Monday, December 31, 2007
AS WE enter the new year, the news from Bali isn’t as good as we hoped but it’s better than no news at all. Buying carbon credits, etc, may be a way to go, but I wonder if it’s not a bit of a cop-out after all.
On the home front, after watching a scientific programme on TV recently, I said to my friend, "Isn’t air great! It’s everywhere and it’s free!" "Yes. Like water used to be," she answered, dryly.
And I thought, yes, any day now we’ll be charged for what we breathe, on the basis of lung capacity, and for what we exhale on the same basis, and carbon discounts will accrue to our children when we’re gone.
We were sitting in front of the fire, enjoying a glass of mulled wine.
It shortly occurred to me that we shouldn’t be burning a fire at all — or breathing, for that matter. The most ecologically sound move would be to pop off toute suite and make room for a few more grandchildren whose lungs would demand less oxygen than mine. But time enough, I thought; first we’ll have another glass of wine...
Burning wood from trees that were surgically trimmed and afterwards sprouted with new vigour is, at least, better than burning oil from tar sands whose extraction leaves swathes of northern Canada looking like it’s been hit by a meteor shower.
Now, in the last decades of oil, Lake Athabasca, one of the vast lakes in the north of Canada which surely had a global environmental role, is about to be killed off. I, like most people, don’t know what to do about it. But we’d better find out quick.
It’s no time for Bali delays or Sao Paulo sell-outs.
When I was a in school, I saw Lake Athabasca in an old atlas. Huge. Pristine. The kingdom of nature. I imagined Indians with Mohican haircuts and hoary trappers in dugout canoes. I imagined beavers at damns and sockeye salmon filling the rivers, and bears, and elks, and all that was there then but is not there now.
This vast lake in the wilderness of northern Canada is now polluted, with governmental blessing, by a major petroleum producer.
The wildernesses available to my generation, and which we did not have the means or the funds to explore, is not available to our children and will never be available again. For millennia, vast areas of the planet were unchanged but in the last 100 years have been changed forever. It took aeons to make them and less than a century to destroy them. They cannot be resuscitated, resurrected or restored. We enter Eden and destroy it. It would make you believe in Original Sin.
The picture of Lake Athabasca’s shores today is one of oil ponds, shale mountains, a devastated landscape and dead trees.
Meanwhile in Bali, a "ray of hope" in the darkness of climate change denial is widely welcomed. But "the people of the world wanted more. They wanted binding targets," as Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil rightly said — but binding targets and firm commitments was what we did not get. Some nations are still fiddling while the planet burns.
The threat of climate change is like the elephant in the room. We know it’s there but will ignore it as long as we can. But it’s an elephant on speed. The populations of China and India daily burgeon and each family, as is their right, will soon have a car, or two cars like ourselves.
Humans have multiplied in deserts and on sea ice, came out of Africa, colonised Europe, Asia and Australasia, crossed the Bering Strait and reached the tip of South America and multiplied even in that inhospitable climate too. Let us hope it doesn’t come to such migrations or recolonisations.
The Bali agreements, although limited, were a step forward. As we enter the new year, we know that 190 nations of the earth now agree that climate change has to be reversed, and that must be good news.
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