Human Nature, Nature's Threat

The Durban Environmental Conference is finally concluded. To no one's real satisfaction, unsurprisingly. And Canada remains in bad odour. The European Union seems to have been the only advanced Western entity that insisted, along with the emerging economies, that Kyoto could be resurrected. In the financial shape they're in, it's a peculiar, seemingly unrealistic position.

In any event, a tentative, new agreement has been accepted. Basically, the result of a final agreement to disagree, and to allow that perhaps something more acceptable to all stake-holders would miraculously occur in the future to save us all from environmental Armageddon. Sun flares, for example, tamed, and geothermal heating becoming more feasible.

Canada originally signed on to Kyoto, but this was a signing-on of an agreement that any country with an ambition to proceed into the future without crippling sacrifices to quality of life of its residents living in a northern country, and with a population growing at the rate of a quarter-million annually through immigration, and a production agenda to keep pace with the perceived need to prosper, could not possibly guarantee.

Even with the best of intentions, of spewing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by shutting down coal plants and finding new methods of scrubbing emissions, relying more heavily on newer technologies, we're still heavily involved in fossil fuels extraction and utilization for heating and transportation.

Solar heating and wind farms have proven to be inefficient and unpopular. Nuclear is too expensive to build and has its own very serious problems; expensive to maintain and retrofit; vulnerable to rare but unpredictable threats related to breakdown, and the unresolvable problem of disposal of nuclear waste.

Canada would have to focus on reducing the use of oil and gas in a stringent, government-forced plan to have people accustom themselves to living in colder homes during the winter, hotter in the summer, travelling less frequently with privately-owned vehicles, becoming more reliant on public transit. By lawful mandate.

Is it lawful in a democratic society to inform a population that they must henceforth adhere to new rules that would restrict their privileges of independence? It might be, if everyone uniformly were agreeable to dispossessing themselves of larger houses for smaller ones, using less energy to heat and to cool, dispose of electric and electronic equipment, and forego car ownership.

While countries like India and China and Brazil, with their steadily emerging economies, greater production, heavier use of energy sources, increasing middle classes, relentlessly consumed everything that Canadians had agreed to voluntarily sacrifice - on behalf of emerging nations. Sounds too altruistic to be true, and it is.