Did somebody say "soapbox"? :-)
It’s Not Easy Being Green
It turns out the frog was right, although he wasn’t singing about the environment.
The war on plastic shopping bags is another rearrangement of the deck chairs. The bags issue at least impacts at a personal, everyday level. It even costs us a few dollars. But disposable shopping bags account for just over one percent of landfill. The reusable alternatives amount to a polypropylene rug under which to sweep a greater problem: the packaging of the items inside them. Relaxing in the green glow of these bags are consumers who are high-maintenance but think they’re low maintenance (to misappropriate a phrase).
Shrink-wrap over everything we buy is one thing. I recently joined with friends on a four-wheel drive weekend: kids, tents, bacon and eggs. And 100 litres of nonrenewable fossil fuel per vehicle, which we converted into about 300kg of greenhouse gas. I’m not picking on recreational vehicles particularly. Your return flight to Melbourne for the weekend used a similar amount of fuel per head. Every time you put on the air con rather than a jumper you become part of the problem. In your 30 square eveless heated towel-rail downlight-constellation ducted-air McMansion.
Take a drive (no, a bus) to the 2600 megawatt Bayswater Power Station, and boggle at the mountain of coal conveyor-fed direct from mine to furnace. Every time you flick a switch another kilogram of carbon goes up into the atmosphere.
There’s a disconnect between our lifestyle and its consequences. Assume for the moment that they’re right: the 97% of scientists who say that global warming heading towards catastrophic climate change is real, and greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas are the primary cause. Decades hence our children’s children, living with this, will incredulously ask their grandparents, What were you thinking…? The epithet "future eaters" would be apt.
Greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) are invisible and easy to ignore. Smog from burning fossil fuel is obvious, alarming, and political. It gets attention. Now it’s been discovered that this form of visible pollution blocks sunlight and causes “global dimming”, i.e. less warming. Ironically, by fixing only the symptom, we’re letting off a handbrake on warming. Since the 70s oil shock, fossil fuel consumption has increased globally by 73%. Global reserves of oil, coal and gas are estimated in decades. The environment will run out before they do.
Cheap petrol is a sacred staple along with bread and milk. Educating people to act responsibly and sacrificially largely doesn’t work. User pays does. Petrol in Europe is about AU$1.70 a litre. In the US it’s a bit over AU$0.70. It’s no surprise then that North Americans consume 5 times more energy per capita than the global average. Environmentally the United States is the leading rogue state. Australia isn't far behind at nearly 70% of their levels.
Bob Carr talks green but capitulates to coal and private transport. The Howard government won’t ratify Koyoto because it’s bad for business. Bush is Big Oil. (But who elected them.) China and India are now rapidly industrialising, with few of the eco-restraints it’s taken the West a couple of centuries to begin to face up to.
Professor James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis and environmental icon, is now advocating an interim widespread switch to nuclear power. He says this is the only way to prevent crossing an irreversible climatic “tipping point”. Alternative renewable energy sources just won’t be ready in time. He’s now at loggerheads which much of the green movement.
Doomsday prophets have a bad track record. But the past is not always the key to the future.
© 2005 Mark Elkington (Sydney, Australia)
From:
http://www.users.on.net/~elkos/