Climate Change

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their latest report this week, to much media frenzy and a flurry of debate, panic, fear-mongering, finger-pointing and anger. David Suzuki is on a cross-country tour of Canada. Executives continue to fly all over hell and creation, promoting their cities, their towns, pandering, pandering, selling, presenting, trying to promote their businesses, cities and towns as examples of sustainable economic ventures, locations or entities.

In my home province, the oil dictatorship has announced that it plans to build a second oil refinery.... the announcement of which came via a big, loud, balls-on media announcement (well, they do own every newspaper in the province)-- meanwhile, quietly, certain government officials look into tidal and wind power. Not much happens. There's just no infrastructure, and everybody wants money.....why hitch your wagon to a not-for-immediate-profit star? Not when you have the requisite 2.5 kids to feed, kids that need to look really happy and well-fed and clothed for your campaign.

In neighbouring Nova Scotia, bigger steps toward developing wind and tidal power have been taken, but then, that particular province is sicker from coal than we are from our nuclear power plant. Prince Edward Island is doing quite a lot. . . I just hope they can stay above water.

It is almost tempting to say "So what?" The damage, apparently, if not completely irreversible, will take 1000 years to reverse. Will humanity survive that long? Can it? Maybe a few lucky ones will be able to hide out underground for 10 centuries, subsisting on astronaut packets, tang, and some miraculous underground reservoir of water. Magickally free of contaminants. But what's to save even them from the inevitable earthquakes and ensuing cave-ins?

Or perhaps we can live on great, big floating cities in the North and South Poles, in order to escape the devastating heat. Or maybe it really is about time we head off into deep-space in search of other life-sustaining planets.

That's how it feels. It feels impossible. Everyday in the news it is "environmental catastrophe" and "imminent pandemic". I don't know which to be more worried about, and regardless of what I do, oil magnates will continue to do what they're doing, and executives will continue to fly and fly and fly, their jet-fuel contrails slashing the already toxic sky like murderer's knives.

Winter came abnormally, disturbingly late this year in Atlantic Canada, and I keep thinking about the summer of 2005, when the heat waves made going outside near impossible. While winter has finally arrived this season, and it is typically cold outside, the mercury even dropping to -30 last week, evidence of climate change is deeply disconcerting, particularly for coastal dwellers such as myself. How much are the waters going to rise? Scientists have predicted my hometown will be underwater in 100 years.

How is a person to process all of this, emotionally and intellectually?

Canada is taking a beating for its failure to uphold Kyoto, and the issue of the environment is shaping up to be the number one issue in our next federal election. Our new Liberal Leader, Stephane Dion, a former Environment Minister, and the owner of a dog named Kyoto is heading the charge against Stephen Harper, and taking a lot of flack for his less than stellar environmental policies in the process.

I enjoy politics as much as the next person, the theatre of it, the cloak and dagger-ism, the legacies made and lost. . . but at some point, some issues have to transcend politics. That our leader should be making the best policy decisions possible on the environment should be as much a given as that he or she should be able to read at a Grade 6 level.

This means, of course, that we need leaders and policy-makers who are not subject to greed, and therefore not apt to fold to the interests of big business in the name of donations, sponsorships and kickbacks.

Industry is the primary cause of what's happening environmentally, and carbon-credits is the closest we've come to finding a way to control their emissions.

Where does the answer lie? Surely with all of us, but recycling our bottles is just one step in the process. The people have to strong-arm not only the government, but big business, and short of all quitting our jobs and opting out of the culture of convenience and status, how can we do that?
The debate is about to ramp up, but it doesn't seem we have a lot of time to talk, so we'd better think fast and we'd better be blunt and we'd better pour our precious, human intelligence and energy into looking for real solutions, whether or not things are as bad as the prognosticators say. Because even if the situation isn't quite so dire...it soon will be. If you don't change direction, you end up where you're headed, as the old dicton goes.

So, how does civilization change course without being forced to by unimaginable catastrophe?

Ideas? Anyone?