When writing on climate change in a New York Times op-ed – “The Aliens Have Landed” – Mark Bittman bites:
We know that when little green men with Shar Pei-like faces invade Earth, we’ll recognize that we are all one and act accordingly, uniting to defeat them and creating a world that recognizes our elemental mutual needs of land, water and air, and maintains their sanctity.
But it’s the blindly irrational mistreatment and abuse of land, water and air that have gotten us into this mess, whose visage is not that of a green Shar Pei-faced critter with a ray gun but one that just looks like … weather.
… the aliens are in the backyard, Granny, and it’s time to start hitting them with the cast-iron pans. The deniers are the equivalent of hucksters selling you a ray-gun-proof magic hat.
“I guess I can stop worrying about my grandchildren,” someone said to me, recognizing that change has come faster than all but a few had anticipated, and that it’s our lifetimes that are threatened now.
You can give up, of course; people will. Or you can break out the clichés about extraordinary times requiring extraordinary measures, put an evil alien face on climate change, and get to work supporting those measures that you know will either mitigate it or help us adapt.
.
Canadians, however, will do neither. Many of our leaders, the ones we elected, believe the problem is that the world is not burning fossil fuels fast enough. But we are here to help. If Canadians can dig it up, put it in a pipeline or get it to a port, we will sell it to those with the resources to get our resources.
So who are we, really?
Outdoors-loving, wilderness-protecting advocates for a more sustainable world, but who will do what we can to undermine any serious attempt to constrain carbon consumption?
We need an honest word to describe our dishonesty.
Our dishonesty – or the dishonesty of the people who manage to get elected by our increasingly broken system?
Canada — we export climate change.
We pat ourselves on the back for getting people out of cars. Then we promote and grow flights in and out of YVR as some sort of success.
The fliers are going to keep flying. Having them do so out of YVR instead of first driving to Bellingham or Seattle is preferable from an environmental perspective as well as an economic one.
Voters, like politicians are consumed with short term thinking. It leads to very bad results in the long term.
It may be greener to drive to Seattle for a flight if that reduces the length of the flight by a similar distance. Especially if you’re not alone.
With David’s line of thinking (people are not going to change bad habits, so we might as well make money off of their bad habits), then we should export more oil and build more pipelines and increase tanker traffic.