Green. The word of the 21st century. Everybody has the Green solution to the end of the world. Recycle your waste. Switch to coily light bulbs that take a while to get bright when switched on (Kind of like me in the morning). Buy a hybrid car (Need to find a new name. This one brings up images of a Camry and Corvette doing nasty things in the dark nine months ago). Use public transit. The litany goes on and you are all as familiar with it as I am. It is being preached from the steps of parliament and the South Lawn. Children are indoctrinated with it in the class room. Talking heads on television run off at the mouth like a soup sandwich about it (all organic vegetable of course). And since it is preached, that bastion of preaching, the church, can’t be left out. Yes it is being preached from the pulpit as well. God has become Green. Actually I could deal with him better as a mischievous leprechaun with a sick and twisted sense of humour.
I confess the whole thing has me a bit confused. Global warming is a crisis and we need to deal with it. The problem I have is that I hear a lot of talk but don’t see much action. At least I don’t see a lot of improvement. Sympathetic magic is a concept used by modern witches. The theory is based on Like produces Like. Well this looks like the environmental plan decided on by our social and political leaders. If we talk about it long enough and wish for it hard enough then maybe the fairies of fate will grant our wish. I can see the coven meetings in Ottawa now with Stephen Harper as High Priest complete with stag horns with John Baird his faithful familiar.
The other problem is that each solution is being pitched as THE solution. Whether it is the demon spawn of macho muscle cars with the little veggie car that could or a new coloured box weekly set out at the curb, do this and all will be well is the pitch. Reality dictates that none of these really is THE answer and ALL of these are the answers. We must comprehensively change the way we live and the way our societies are structured. That is something none of our leaders want to talk about.
Recycling helps and it is a good thing to do. It is starting now to expand but more has to be done and fast. One of the saddest facts of the recycling program is that most of our recyclables end up in landfill anyway, just not our local landfill. Out of sight, out of mind. (I believe most of my recyclables are land-filled around Hamilton, Ontario which should annoy some of my colleagues 
)That’s not going to get us anywhere. There is not yet a strong enough market for the materials. The way to change this is to not offer a choice between products from recycled materials and new materials. If it can be made from recycled material, it MUST be made of recycled material. If we want to be serious about this process that must be our mantra.
The new energy efficient light bulbs being championed by David Suzuki solve one problem but create another. No plan to dispose of the mercury contained in them is presented along with the songs of praise. We cannot afford solutions that create problems elsewhere. The global biosphere is an wholistic system. The goal is to save it, not sweep the problems under a different leaf. Suzuki and other proponents of these bulbs make two arguments in their defense. Their long life means that the mercury is contained for perhaps a decade or more, there will be fewer light bulbs land-filled and therefore the impact will be minimal. I forget. How many billions in a minimal? Their lifespan is impressive providing nothing goes wrong. No incompetent handyman clips one with a ladder. No child disobeys a parent and plays ball in the house. No roof leaks. You get the picture. The second argument is that the amount of mercury is minimal. (See my previous question concerning minimal) We are told the mercury content is no more than that found in a watch battery. That really isn’t very much but I have only owned about a dozen watches through my life. Disregarding the ones that I had to wind that leaves three. I am currently wearing one and the other two, sentimental mementos of times gone by, are resting sans batteries in my jewelry box to be taken out only in those private moments of tears and scotch. I have only ever replaced the battery in one of them. But light bulbs? I got light bulbs coming out the ying yang. I counted 35 in my little semi-detached. Multiply that over the billion or so people in the industrialized first world and we are talking impact. The other problem I have with Suzuki’s argument here is that it is dismissive. He doesn’t argue that it is not a problem but that we shouldn’t worry about it. That is straight from the playbook of the idiots that got us all into this mess in the first place so excuse me if I am not real receptive to it.
As for the demon spawn mentioned above, hybrid cars, they show minimal carbon saving once all factors including manufacturing are considered. Transportation is the toughest environmental nut to crack. No one wants to give up their car. Actually I do. I can’t wait until I retire and go back to a car-less life. Right now I would get rid of my vehicle if there were a viable public transportation option. Currently we are spending billions, maybe trillions, of tax dollars to bail out an industry that must disappear if we want to spare this planet the horrors of an environmental holocaust. The only answer is the disappearance of the private automobile. Remove one or two lanes from the current multi-lane highways and dedicate them to public buses. Move the terminals to major highway interchanges with local systems feeding them and voila public transit is faster and more convenient than private vehicles. Eighty percent of the automobile traffic currently on the roads must be gone withing twenty years. Let’s get over it and move on. While there will be a transition of jobs with the change over, there need not be any net loss of jobs. The naysayers seem to believe that if we eliminate the private automobile that the world will come to a stop as the people of this planet fall into a stunned silence, immobile for the rest of eternity.
David Suzuki and others are supporting the creation of a carbon tax as a means to really get serious about the environment. It does hold promise to reduce carbon emissions. A carbon tax is a means of rationing by price. That has been done successfully before . However, in every case it has meant and will again this time that those at the bottom will shoulder the burden of lifting the world out of the crisis while those on top sail through their privileged lives with barely any inconvenience. Heaven forbid that the people David socializes with, or he himself, pitch in. Case in point, Suzuki was in the news this morning as part of a convention on Global Warming and winter sport I believe. It really doesn’t matter what the conference was about, it is the conference itself that was the problem. Participants travelled many miles, most in airplanes to get to it. Why? Why couldn’t it have been done virtually given our current communications capabilities? This would have made a gigantic carbon saving but Suzuki wouldn’t have the pleasure of staying at a luxury hotel and hobnobbing with his pals. Before you start putting more pressure on the working class and those on fixed income to fight the good fight one more time, you should maybe enlist yourself and spend a little time at the front.
A better answer would be direct carbon rationing as suggested in George Monbiot’s book Heat(click on page on sidebar to see review). Decide up front exactly how much carbon we can afford to expend each year and divide it up equally. If I don’t use all of mine because I am careful and conserve I can sell the left over credit to some wasteful slob with money. And trust me he will pay dear if he wants it. (Actually let me thank George Monbiot for the alternative solutions he presented in his book which I have borrowed here.) Publicly controlled rationing has also been done successfully in the past and it is fair and democratic. But then I keep forgetting, most people don’t really believe in democracy, apparently including David Suzuki, the Verdant Prince.
