A22 Saturday, November 30, 2019 Vancouver Sun
Editor;
It’s disappointing to see the David Suzuki Foundation advocating road pricing; to see Vancouver and Metro looking at it. Stockholm is not us: our gap between rich and poor is wider, distances greater. Why not replace the gas tax with carbon tax income for municipal services? Why not divert taxes from escalating military spending?
Road pricing attempts to micro-manage the civilian economy while ignoring the bull in the china shop: militarism and war. Wars also cause climate change. But the UN IPCC limits its reports to CO2 emissions from the civilian economy because the U.S. lobbied at the 1997 Kyoto Accord to keep military emissions out. After 22 years of misdirection we still follow suit.
The missing puzzle pieces to the climate picture—overt and covert war—are being placed, giving us the whole picture, opening new ways to ease our survival crisis.
Is war a civic issue? An environmental issue?
Hildegard Bechler
Sustainable Community development services
Langley, BC
www.action-on-military-climate-change.net
cc:
Dr. David Suzuki
Tom Green
Mayor Jonathan Cote
Mayor Kennedy Stewart
Councillor Adrianne Carr
Metro Vancouver Climate Action Committee
Tiffany Crawford
Stop-weather-war 