We all have a role in curbing climate change

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 04, 2008

Europe has been emitting carbon since the dawn of the 20th Century at a rate that would be hard for most of us to fathom. This is the place, after all, which even has poets remarking about their ‘dark satanic mills.’ A friend of mine worked for a year in London a decade ago and told me of hospitals and skyscrapers whose concrete walls were black from the sooty grime of industrialization. Anyone who has ever been to Glasgow, or Berlin, or Prague can confirm that dark and dreary is not just an imaginative turn of phrase when you are talking about the truly industrialized parts of Europe.

I mention this merely to set the stage for a comparison of sorts. Canada is the largest country in the world, containing 7% of the land mass, some 4 million square miles of it, or, if you like, an area the size of all of Europe. Much of Canada is still wilderness, filled with tree and field, river and mountain – whereas you would be hard pressed to throw a baseball into the trees in Europe without hitting some bit of developed land. We also have an extremely small population by comparison to almost everyone else. With all of this being true, we still have a hard time meeting goals that should naturally be easier for us to achieve.

I am not an economist, so I cannot say what is truly behind our dependence on oil refining, mining, or any of the other things that are so harmful to the environment. I am not a sociologist so I am uncertain why cars seem a status symbol in North American society as opposed to a means of travel. I am also not a politician so I am uncertain whether our inability to come up with national policy and intergovernmental cooperation is uniquely Canadian or what.

Our climate change policies seem to reflect disbelief, disinterest, or despair, but we need to something.

Ed Stelmach, the premier of Alberta has announced at the latest round of talks that his province won’t even consider making any cuts until 2020. The three premiers responsible for the majority of our populace are fighting with Stephen Harper over what goals Canada should set and how to reach them. The United States has continued to block and call for more “flexibility” in terms of goals.

Meanwhile those purveyors of grime, keepers of the Satanic Mills, the European Union, have pledged to reduce emissions by at least 20% by 2020 – and a further 10% reduction if the rest of us could ever get on board. So why don’t we?

Let’s put aside for a minute the fact that NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, of all credible resources, published an article in the Journal of Glaciology in which they presented evidence that the Antarctic Ice Shelves were unstable in 2000; or that they have just declared that 2007 the second hottest year for the earth in history. You could even dismiss the fact that some 5000 years ago the Ancient Mayan culture created a calendar that predicted every solar eclipse, every lunar change, and every possible change in the universe with computer like accuracy – and then said that in 2012 everything was going to change.

As an aside, and curiously, the Sun flips its magnetic poles with regularity, and the next flip is due in 2012. We here on earth are long overdue for a flip (the North Pole becomes the South – the polarity reverses) and the ensuing havoc that is caused, the last one was the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal which occurred 780,000 years ago. Just so you know, the poles should reverse every 50,000 years or so, we are definitely on borrowed time.

Putting aside the global rise in temperature, storm systems, loss of biodiversity and all the rest of the warning signs...

It is just a kindergarten like good idea to clean up the mess we make.

As Al Gore, David Suzuki and others who know way more than I about all of this have been pointing out, the cure is not going to be easy to swallow. It never is. The goal, you see, is to reduce carbon emissions - and what the government is worried about is how that affects big industry. So for now, let’s just hope a majority of them can wake up to the fact that they have to change and focus on us as individuals.

What we need to be aware of is that carbon is basically emitted whenever we use any form of energy – and I mean any form of energy, from turning on a light to walking the dog. As we become aware of our individual energy output we can change it by making better choices. In the home that means the funky new light bulbs as an easy first step; but the more difficult ones to make are new appliances and painting your house a darker colour. Believe it or not in colder climates dark colour houses use 5000 less pounds of carbon a year. Then try mowing the lawn less, driving less, buying a hybrid car.

But if you really want to make a difference you have to give up meat. In the United States 260 million acres of land are clear cut and half of all their water is used yearly in the production of animals for food. Worldwide we kill 10 billion animals every year so we can eat. The end result is that we have more heart disease and health problems than we would as a vegetarian, and the world gets more and more polluted.

A vegetarian driving a Hummer is better for the environment than a meat eater driving a hybrid. Of course, Ed won’t like that either what with all those Albertan cows languishing in the fields above the oil. Still, we all have to do our part – what we have failed to recognize so far is that the alternative will kill us.