"Canada Speeds Up Desertification With Tar Sands, Exits U.N. Convention Aimed At Addressing Problem"
The biggest threat that climate change poses to humanity is Dust-Bowlification. So naturally the first and only country to withdraw from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is Canada, home of the Dust-Bowl-accelerating tar sands.
In 2011, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.” I argued that because of those threats, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.” (The photo is by Dorothea Lange, who was hired by the Farm Security Administration to help humanize the Dust Bowl.)
As the UNCCD explained in its response to the withdrawal last month:
The UNCCD is the only legally binding instrument that addresses desertification/land degradation and drought….
In June 2012, world leaders at Rio +20 declared land degradation and drought as some of the most serious global challenges impeding the sustainable development of all nations, especially developing countries…. They also reaffirmed their resolve, in accordance with the UNCCD, to take coordinated action nationally, regionally and internationally, to monitor, globally, land degradation and restore degraded lands in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas.
Global warming is projected to worsen and prolong droughts over much of the world — and to Dust-Bowlify as much as one third of the Earth’s currently habited and arable land. Certainly all nations have a moral obligation to work to reduce desertification, especially one like Canada that working to speed up climate change — see “Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Accelerated Climate Change.”
And in case you were wondering whether Canada actually bothered to offer a legitimate reason for exiting this international effort, try this:
Canada defended its decision to pull out of a United Nations convention that fights the spread of droughts just a month before a major gathering would have forced the country to confront scientific analysis on the effects of climate change….
Harper said Thursday that the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification is too bureaucratic. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called it a “talkfest” that does a disservice to taxpayers.
Canada is shocked, shocked that a U.N. Convention is a bureaucratic talk-fest. Seriously. What next, Canada withdraws from the Olympics because the games are “too competitive”?
This shameless move is yet one more reason for Obama to kill the Keystone pipeline.