Climate change is a serious issue for the government of Ontario, Canada, yet provincial officials have decided that there is some room for humor. Today, I’m sharing four videos designed to help average Canadians understand the profound effects of a warming world.
“We have so little time,” said Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister
on the Environment and Climate Change, speaking with Anthony
Leiserowitz of
Yale Climate Connections. “You’ve really got to throw
everything at it — your wit, your humor and your sober, serious,
heavy-duty conversations about the reality of what we’re
facing.”
“Climate change affects everything,” comes the overall message for these four videos. “Climate change affects you and the world around you. This fight is personal.”
For example, rather than profile the economic upheaval expected in commercial agriculture, the first video on this page talks about the effects on the pizza delivered to your door.
Ontario, like the state of Washington, has a Climate Change Action Plan. For Washington’s integrated climate strategy, visit the Department of Ecology’s website. In Ontario’s plan, Murray issues a message to his fellow citizens.
“Climate change is a fact in our daily lives — raising the cost of our food, causing extreme weather that damages property and infrastructure, threatening outdoor activities we love, and melting winter roads that provide critical seasonal access to remote northern Indigenous communities,” Murray writes. “It affects every aspect of our lives, so it is our collective responsibility to fight climate change together to ensure our children benefit from a cleaner planet.”
He describes how some actions can reduce the ultimate effects of climate change and how others can maintain existing jobs and create new ones.
In a 3-minute interview with Climate TV, Murray quickly spells out what he thinks should be done to move Canada and the world to a low-carbon future. His comments were made in the final days of COP21 — the Conference of the Parties 21 — in which representative s from countries throughout the world went to Paris in 2015 to agree to actions that can begin to address climate change.
