Tag Archives: environment

Nobody Knows What’s Happening

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About a year ago, the Canadian Conservative government announced that it had a plan to cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions 20% from 2006 levels by 2020. The new regulations were scheduled to come into force on January 1, 2010. I was pretty happy – skeptical of Stephen Harper’s ability to carry this out, and wishing it was an even greater reduction – but still happy that progress was being made.

A few months ago, there was one article buried deep in my local newspaper that announced that the Harper government was giving up on this plan. They didn’t want to hurt the economy, or trade with the States, or something like that, so they were going to wait until the Waxman-Markey legislation was fully implemented. That meant they wouldn’t do anything on the issue until 2012, and even then it would take until 2016 for the laws they’d agreed on to come into force. I recall one interviewee in the newspaper saying that it was pretty ridiculous for a prime minister these days to expect to take no action on climate change for his first 6 years in office – and expect to get away with it.

These sort of political decisions usually make their way through the Globe and Mail, CBC, Rick Mercer, and Maclean’s pretty quickly. But this time, I only read the one, half-hidden article, and despite an extensive search, couldn’t find any other mention of it. I was amazed.

As I mention Canada’s (in)action on climate change in a (hopefully soon to come) video I’m working on, I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight. So I went through the Environment Canada website, which, believe me, is not an easy task. Every time I clicked on a link that said “action” or “Canada’s action plan” it lead me to a page that said “Copenhagen is coming!”

Eventually I found the page that described the 20% by 2020 plan – “Turning the Corner”. It hadn’t been updated in over a year – the last announcement was from August 9, 2008. There was no mention if the plan had been abandoned or postponed. And yet it still said,

“Proposed greenhouse gas regulations are expected to be published in the Canada Gazette later this year, and the regulations finalized in 2009 to come into force as planned on January 1, 2010.”

So they hadn’t done anything on this plan for a year, but were still claiming that it would come into force in four months, all the while making no admission of its abandonment and hoping nobody would notice.

I asked a coworker, who had been just as confused as I was. We called the help number at the bottom of  the page, which, unfortunately, was the central information line for all of the Government of Canada. The employee who answered seemed to know even less than we did regarding Canada’s climate change plans.

“I can’t find anything,” he said. “What’s the name of the report?”

“Turning the Corner,” we replied.

“Okay. Just hang on while I type that into Google.”

Eventually we were sent to another federal website (which is so hidden that I can’t even find it again) which apparently dealt with greenhouse gases. It turns out that all they did was measure Canada’s emissions, and require any industrial plants that surpassed a certain amount to report this to the government – but not have to reduce them. Nowhere was there mention of Turning the Corner or any other kinds of regulations.

The environment section of Harper’s website was even worse. Words like “emissions intensity”, “clean air”, “home energy efficiency”, and “environmental leadership” were tossed around, assuming that nobody would read between the lines to discover how little Harper was actually doing about climate change.

The government employee on the line also gave us the number of the Environment Canada deparment. We called them and were given the number of the secretariat for greenhouse gas management. We called that number and got the answering machine. It was 2:00 PM on a Monday. We’ve never heard back.

Does anybody in Canada actually know what’s going on with climate change? Why isn’t anyone demanding answers? Is our country really so apathetic one way or the other?

At least in the States there’s a major opposition to cap-and-trade, so the government can’t pull the wool over your eyes too easily. At least it’s a controversy which is visible to the public

If any Canadian readers actually know what’s happening, or have any more information, please leave comments – this is far too important to ignore.

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A Fun Quote

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“Although the most extreme environmental zealots may be relatively few in number, they have managed to gain undue influence by exploiting the gullibility of scientifically illiterate people who are only too willing to believe the planet needs saving from man’s excesses. Perhaps this phenomenon is a psychological throwback to earlier civilizations that offered human sacrifices to the gods to assuage their sins and spare them from punishment in the form of drought, flood, famine, or disease. There are certainly many parallels between modern environmentalism and ancient religions.”

–The Heartland Institute

The Time We Have Left

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11th hourLast Christmas, I was given the documentary The 11th Hour as a gift. I admit that I was somewhat skeptical of its legitamacy – as much as we all loved Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, I wasn’t sure how credible a documentary created by a movie star would be. It was also wrapped in something called BioFilm that sounded kind of sketchy (admittedly, I don’t know what the plastic was made of, but chances are that it’s corn ethanol – not the greatest of fossil fuel replacements).

However, when I watched the film, I was utterly engrossed. My favourite thing about the 11th hour is that most of the dialogue and narration comes from interviews with incredibly articulate experts. This film featured scientists, authors, First Nations leaders, CEOs of green businesses, and national security officials. David Suzuki, Stephen Schneider, Paul Hawken, and Stephen Hawking were just a few of those interviewed.

The 11th Hour dicusses many different aspects of environmental depletion, sociology, and solutions. It opened with a sort of celebration of life and the beauty of nature. I believe it was Paul Hawken that said something along the lines of, “In your body, right this very second, there are three (something with a lot of billions and trillions) things happening at once. That’s a three with twenty-four zeros after it. Right this second. And in the next second, as you sit there on the couch, one hundred times more things are happening than there are stars and planets in the universe. And that is what we call life.”

The section on climate change was brief, but quite well done. Most of the time was devoted to talking about possible impacts – how warming would affect our water security, food security…..However, Stephen Schneider delivered a fantastic quote that’s quite relevant to this blog:

“Some scientists are amazed that in the media debate and in Congress there are people who stand up and say, “I believe” or “I don’t believe in global warming,” as if it were some sort of object of religion, instead of based in evidence.”

(Check out the post Making Up Your Own Science for more on that topic.)

Following the climate change discussion were small sections devoted to forestry, aquatics, biodiversity, and hyperconsumerism. However, the discussion on extinction was so compelling to me that it dwarfed all the previous discussions. The film explored how extinction is inevitable to a species, that the demise of an entire species is as natural as the death of a single organism. It’s no secret that humans will eventually become extinct. The question is how our actions today are affecting when that extinction will happen, and how many other species we are taking down with us.

The last third of the movie was devoted to possible solutions. I applaud the filmmakers in this decision. The first part of the film was pretty darn scary, and ending on an optimistic note made me feel more motivated for action. And what an optimistic note it was! The film discussed how our current system of economics discourages environmental action, and how we could reinvent our economy so that it is more in tune with sustainability and quality of life. It discussed biomimicry, a principle of design which mimics nature, such as the incredibly strong spider’s silk, the structural (rather than pigmented) colour of the blue morpho butterfly, and self-cleaning leaves. “The generations alive today,” Paul Hawken said, “will have to reinvent everything…..what a great time to be born, what an opportunity.”

Happy things

The 11th Hour ended on such a hopeful note that I felt myself becoming more optimistic. There is time to solve the problem of climate change. If our global carbon emissions drop to zero by the middle of this century, we will never pass the 2 C warming which is estimated to be a tipping point. Some warming is inevitable, but we still have time to stop it getting out of control.

In the Discover article on climate change this June, the panel of scientists was asked how hopeful they were that humanity could solve the problem of climate change. Most of them answered that they felt very sure that we had the resources and technology to drastically reduce, or even eliminate, carbon emissions. But they weren’t so sure that we had the will. The world has known about this problem for over 40 years, but little has been done.

But to think that we still have a chance…..no matter how small….it makes me want to grab on to that chance and run with it and do all that I can to make it come true.

If it clashes with the economy, we’ll reinvent the economy. If the oil executives get mad, we’ll pay them a lot of money to develop wind power and geothermal. If the skeptics continue to argue, we’ll say to them, as we should be saying now, “The stakes are too high to base our actions on the best possible scenario.”

The fact that there still is a tangible chance, however small, that we could fix the problem of climate change altogether, is so exciting that I feel obliged to pursue it.

Undeveloped

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In Canada, where I live, there are recycling bins everywhere you go. Every public place, office building, or school has blue boxes that are almost as easy to find as garbage cans. In Canada, it is almost a public embarrassment not to recycle. I seem to remember reading that upwards of 97% of homes put out recycling with their garbage pickup every week.

In Canada, it would be hard to find a suburban street where nobody had a compost pile in their backyard. Most universities have some sort of campus composting program. More and more municipalities are even getting curbside compost pickups along with their garbage and recycling.

In Canada, most sit-down restaurants serve their meals in reusable dishes. Receiving a meal where anything other than the napkin was designed to be thrown out would reflect badly on the restaurant. Eating a hotel breakfast out of Styrofoam would make the hotel seem much less classy.

In Canada, we know we have a long way to go. We continually feel bad about our national ecological footprint. We compare ourselves to Europe and groan. We’re one of the worst per-capita polluters in the world.

I have never had reason to feel proud of the environmental practices of my country. Until now.

A trip south

This weekend, I travelled down to the United States for the first time since becoming interested in the environment. I already knew that the US was slightly worse than Canada in terms of environmental policy. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

Recycling appeared to be nonexistent. It was the exception rather than the rule. At the hotel I stayed at, there was not a single recycling bin in the entire building. Not even for paper! In my entire stay, I believe I saw recycling bins in two public places. I ended up hoarding all my recyclables and bringing them home with me. I couldn’t bear to throw out a milk carton, drink can or piece of cardboard.

Even worse were the widespread use of disposable products. The continental breakfast that the hotel served did not offer a single reusable plate, glass, or piece of cutlery. There were only two places that I ate where not everything was designed to be thrown out. One of those places randomly served water and soft drinks in flimsy plastic cups. Food just doesn’t taste as good in dishes designed for the landfill, at least for me. I ate out of a Tupperware container and a travel mug for most of my meals.

I am so used to, after every meal, separating my waste into three piles: recycling, composting, and garbage. It’s almost unconscious. And now, suddenly, I was expected to merge my three piles into the one that I avoided most of all.

How could the most economically powerful nation in the world lack basic sustainability practices? How could cities that have light rail transit not have a recycling program?

It never occurred to me that somewhere so developed could be so undeveloped in their environmental practices.

Please, America. Catch up to the rest of the world. This isn’t like health insurance where only the nation involved is affected. When you take no measures to decrease your environmental impact, every being on this planet is being harmed.