Peter Kent on climate, circa 1984

This is interesting:

Back in 1984, Peter Kent presented a ground-breaking documentary, ‘The Greenhouse Effect’, on CBC’s The Journal. Kent explained the dire threat posed by global warming and noted that the “scientific community [was] virtually unanimous” on the seriousness of the problem.

Early this year, Peter Kent was appointed as Canada’s environment minister and promptly began peddaling the talking points of climate change deniers about Alberta’s tar sands being “ethical oil”.

The documentary opens with some interesting claims. It takes seriously the possibility that climate change could be dangerous, but then baldly asserts that “we can’t stop it”.

Thankfully, we can. We just need to replace fossil fuels with better energy alternatives.

2 thoughts on “Peter Kent on climate, circa 1984

  1. Milan

    Again, around the nine minute mark in the first video, the narrator claims that scientists agree that we cannot stop burning fossil fuels, but must rather adapt to climate change. The biggest problem with that claim is that it isn’t sensible to talk about adapting to the kind of warming that would occur if we were to keep burning fossil fuels until none are left. Doing that would utterly transform the planet, into something very different from what human beings have ever known.

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