I have the insomnia again, so it is early morning when I write this. There are only a few swigs of July left in its bottle. Its dregs are brackish on the palate from the heat domes and wildfires in northern Canada, as well as across Europe. Much of England is in drought, and Europe’s rivers are so parched that their beds now expose sunken ships from the Second World War and even the bones of woolly mammoths.
We don’t get the dog days of summer anymore, which could be cooled with a garden hose outside and a box fan circulating air inside a suburban house. Now, the season, like all the seasons of the year, is as unpredictable as an alcoholic parent. They are the end days of what we have always known and thought would remain constant.
In a few hours, below my living room window, the asphalt parking lot will shimmer in the scorching heat. It’s not even a heat dome day, just a prelude to the ones predicted to arrive soon.
“Stay hydrated” is the most common response from journalists on cable news networks to the pernicious health symptoms created by the climate emergency. Predictably, they use B-roll of people in public pools and splash pads as if the heatwaves of 2026 are the same as those of the 1970s, rather than the catastrophic weather events brought about by unregulated industrialisation driven by the greed of the 1%. Too many boomers, despite all the facts to the contrary, still say, “It was ever thus, hot summers and cold winters.”
My life straddles two centuries: one that was analogue and this digital one. I know today’s climate is not the climate of my youth. Like Dorothy says to Toto in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” We must stop pretending we are if we ever want to find normal again.
The 1% and their corporate news media manipulate us through bought politicians and pundits into complacency over this existential threat. Today, The Telegraph told Britain to enjoy its new Mediterranean climate, which is as ludicrous as telling someone thrown into the sea to grow gills and fins if they want to live.
After 200 years of industrial abuse accelerated by capitalism, our planet’s Goldilocks climate is over. What has happened is not change or evolution but wholesale exploitation. The 1% poisoned our world in pursuit of greater wealth.
In 1975, my parents took my brother Peter and me on holiday to Alberta. That was the year Pierre Trudeau created Petro-Canada as a Crown corporation. It was done with the support of the New Democratic Party, whose backing kept his Liberal minority government in office. It was a forward-thinking strategy. But the rich didn’t like it very much because state-owned industries don’t bring wealth to the 1%. Instead, they offer prosperity to the whole nation. The rich of the 1970s made the working and middle classes hate it too because they told them it was “socialism gone amok”.
My dad drove us to Alberta in a Rideau 500 that pulled a Coleman camper trailer. It was a car of its time, an enormous dinosaur of an automobile with a V8 engine. Apart from excessive horsepower, it didn’t come with much else except an AM radio and ashtrays located in the front and back of the vehicle for the convenience of smokers.
There was no air conditioning because that was considered a superfluous luxury in the 1970s. Our holiday in Canada’s western provinces took place in July. There was a Lawrence of Arabia opening-scene cinematic quality to our drive across the Prairies. The Trans-Canada Highway undulated in the summer heat.
My brother and I cooled ourselves by pressing ice-chilled seven-ounce glass bottles of Coke against our faces before gulping them down until we burped loudly, much to the consternation of our mother, who sat in the front seat fanning herself with a road map.
After a week-long trek from Toronto, we arrived at Banff National Park and set up our trailer. We spent five days nestled between forests and the Rocky Mountains, hiking, joking, arguing and loving our time alone as much as our time together as a family.
Far from our camper trailer, the oil sands were beginning their rapid expansion as capitalism’s response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
My dad, who was a curious man, asked a camper on the neighbouring pitch, an Albertan who sat with us around our campfire one evening, what he thought of these new oil sands.
“It’s going to kill this land,” he said, “and the only ones who will get rich from it are the already rich.”
After more than fifty years, that Albertan was not wrong. It changed Canada for the worse. It turned Canada into a petrostate and one of the world’s largest carbon polluters and contributors to climate change. Canada is among the world’s largest oil and gas producers. We are an energy superpower that pretends to be on the right side of environmental fair play. It isn’t, though, and the longer Mark Carney remains Prime Minister, the more apparent that becomes.
The oil sands produce substantially higher greenhouse gas emissions during extraction than conventional crude oil. The filthy little secret that most Canadians don’t know, or don’t want to know, is that they ceded their economy to oligarchs, corporations and the entitled, who will see millions of us dead before they do anything to stop climate change. Putting your plastics in the recycling every week won’t amount to a hill of beans for the planet’s survival until you make the behemoth polluters of our economy pay for their crimes against humanity.
As always, thank you for reading my Substack posts. Rent for August is coming up in 48 hours. I am fighting to make sure I can pay it. There is still a shortfall of C$270.
Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and keep me housed. So, if you can, please join with a paid subscription for just £3.50 a month, or take out a yearly or gift subscription. There is also an option to tip, and yearly subscriptions are 40% off. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful.
Take care,
John
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.