Good News

The local paper brought the good news that global warming is a fixable situation and we have enough time to do the fixing.

I believe this is true.

What is missing from this assessment is that governments, industries and individuals will actually face up to the amount of fixing necessary to keep the chaos of population shifts, storm intensity rise with attendant habitat destruction, crop failures, coastal erosion and myriad effects on animal and plant life. We are told that China and India will continue to pollute the skies inasmuch as they are developing nations.

The U.S. is the world champ at the moment, throwing up some 24.5 tons of greenhouse gas per person. China is a close second. The problem is that China and India have over two billion people while the U.S. has only 300 million--and they are catching up to us , fast.

We can do some things on an individual basis, like equipping our homes with compact fluorescent lamp bulbs (CFLs), trading in our 15-MPG SUV's for 50-MPG Prius's, installing energy-efficient air conditioners and heat pumps, riding bikes or walking instead of driving, etc.

But all that will have only a minuscule effect on the warming of the Earth. What is the real source of all the greenhouse gas that is causing the deepening problem?

We must look into our own behavior to understand how difficult it will be to curb our appetite for all the goodies with which our industrial empire continues to shower on us. If we want to continue to drive in lonely splendor from our suburban pads to our spanking new industrial plants, if we want to continue to flit in airliners from here to there around the world, if we can't do without our electronic gadgets, if we must expand our cities at the expense of forest and farm land, all to enhance the bottom line for more and more entrepreneurs and industrialists, then we will continue to see the inexorable rise in temerature.

The change will hurt. We have to pay a price for avoiding catastrophe or else the price that will fall on our children and grandchildren will be unbearably severe. What price? Tune in later. I'm in Canada at the moment and learning a great deal about how our neighbors to the north are changing their life style.