The game’s creator:

”Even old, abandoned tools and the most basic pieces of software can still be put in the hands of someone who wants to create their dream and result in beautiful things happening."

And the result can far exceed what the tool provided in the past. Compare a QBASIC game from 1991 to Black Annex in 2012 to see just that.

We have everything we need to create new things, prepare, and solve problems. No new technology or policy or permission is needed. Find an available tool and get to it.

It was bad enough [for US politicians] to take four decades simply to warm up to the idea of gay rights. Innumerable lives were blighted in those in-between years, and given long-lasting official unconcern about Aids, innumerable lives were lost. At least, however, inaction didn’t make the problem harder to solve: if the supreme court decides gay people should be able to marry, then they’ll be able to marry.

Unlike gay rights or similar issues of basic human justice and fairness, climate change comes with a time limit. Go past a certain point, and we may no longer be able to affect the outcome in ways that will prevent long-term global catastrophe. We’re clearly nearing that limit and so the essential cowardice of too many Democrats is becoming an ever more fundamental problem that needs to be faced. We lack the decades needed for their positions to “evolve” along with the polling numbers. What we need, desperately, is for them to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy.

Compared to other provinces, BC:

has the lowest proportion of its land area at risk but the majority of [Canadian] dwellings at risk, due to the high housing density in the Lower Mainland, much of which is low lying. The Lower Mainland, consisting of Metro Vancouver and the lower Fraser River Valley, is very vulnerable to sea level rise because of a 127 kilometre system of dikes, which were not built with sea-level level rise factored into the design. This area also has very expensive real estate subject to flood risks.

The report looks at two responses for our coastal areas: climate-related development planning and strategic retreat.

The first means no new construction would be permitted in high risk areas. The latter strategy means a gradual abandonment of these areas. Citing the now-shuttered National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the study notes strategic retreat produces significant benefits over development planning. In some areas, dikes would need to be 6–8 metres high to protect dwellings, much taller than current structures.

Full report PDF is here.

Climate Progress:

The report “makes clear that these weather events will only get worse in the coming years, and warns that health and emergency professionals as well as citizens must prepare for their impacts now.”

B.C.’s leadership on climate change has made us more economically competitive. As the last global financial crisis wreaked havoc on economies worldwide, at home our carbon tax spurred innovation and clean technology sector growth to more than 200 companies. It saw sales projected for $2.5 billion in 2011 with a 48 per cent growth between 2008 and 2010. According to KPMG, 78 per cent of these sales are exports. These clean-technology innovations throughout the province have diversified our economy while making us a leader in climate change solutions that give us cleaner air, energy-efficient homes and businesses, and healthier communities.

The BC Liberal Party likely believes there are votes to be gained in their cynical and cowardly retreat from climate leadership. But their argument that the carbon tax is hurting BC’s economic competitiveness is just dishonest. A carbon tax may reduce the record profits of the greedy carbon polluters who donate to the party (and then expect to be served by it), but underpricing carbon harms our economy and everyone you know.

According to the anti-business radicals at KPMG, BC’s cleaner technology sector employs more people than forestry, mining and the oil and gas sectors combined. It also contributes more to provincial GDP than any of the traditional resource-based sectors.

Unpriced carbon is a subsidy for unethical businesses that damage and endanger our communities without creating much economic value.

“We are the best firefighters in the world,” the captain proudly declares, “but we must let the other fire trucks catch up before we continue putting this fire out.”

As you watch the fire spread from apartment to apartment and threaten an adjacent building, you notice other firefighters stoking the flames, speeding up the destruction of your home. They’re piling kindling and flammable waste up around the foundation. You angrily confront the firefighters for worsening a problem they’re pretending to be dealing with.

They return a chant in unison, drowning out your pleas for help: “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”. As the fire they boosted moves from home to home down your block, the captain asks, “You wouldn’t put us world-leading firefighters out of work would you?

“I’m sure our co-workers will be showing up any time now. Then we’ll start putting out this fire we’ve worsened.”

In other words, the BC Liberals’ plans for a carbon tax freeze.

Local municipalities, including the City of Vancouver, must urgently act to protect citizens and our environment from reckless plans to make Port Metro Vancouver the largest coal export terminal in North America.

I share the concerns about expanding coal exports through our region expressed by Mayor Gregor Robertson; elected officials and city staff in Delta, Surrey, White Rock, and New Westminster; and public health authorities and organizations from across the region. Increasing coal export capacity in our region and excusing the public health impacts of coal transport must be responsibly opposed by the City of Vancouver and I strongly urge you to support the coal export expansion motion at City Council on March 12, 2013.

The City of Vancouver must continuously confront local contributions to the rapid heating of our atmosphere, a crisis driven by the over-use of dangerous fossil fuels like coal. The public health impacts of the transportation, import and re-export of coal through our regional port network are extremely worrying and we must acknowledge the warnings from public health experts. No less, the local economic benefits paraded by coal export proponents are deadly false. The future of Vancouver’s economy is in cleaner energy, technology, services, resource management and food — not energy and materials systems from the 19th century. And if we fail to prevent runaway global warming — as looks increasingly likely — we must remember that there are “no jobs on a dead planet”.

Last year, our atmosphere was dangerously disrupted by the second-highest increase in heat-trapping carbon dioxide in half a century. New research shows global temperatures are at their warmest in 4000 years and that melting permafrost and other feedback loops will accelerate this warming. A rising chorus of citizens — and especially young people — will no longer tolerate half-measures and rhetoric on the most urgent crisis we face. I will fervently resist economic development schemes that damage the planet and threaten my friends and family — especially when Vancouver is so well-positioned to take advantage from safer alternatives. Indeed, we can take action on climate change and support jobs and economic activity that promote resilience and well-being.

Along with health authorities and physicians in Canada and the United States, I am very concerned about the not-well-understood environmental and health impacts of coal transportation, including:

- coal dust
- diesel exhaust
- congestion and collisions on our roads
- the risk of coal train derailment
- fires

This list does not include the public health and security impacts that arise from cooking our atmosphere, such as heatwave deaths like those endured by European families in 2003 or the catastrophic drought disasters currently afflicting the US and other major food producers. From a pure carbon standpoint, coal export expansion is today a more insidious problem than pipelines or the tar sands experiment, which also threaten our livelihoods and health and damage local economies. No isolated local economic benefits, however construed or measured, should come at the expense of local public health or the peace and survivability of our global community.

Simply put, the local economic benefits touted by coal export expansion proponents aren’t worth the damage to our environment and our bodies. Coal export terminals employ very few people. Coal rail traffic from the US would crowd out local rail-using commodities. Coal export leaves our waterfronts less appealing for tourism, recreation, and other commercial or community purposes. As the writer David Roberts puts it “coal companies would get the profits, Asia would get the coal, and the Northwest would get the pollution and disruption.”

The City of Vancouver must intervene to prevent future coal export terminal creation or expansion, introduce health impact assessments for all new coal export expansion proposals, and protect the health and security of Vancouverites. The March 12, 2013 Council motion on coal export expansion supports these objectives and I urge you to approve this motion.

- Mike Soron

This quote, from twenty year-old Alli Welton, has really stuck with me the last few days:

[B]efore, I’d always been thinking of climate activism primarily as solidarity, and helping reduce inequality in the world, which is something I’ve cared about ever since I was a kid, growing up privileged in a really poor town. But I guess, recently, it’s become more of a self-preservation thing…

As youth, we don’t have a voice in this fight… there’s no way that I can climb the government ladder and end up in a position of enough political power to save myself now. I’m never going to get that chance. And there are kids who are being born today, or born 10 years ago, they’re not really going to get that chance either, if we don’t start winning in the next couple of years.

People in Vancouver (especially young people) are rightly worried about and opposing this dangerous and irresponsible direction. Now, Mayor Gregor Robertson is very publicly joining this opposition. Robertson has introduced a motion that could stop coal export infrastructure from being built or expanded in the City of Vancouver and that supports the call for a health impact assessment of Port Metro Vancouver’s reckless coal export plans.

Coal ports employ very few people, do little for our local economy, and endanger all of our jobs and livelihoods by destabilizing the climate. As the Mayor outlines at length in his motion, the local health impacts from coal dust and diesel fumes are not well-understood and of great concern to our community’s health authorities.

Most importantly, it is very unlikely that we will avoid the 2 degree warming threshold most scientists and global governments say must be avoided. Coal is killing us and we do not need more of it in our community.

As David Roberts writes: “Coal is the enemy of the human race. It needs to be kept in the damn ground.”

Read the whole motion here and tell the mayor and councillors that you’re behind this important motion and expect their support.