What were we thinking?
This is a rant, unedited – so far – sent to a conservative-oriented mailing list subscribed to by quite a few folks. Didn’t have time to make it grammatically correct or eloquent. Perhaps will clean / tighten this up in time.
Re Heresy or Reality, you quoted noted climate change skeptic and oil patch friendly mouth piece Lorne Gunter, who wrote:
If solar activity is behind recent climate changes, rather than carbon dioxide emission—as many reputable scientists believe—then running around capping our CO2 production, banning this and taxing that, will cripple our economy without doing a thing to prevent a warming Earth.
Lorne Gunter has been riding that horse for a long time:
Liberals’ Kyoto plan full of hot air
By: Lorne Gunter,
EDMONTON JOURNAL Sunday 17 May 2005; p. A15Kyoto’s conscientious objector
More Kyoto scandal from Montreal – propaganda extraordinaire!
By: Lorne Gunter,
National Post November 28, 2005Greenhouse Gases are the result of political motives
By: Lorne Gunter
The Calgary Herald, June 10, 1998
“So why is it so hard for most government climate scientists to accept that the one-degree warming the Earth has experienced since the mid-19th century has been entirely, or even just mostly, caused by solar activity?I can’t help thinking their motives are political. Government can’t control the sun. ”
(and it goes on, and on…)
Gunter’s written record is clear, and given his obvious bias, there’s no reason to give him centre stage.
Anyone, and I truly mean anyone, can cherry pick quotations and conclusions from scientific studies, pseudo-science, reputable or crackpot researchers, to frame conclusions they’ve already decided to believe. Gunter, for whatever reason, is completely un-amenable to even considering that human activity on the earth may be causing negative impacts on a global scale. For that reason alone, his written works need to be taken as propaganda for one side of the argument, even as he castigates others for doing the same on the other.
No doubt Gunter was opposed to CFC-bans, arrived at as a result of the Montreal Protocol, that were, and remain, critical in protecting the ozone layer of the earth. Despite overwhelming evidence confirming the impact of human activities on the ozone layer, as measured over decades, you can still find so-called reputable scientists, as well as politicians and “journalists” (with Gunter this term must be used with some prejudice), who will try to argue against the facts.
We humans are not very humble creatures, so certain are we that we can master our world forever and a day. One upon a time our east and west coasts teemed with fish; now look at the cod fishery in Atlantic Canada, or speak to those watching our west coast salmon fishery being killed by inept regulation and active attack by coastal aquaculture practice. We will, in not many years, ask “what were we thinking” after our salmon fishery is dead, apparently after learning no lessons from our experiences on the other coast.
I wrote the above even before noting this article just published: Fish farms kill up to 95% of wild salmon, study finds (CBC News, Oct 2, 2006)
2,4D was once seen as an agricultural saviour, but is now a pariah. Former wonder-drugs resulted in hideous birth defects; cosmetic surgery in later illness, deformities, and death. PCB‘s, asbestos – there is a long list of “modern” remedies for old problems that have later caused society suffering and billions to act upon. In each case these potions, approaches, remedies, chemicals, materials and industries had their supporters in the press, in business, and in government.
Later we ask ourselves “what were we thinking”?
Our society over the past 60 years has readily embraced the notion that bigger / faster / cheaper is, or must be, better. Ecology, science and nature be damned, we’ll engineer or inoculate our way out of trouble or so we think.
In the drive to produce more product at a lower price family farms gave way to factory farming animals – organisms that just like us were never meant to live in small pens and cages, sitting in their own filth, sharing disease with one and all. You and I wouldn’t be able to survive in the conditions we expect our meat stock to live in before we butcher them, not without the constant application of antibiotics and chemicals. We fed ruminants to themselves – saved a cost there – only to find out that BSE was an unfortunate result. Oops.
Over medication of our society, and foodstuffs, looks to be supporting the rise of so-called ‘superbugs’. Oops. Who knew?
Conservatives ought to be first among those who apply a skeptical eye to such practices. We tend to be naturally reluctant to change for changes sake. Why then do “conservative parties” (and in this country, all parties in power) tend forget natural commonsense skepticism when it comes to our use, or abuse, of the natural world?
The fossil fuel industry is relatively young. 100 years ago we did not all consume many barrels of oil per person per year to live our lives. 60 years ago most of our families didn’t have a car, let alone two. 50 years ago our cities were smaller and more compact, and our population wasn’t so concentrated. “Cheap” oil, and no regulatory framework for the long term ensured it was cheap, made possible a radical restructuring of society. We called it progress. We, as a society, did little to question this progress or consider the longer term.
We didn’t cast a skeptical eye way back then at how we were engineering our our regions and cities. We are very likely to pay for that oversight in the next generation.
When the environmental movement started roughly 4 decades ago it was attacked. What was heretical (pollution in the great lakes? nah!) is now common sense. What were we thinking?
The global fossil fuel energy industry, on the scale that we see today, is the newcomer, not the old established practice. Over the next 24 hours over 84,000,000 (eighty four million) barrels of oil will be delivered around the world, and untold tonnes of coal, and set alight, burned, refined, and otherwise turned into other chemicals, energy sources and such – all processes producing massive amounts of pollutants and carbon.
And then, 24 hours later, another 84,000,000 barrels of oil and other fossil fuels will go through the same cycle. And then another, And another. And each year that amount grows. By 2020 the US Department of Energy estimates that daily oil consumption will have risen to 110M boe. Daily.
The injection of CO2, and other greenhouse gasses, into the atmosphere happens on a scale which is difficult for us to comprehend. Megatonnes of CO2 / GHGs pumped at a rate growing each and every effectively change the composition of our atmosphere. Common sense says there must be limits before nasty things happen, perhaps irreversible nasty things.
The conservative approach should be to recognize that human kind has become hooked on fossil fuels, over a very short space of history, without any real regard to repercussions.
The conservative approach has not now nor ever been contemplated when it comes to environmental management and sustainability. We’ve allowed the market rules all crowd to define the parameters of our world, and nothing is more sacrosanct to the market rules all crowd than growth.
Oil, it turns out, is an ideal energy vessel. Quite cheap over most of recent history, and cheap by many standards of measurement at todays cost, oil met the needs of the market by being always available in greater amounts. Energy == growth and the market gods were happy.
The market doesn’t need to consider the long term. Its today and this quarter that matter.
We’ve all nursed at the teat of this system, we are all complicit. Its exceedingly difficult to consider, even for those of us who are in fact skeptical, how our world could be run differently, so pervasive is the notion of readily available cheap energy to the very nature of our societies.
SO its no wonder that Lorne Gunter, with his well-baked-in prejudices keeps harping on his pet theory, no matter that the bulk of scientific opinion is opposite his. He simply finds a few scientists that agree with him, and calls the discussion over. He is merely a mirror as to what much of society is thinking. “We’ve always done it this way” and “I can’t see any other way”.
Our approach should naturally be to question whether our planet – our home, which we must all work to conserve for our children and future generations – can tolerate us continuing down this same path.
It is absolutely incredible, in every sense of the word, to merely assume that what we are doing is sustainable.
In closing I want to leave an open ended question: when was the last time that taking a prudent, conservative, approach to managing the environment and earth seen to be a “bad” thing in the fullness of time?
Sadly, if I were to venture a prediction on climate change, it will be that we’ll rue one day that we didn’t act sooner, and we, or our children, will be scratching their heads wondering “what were we thinking?”