As the head of the World Bank’s committee to review and criticize the development goals of the Bretton Woods institutions, Lester Pearson had the opportunity to foreground an alternative form of Northern engagement with the South. Instead, he reaffirmed all the most harmful aspects of these institutions and argued for their greater involvement in the lives of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs.

The progressive Colombian government of Gustavo Petro is drafting legislation that, if enacted, will require mining companies to obtain environmental licenses for mineral exploration. Currently, Colombia only requires environmental licenses for the extraction and production phases of mining. Petro won the Colombian presidential election in a runoff on June 19.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity.

Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will save countries at least US$12 trillion by 2050, an Oxford University research team reports. The study concludes that “the decarbonization of the energy system will not only see a major reduction in the cost of producing and distributing energy, but will also help expand energy access around the planet.”

In a world where “natural” disasters and geopolitical dislocations caused by anthropogenic climate change are increasingly becoming the norm, the Poilievres of the world stand to benefit—while doing nothing to address the causes of these crises. What happens to our politics when, in the words of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, the state of emergency becomes the norm?

We are in the middle of an historic energy crisis. Recently, news headlines have been overwhelmed by commentaries on the price of energy across Europe, driving governments like Canada’s to make sweeping statements about the future of natural gas and hydrogen. Many of these new climate plans are predicated upon carbon capture and storage technologies.

It is incumbent upon us as a species, especially us in the Global North, to seriously consider alternative futures from an anti-capitalist, dialectical, ecological point-of-view, writes CD columnist Owen Schalk. This will unavoidably entail challenging the ideology of growth that pervades the political institutions of Northern countries.

The crises of the environment care nothing for human squabbles and timetables and are proceeding apace on their own schedule. Nature’s clock keeps ticking. Indeed, the human enterprise is looking like a great Shakespearean tragedy in which an intense internal struggle distracts from a far greater external crisis that threatens all sides. To use an idiom from the 1990s, it will be the mother of all crises.

Retrofitting existing buildings is one of the only tools for mitigating climate change that virtually everyone can agree on. There are large numbers of poorly insulated buildings using fossil fuels for water and space heating. Abandoning those buildings would be a colossal waste, so to move towards a zero emissions future, they need to be retrofitted. Canada is no exception.