I just watched a great TED talk by Bill Gates. He cogently explains the real threat of climate change, particularly to the world’s poorest 2 billion people. He goes on to describe the urgent demand for an energy breakthrough that can radically reduce the planet’s carbon emissions. He also discusses exciting innovations in nuclear power which, on the face of them, sound pretty convincing:
As regular readers know, I’m working on the TckTckTck campaign, fighting for a fair, ambitious and binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen. We’re in the second, final week of negotiations and things are heating up. This past weekend, the campaign organized a third global day of action. It featured over 3000 events–candlelight vigils, marches, protests and so forth–in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The previous two days, by Avaaz on September 21 and 350.org on October 24, were similar in scale.
Ineachcase, there’s been a video hastily produced that seeks to document the day and further inspire the climate change movement. Together, they tell the story of global climate action over the past six months, and look pretty slick doing it.
In the next couple of weeks, there are two big climate change-related events that I wanted to mention.
First up, this Thursday is Blog Action Day, a day on which a bunch of bloggers agree to all write about the same topic. This year, that topic is climate change (over at TckTckTck, we pushed hard to make that happen).
If you’re a blogger, please consider joining Blog Action Day and, this Thursday, writing about climate change. If you do, you can find plenty of helpful assets associated with the TckTckTck campaign. We’ve got a bunch of evocative photos on our Flickr stream, and a mega YouTube playlist of great videos.
Bridge to a Cool Planet
October 24 is the Global Day of Climate Action, where people all over the planet engage in thousands of actions–flash mobs, parades, protests and other events–to call for a fair, binding and ambitious climate treaty. This two-minute video (featuring an awesome Sigur Ros song) explains:
The biggest event that I’m aware of locally is Bridge to a Cool Planet. The northbound lanes of the Cambie Street Bridge will be closed to traffic, and people will walk north across the bridge and then east over to Science World, where there will apparently be festivities throughout the afternoon.
The excellent people at the Surrey International Writers Conference have kindly shuffled the schedule around so that I can come down and take part for a couple of hours in the afternoon. If you’re in the vicinity during the actual walk, drop me a tweet or text.
Many years ago, my friend convinced me that the Cambie Street Bridge, though least attractive, has the best views of any bridge on the south side of downtown. That’s a bonus to the whole fighting climate change business, but the views alone are worth the walk.
As I’ve mentioned in passing a couple of times, I’m excited to be working with the TckTckTck campaign. It’s an unprecedented coalition of global NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, Amnesty International among others–here’s a complete list on the website or Twitter) dedicated to urging world leaders to agree to a binding, fair and ambitious deal in Copenhagen this December, where they’ll negotiate the sequel to the Kyoto Protocol.
There’s a series of global events happening over the next three months. The first of these is the Global Wake Up Call, more than 2000 flash mobs and other events that occur all over the world next Monday, September 21. There are 188 events happening in Canada, and at least a dozen–like this one–are happening around Vancouver. If you’re looking to do something over lunchtime next Monday, maybe you’d like to join one?
Our climate action dividends arrived today. For non-British Columbian readers, the provincial government has seen fit to bestow CAN $100 on every person with a British Columbian address. This cash-in-hand accompanies new taxes and new tax cuts. From the brochure that accompanied our cheques:
New tax reductions, new programs and the Climate Action Dividend are all designed to support your climate smart choices. Whether you purchase energy-efficient light bulbs, shop locally for produce, or use your dividend to help purchase eco-friendly upgrades in your home, your decisions can make a big difference.
First, a couple of petty complaints about the brochure itself:
There are photos of nine people on it, and eight of them are women and girls. Subtext: men can’t be bothered with the environment.
The English side of the brochure prominently features a photo of a (forgive me) very dorky, glasses-wearing girl clutching a sapling. Subtext: only nerds care about the environment.
The phrase ‘global warming’ is three times as popular on the web as ‘climate change’. Yet the brochure only uses the latter term. Subtext: the government’s PR firm set the messaging instead of picking terms that people actually use.
I think this is an idiotic program. The vast majority of British Columbians are going to spend this money the same way they spend every other dollar. If the government wants to make the environment a priority, then they ought to invest the $440 million in measurable initiatives that are in the public interest.
However, I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise. Who wants to mount a rational, evidence-based argument in favour of the climate action dividend? I think I was out of the country when this announced, so I missed the initial flurry of punditry.
I tried to do this for myself. My first point was the citation of the Canada Child Tax Benefit or ‘baby bonus’. I did find some (hardly definitive) evidence that it increases the birth rate. Still, I’m not sure that comparing it to this one-off cheque is an apples to apples argument.
We’re doing some work at the moment for the Clean Air Foundation. Specifically, we’re helping to spread the word about Mow Down Pollution, one of those small, worthy causes that makes the world a little greener. They’re running a program to get rid of as many of those old, polluting, two-stroke mowers are they can:
Bring your working or non-working gas-powered mower or trimmer to any Home Depot location between April 17 and 27, 2008 and receive up to a $100 instant rebate on the purchase of a new push-reel, electric, rechargeable or low-emission alternative mower or trimmer.
When we took on this project, I was a little sceptical. Lawnmowers are big polluters? As it turns out, they’re pretty dirty:
A gas mower can emit the same amount of air pollutants in one hour as driving a new car for over 550km.
Statistics Canada reports that gas-powered lawn equipment releases about 80,000 tonnes of emissions in Canada every year, using 151 million litres of gas.
The Mow Down program has been around since 2001, and thus far has taken 18,000 gas lawnmowers and trimmers off of the country’s lawns.
Of course, you could go one step better and just get rid of the monoculture that is your lawn altogether. Here are some earth-friendlier alternatives.
We had a launch event yesterday behind the legislature building in Victoria. Minister of the Environment Barry Penner was on hand to give some of the alternative mowers a try on the legislature lawn. I took some photos.
Thanks to Rob, Erika and Rebecca for blogging about this. If you want to mention it, don’t let me stop you. If that’s too much of a commitment, you can become a fan on Facebook.
Sarah Marchildon works for the David Suzuki Foundation. She’s in Bali at the moment, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where the world is negotiating the sequel to the Kyoto Agreement. She’s been blogging about her work there, and I’ve enjoyed two recent posts.
Once the morning meeting is over, it’s time to hike back to the conference centre to take in a press conference or two. Today there were 21 different press conferences to choose from. I’m less interested in the content of the press conference and more interested in the questions the journalists are asking. It’s a good way to find out what’s generating a buzz in Bali.
Canada’s bad behaviour isn’t going unnoticed. I had lunch with an Australian journalist today who said the event was a “complete con” and “totally outrageous.”
A Nigerian delegate joined our table. Upon learning I was Canadian, he said, “Aren’t you ashamed to show your face here?”
That reputation has been well-earned in recent years. Despite concern for the environment being a top issue for Canadians in poll after poll, our government has been all about bluster and in-action. I’m proud of my nation for so many things, but I’ve ashamed of Canada on climate change.
On a trivial, vaguely-related note, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the top-level domain .INT used (for the Bali conference website).
I was reminded by Erika that today is Blog Action Day, a day on which 15,000 bloggers will be writing to their 12 million users about the environment.
I thought I’d take the opportunity to confess my big eco-sin. Throughout my adult life, I’ve lived–compared to the average Canadian–a relatively environmentally friendly life. I’ve lived in small apartments, rarely used a car, don’t eat red meat (and try to always choose organic chicken), recycled and so forth. These are small gestures that happen to coincide with my preferred lifestyle, and they’re not going to change the world.
However, I love to travel. I’ve flown a lot in the past decade–probably around 100 individual flights. And, as you probably know, air travel is a beast for climate change. There are other high-impact elements of travel, but flights are the worst. Plus there’s a compelling economic argument for travel bolstering economies in the developing world.
Tickets to Guilt Avoidance Town
Recently we’ve started buying carbon credits, but those are really tickets to Guilt Avoidance Town more than anything else. Likewise, I regularly donate to the David Suzuki Foundation, but that hardly excuses the air travel, does it?
What to do? Besides fly less, there are no easy answers. It’s going to take decades for airplanes to get more eco-friendly. That’s particularly tricky considering our home base in Vancouver. It’s a long way to anywhere from there, you know? One strategy I do hope to apply is squishing more activities under one flight. So, instead of going to Europe twice in a year, we go once, stay twice as long, and take trains and ferries between our sundry destinations. Given that this Malta experiment has worked out pretty well in terms of working remotely, that seems viable.
The other thing I can do is act (to use Andrea’s phrase) as a lobbyist and a change agent to convince other people, companies and governments to live greener. This gets into the whole Stacies thing, but that’s really the only way I’m going to offset a lifetime’s worth of air travel.
Via a recent bookmark from Todd, I discovered The Breathing Earth. You may have seen it already (it seems to have made the rounds), but I dig it. It’s a lovely visualization of the world’s births, deaths and carbon dioxide emissions. I’m not exactly selling it there–just go check it out.
Today over at The Conscious Earth, there’s a post about Heather Stillwell, hyper-conservative rabble rouser:
As Conscious Earth visitors read last month, free copies of An Inconvenient Truth were made available to every high school in British Columbia thanks to the charitable contribution of the Tides Canada Foundation. Now, Surrey school trustee Heather Stilwell wants the widely discredited mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to be shown alongside Al Gore’s global warming documentary.
If you read on in that post (or this one or this one), you’ll see that Ms. Stillwell fancies the contrarian limelight (would that be the lemon light?). And why do all the conservative nutters seem to live in Surrey? Hmm…in truth, I guess there are a few in my childhood home of West Vancouver, too.
I should clarify my ambiguity in that last paragraph. All conservatives are not nutters, nor are all Surreyites (Surreyans? Surreydanavians?). However, it seems like all the Lower Mainland nutters who are conservative come from Surrey. Onward.
In circumstances like this, the Heather Stillwells of the world appeal to our rationalism by calling for ‘both sides of the story’ to be told in schools. That theory has always appealed to me, but obviously isn’t practical on every single issue we teach. Is smoking really bad for you? Was Shakespare actually a nobleman? Do muons really exist? High school would stretch into our early thirties.
Really, it’s a question of scientific consensus. I think that if there’s an academic consensus on a subject (say, gravity), then we should just teach it. Teachers ought to be open to debate on the subject, but they law shouldn’t require them to cover the Holocaust and moon landing deniers for every fact.
Like evolution (but unlike, say, the creation of the universe), I believe there’s a scientific consensus on climate change. The dissenting minority is loud but shrinking. So, I think it’s germaine germane that we show students “An Inconvenient Truth” or a similar film, and not feel obligated to dedicate another ninety minutes to the opposing viewpoint. They should probably discuss the political and public relations debate being carried out in the offline and online media around the world, but in this case they don’t need to give opposing viewpoints equal weight.
Schools must foster debate, but they have to pick their spots. I remember in Geography 12, Ryan Jaye, Albert Kaan and I made a kick-ass video about nuclear power. I believe we came out in favour of it, and got an A. I don’t recall if there was much debate or not.
