To the editor,
Annual oil company profits for 2022 have just been released. Shell made its highest profit in 100 years: $39 billion. Exxon made $56 billion, its biggest profit in history, and Chevron made $36.5 billion, more than double the previous year. Yes, this is all billions.
Among other important recent revelations is the fact that Exxon knew that climate change was real and knew what the effects would be as it employed top scientists back in the 1970s and ’80s to research the issue and build rigorous climate models. Since that time, fossil fuel companies have sown doubt as well as financing think tanks that promoted climate denial.
Meanwhile the Canadian government continues to lavish tax breaks and subsidies on this industry estimated to be worth $4.8 billion a year while the costs to mitigate climate change to Canadians is variously estimated to be anywhere between $5.5 trillion by 2100 or maybe $200-$350 billion annually or maybe a mere $139 billion by 2050, presumably depending on how serious or effective we are. And that’s only going to be effective if the rest of the world makes a similar effort.
Today’s children are going to be the ones to feel the full, initial impacts of climate change, from extreme weather, to disruptions in food production, to extinctions of many species of animals and plants and to an increasingly perilous existence. As consumers of fossil fuels we are all complicit. So accustomed to our comfortable lives we seem almost mesmerized by our relatively petty daily problems as we blunder closer to the point of no return.
Liz Fox, Lantzville
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