Mid-Week Updates, No 33

Forest Fires, Ukraine, Israel

It was a week of forest fires here and although we are safe on the West Coast we did see the smoke coming our way from inland fires, most notably the ones raging in the Shuswap and Kelowna areas in the interior of British Columbia. The impact on these and other communities is tragic and the concerns as the draughts continue are increasing as more places are put at risk. The trailheads in our area are going to be closed to keep hikers and campers away for the time being.

Concurrent with this we are experiencing the onslaught of those trying to score political points using life threatening emergencies to get their opinion out in the open. It is generally speaking not helpful to further raise the temperature by calling out an ‘apocalypse’ or a ‘if we don’t act now, it’s over’ type of messaging. Panic inevitably leads to bad decisions, so we need to get the emotion out of the debate over climate and forest fires. There is incredible progress being made on technologies that can help us spot and manage forest fires, quite a few come across my desk from time to time actually. Better ways to manage and maintain forests can be implemented as well as a lot is lacking in that area. On a much higher level the same is happening with carbon emission tech, only last week Occidental Petroleum bought Squamish-based Carbon Engineering for a neat US$1.1 billion. As we work through these challenges we need to look at how tech can help mitigate natural disasters and it is a work in progress that will take time.

The other eye catching thing was that Meta (Facebook) is no longer sharing news links in Canada following the fall out after the Trudeau government adopted Bill C-18. Always ready to purpose events for political purposes the new minister responsible for this file lashed out over the weekend:

And the prime minister doubled down on this. It is both distasteful and disingenuous to use emergency and safety issues to further push this controversial media law. I will leave it to the experts like Michael Geist to pull apart and explain how incredibly misleading these communications are from team Trudeau. On a more practical level it seems to me that in emergencies there are far better news sources than Facebook: government channels, radio, direct messaging and of course X (Twitter), not to mention Canada’s own CBC national broadcaster. And no, team Zuckerberg is not a group of saints, but in this case they are surely the cooler heads in the room.

Ukraine

My take here has been consistently that we are in a sort of war of attrition where no one is making any progress and the loss of life keeps mounting. The White House yesterday disagreed and without going into full detail national security adviser Jake Sullivan argued we are not in a stalemate. Maybe now that the delivery of F-16’s from a number of NATO countries is being firmed up we may see a different dynamic, but it will not be until early next year until these jets are fully operational and are able to break this stalemate. It is a matter of what your time horizon is when qualifying this war, and it is a longer one than any of us expected. In the meantime casualties on the civilian side, the Ukrainian side to be clear, keep going up and we need to keep these stories going to grasp what is at stake here:

Israel

A lot of you thank me for reporting on Israel and, yes, there are a few who think there is too much of it here on this newsletter. The goal is to keep things balanced and report out major developments and try and interpret them or put them in some context.

Executing a mother who is driving a car with her 12-year old daughter is one of these things. Batsheva Nigri’s car took 20 bullets this week, her daughter survived miraculously. She was able to deliver a moving eulogy on her mothers’ funeral yesterday. This comes after the murder of a father and son who were stranded at a gas station over the weekend and someone alerted a Palestinian terrorist who came over and proceeded to kill both men. It is mindless violence, a psychosis of hate that targets civilians and afterwards celebrates the kill by praising the murderers and handing out candies. It is no different from lobbing missiles into civilian areas in Ukraine and elaborating on Russian TV on how Ukrainians should accept their fate or die. In the face of such inhumanity we have to make sure we always try and support those that are innocent and who are unfortunately always the targets.