Power & Energy

We in the west are the beneficiaries of the development of energy originally produced by the burning of coal. I am old enough to remember the arrival of the coal man who provided fuel stored in the basement of my house - a scary person, because he was necessarily covered in soot. Later the oil truck arrived to deliver fuel. Still later, my father had a heat pump installed in a newer house - in the late 1970s. His motivation probably had little to do with saving the planet, but saving money.

Canada is blessed with much electricity produced by hydro electric power and my province has more resources than others. But it is human power that also plays a role. There is news this morning that young people in Montana have been successful in suing their state government asking for the right to “a clean and healthful environment” through a provision relating to energy projects. It’s the first successful case following a number of others started by young people. The impact on climate has to be a consideration in approving projects, and more rulings will now have a better chance of success. The suit was brought on behalf of the Children’s Trust and it involved 16 young people aged 5=22.

The oldest of these will be 49 in 2050. I have a friend who is now in his 102nd year and he has said that he thinks 144 would be a good age for a lifetime. He is a retired professor and when he retired at 75 as a University professor, he thought working five hours a day on academic research would be a good aim. He still does - without either a TV or a computer - but attends both opera and Blue Jays games as a fan. His environmental impact is much lower than mine - and since he has never driven a car, it undoubtedly is.

The likelihood of his making age 144 is small. But the politicians who want to slow down the use of climate change might think about how old they will be in 2050. The premier of Alberta will be 79 that year. I’m in a better position than she is to imagine what life will be like for her then. She won’t have her current job. She may have health issues relating to climate change or be affected directly by floods or fires. But basically she will have left the problem of pausing the support of renewable energy for a bit - as she has just done- to the current five and 22 year olds. I wonder how she will feel then.

What we generally lack is imagination and a realistic picture of human nature - the latter with its combination of strength and limitations. Politicians start with the best of intentions - to make the world the better place. After a term of office the intention becomes to stay in office. They like power after having a taste of it. Companies are good at telling us that climate change depends on us as individuals so they can keep doing what they do, which is to make a profit. They like power too.

That doesn’t mean that individual actions don’t count. I continue to recycle in the hope that at least some of my trash gets re-used. I send letters to my premier urging him to reconsider his original promise to retain the Greenbelt. Individuals matter - but governments and movements matter even more. Young people are teaching us that the law matters. What if all these elements converged? That’s a story that imagination could start to tell.

Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.

Normal?

We have seen some encouraging return of audiences to arts events and other places where people congregate. During the pandemic there was a lot of hope for things to go “back to normal” - as though life in the twenty-first century ever had a degree of stability. Recent years were not without abnormal events - in New York in 2001, or 2020 with an insurrection in Washington, or the discovery of mass graves near Canadian residential schools. The world before the 1950s wasn’t exactly normal either, but the 50s remain a dream world to return to for many.

We are hearing “normal” preceded by “new” in descriptions of climate change now. There’s a deception in feeling that the heat, flooding and fires will stay at the same level as they are now. We just have to accept that and deal with it and that will make it OK.

What a cop-out. It shows how we resist facing the reality that there is only a now - and that a future that depends on what we do today. Doing the same things will not create normality, however dysfunctional. It will only make things worse.

An App for That

The other evening I sat on my balcony watching planes circle and appear to be going east when the airport was to the west - but it was a pattern that allowed them to form a line to come in as others could be seen heading out to the east until they disappeared at higher heights. New planes coming in dotted the evening sky and suddenly their landing lights appeared in a kind of fairy tale illiumination - until one thought of how much energy all this was taking as their passengers landed to consume even more as they boarded their cars, buses and taxis.

A better choice might be using apps to explore nature - even in an urban environment. Here are some:

Search your app store for a bird identifier software. You will find several of them Try E-Bird or Merlin from Cornell labs designed to answer the question, What’s that Bird? Most of us as children could name several - and now we can’t - either because we have forgotten. or because they are not around any more. Becoming conscious of other forms of life around us matters more for our future than watching planes come in. It’s a great story about citizen science,

PlantNet and Picture this does similar things for plants. There’s another one for trees. We need to become much more aware of our surroundings - and remind ourselves that technology is a means to the ends that we actually value.

Faster

“A report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters.”

The date was 1972 and the report was published by the Club of Rome with the title, “Limits to Growth”. A year ago there was a 50th year anniversary gathering called “Beyond Growth” with very low attendance - but for one this year, thousands packed the EU meeting rooms. We are starting to accept the reality that that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” and we are moving in the wrong direction without knowing how to stop.

We hear often that the solution is Green Energy - forgetting that the creation of new systems takes energy to produce the required minerals. Hello Mining. Bill McKibbon suggests that maybe we have to slow down, returning to the lifestyle of the 60s “consume less, travel less, build less, eat less wastefully.” He has also been a fan of Green Energy, realizing that its growth creates local problems. Clean energy does not mean clean production, and those who produce it usually live closest to the environmental degradation it causes. Those of us who live well are the ones that are going to have to learn to live more simply - and that means a different ethic than the one of More - Now.

To stabilize the earth’s temperature:

• Reduce passenger car transport by 81%.

• Limit per-person air travel to one trip per year.

• Decrease living space per person by 25%.

• Decrease meat consumption in rich countries by 60%.

Sounds rather like my life in the 60’s - and a happy one it was. Slowing down might be more attractive if it would lessen the world from heating up - which it is.