Now we know

There is such a tendency to think we are free and independent. We are city dwellers or live in towns or in rural villages or farms. We have our own lives and we are unaffected by things going on in other places - until we are.

I’m indoors with air conditioner and air purifier running full blast. It’s better today with high moderate air pollution as opposed to two days ago when air quality in my city was the worst in the world. US neighboring cities are experiencing the same problems - caused by forest fires in several of our Canadian provinces. Air pollution doesn’t respect international boundaries. Fires take their own direction from the wind. We like to think we are in charge of the earth. We aren’t. We thought we had a master-slave relationship with nature. Nature is talking back.

Getting out of this will take more than modest remediation. Many are evacuated from their homes. Some have lost their homes entirely. My current discomfort is minor and I need to stop whining. Governments have work to do. Companies that burn fossils or like to log have work to do. Ordinary people have work to do - to protect themselves, yes, but to go much further. Now it is not only the dispossessed that can’t breathe. Now we know.

The Time has Come

Strong words from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, about the latest document from the International Panel on Climate Change. “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and he added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” 

 Bill McKibben’s latest essay in the New Yorker contends that the time to act is NOW.

 · There is a relation to the war in Ukraine.  Fossil fuel has given Putin the money to finance this atrocious invasion.

· John Kerry called the Glasgow climate talks our last best hope to which Greta Thumberg responded, “blah blah blah”.

·  If the US bans Russian oil – that’s just the beginning. We have to ban oil everywhere.

·  Our species has learned to depend on combustion. Now we have to unlearn it. We’ve focused on the pandemic, but we didn’t note this fact. In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as covid-19 did.

·  What we have forgotten is the fire that we can access from elsewhere without drilling for it – the sun.

·  We have the resources to replace burning fossil fuels. Early predictions of production of wind and solar energy production were pessimistic, but that is changing.  McKibben notes that Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources.

·  Cost matters.  Here is another quote from McKibben. “ By  2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.”

·  People have believed for a long time that the cost of changing from coal is prohibitive.  Since that is no longer the case, it is beliefs and attitudes that have to change.

·  There are huge implications for Canada, according to McKibben. “A third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)”

·  But we have a huge potential for renewable energy from the sky. Do we want to leave that in the air rather than thinking about what we can take from the ground?

·  Much of the world is an importer of coal – and the ships that carry it there do so over and over with fuel to transport it. Wind blades have to be transported too – but one shipment of them lasts for fifty years.

·  We are going to need more electricians.  That’s a retraining decision that has to be made by governments. They will ultimately be well paying jobs.

·  We’re still up against those who want to keep burning things – including one member of the US senate who holds the power to do so while benefiting from coal production. We pretend that natural gas is cleaner, while forgetting that it still involves burning something. Natural gas, McKibben says, is a bridge fuel to nowhere.

·  Wood burning is also seen as an alternative. But wood takes years to replace and all the tree planting in the world can’t keep up.

·  Carbon capture is raised as a possibility – but it costs more than solar power.

·  Utilities will fight hard – charging huge rates for changing systems to discourage changes. Governments need to regulate.

·  After pointing out that those who cause the least energy damage are the ones to suffer most, McKibben quotes Naomi Klein on inequities and the need for environmental organizations to think beyond themselves: “ Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. “

·  The haves of the world have to pay more to the fifty five have-not countries to help them pay for transfers to renewable energy.  So far, these have been empty promises.

·  We need to learn from our indigenous cousins who know the value of using small fires to prevent larger conflagrations – something that they have known for hundreds of years.

There were prophets. . .

Decades ago we enjoyed the satirical Tom Lehrer and responded to his songs as funny and relevant. We missed the seriousness of the content because he was so engaging. "Always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a prophet." a friend told him He was born in 1928 which puts more birthdays into the 90s - and after retiring from performing, he went back to teach mathematics. But now both environmental and faith based groups have to deal with the following outcomes of one of his best known songs:

Air pollution
Freshwater pollution
Land and soil pollution
Marine and coastal pollution
Chemical pollution
Waste pollution
Online data pollution

We were quick to accept the reality of the words even then. But it didn’t move us toward action. Satire is just one of the art forms that points to realities and the changes we must make. The current messages on climate change are often deadly serious and lead to denial or despair. I wonder if we can still respond to Lehrer - and not just laugh but do something about it. But it’s not quite as funny as it was in the past. Jonathan Swift, the writer of Gulliver’s Travels, would agree.

True Cost

When a cargo ship was stuck in the Suez Canal. we saw many pictures and got a sense of how big these vessels are. They are loaded with containers and we may not think who those containers are carrying and where they are going. Two US based not-for-profits decided to find out.

The study, prepared by Stand.earth and Pacific Environment found that most of the items were headed for 15 major retail companies. Here is an indication of the damage:

“Collectively, the top importers of U.S. goods are responsible for emitting as much sulfur oxide, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter as tens of millions of U.S. vehicles every year. These emissions are some of the most dangerous and deadly types of air pollutants, contributing to asthma, cancer, and premature death, and increasing the mortality risk from respiratory-based illnesses like COVID-19.”

Here are some of the names and the impacts:

“Walmart, for example, was responsible for 3.7 million metric tons of climate pollution from its shipping practices in 2019, more than an entire coal-fired power plant emits in a year. Target, IKEA, Amazon, and eleven other companies were also investigated.”

According to the study, there are 55,000 merchant ships on the water and the number is growing. All of them but one (noted elsewhere as the first electric merchant ship) use fossil fuels. It’s a reminder that our consumer life style does not take the full cost to the atmosphere into account. What is even worse is that the poorest among us are the ones most likely to live closest to the pollution along the shipping routes.

We often feel helpless. But we can tell them we know what is happening and challenge them to deal with it. We can buy elsewhere - and we can buy less.