- 60 per cent of our production -- at a time when Canada looks, and the whole world looks, like we're beginning to run out of oil. And we will need these reserves in the long-term."

He predicts the approach of a transition period, where the world will shift towards using new types of fuel as global supplies begin to run out. To prepare for that, Marsden suggests Canada needs to begin stockpiling fuel in order to guarantee a successful transition through that period. At the moment, however, that isn't happening. "We've basically given it over to private industry, most of which is foreign, so the vast majority of the profits are going to private industry," Marsden said. "So we won't even have the kind of treasury that we will need as we enter into this new age to smooth over this transition."

He said Canadians don't seem to realize how dire the situation really is and many believe there is no reason to question the status quo.

"It's almost sort of the politics of our age where we continue to think that it's business as usual," Marsden said.

These companies are killing us, and our governments are allowing it, even encouraging it. Politicians only listen to two things: money and voter pressure. We need to make a noise, keep these issues as priority issues and let politicians know we will vote their asses out if they don’t act now.