Think fast!
We have no more time.
There is no other Earth and this one is really, really sick.
Headlines in The Citizen read:
This: "Scheer, Trudeau spar over climate pledges; May offers cost breakdown."
And: "Three local businesses reach carbon neutrality."
And: "Victoria taking plastic bag ban to Supreme Court."
And: "Paid to protect the planet - CEOs step up when bonuses tied to environmental goals."
And: "Risk rising for oceans, report finds."
The last headline is a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of September 2019. Our rising oceans are not just a problem for island nations or coastal waters.
Glaciers, which feed our rivers, normally melt a bit every year and are replenished every winter, but they are disappearing now, at an alarming rate. Permafrost, which is supposed to be permanent, has always stored twice as much carbon as the atmosphere - twice as much.
Oxygen is disappearing, the oceans are acidifying, which is killing shellfish and not birthing more of them. Fish and sea mammals have much less to eat. Salmon are in tremendous peril. Polar bears are emaciated and dying. Millions of Canadians, ocean to ocean to ocean, are being affected today. This is serious stuff.
The North and South Poles keep our planet cool enough to support all life. Polar ice refreshes the Earth every single winter season. When the ice at the poles is gone, there is no reflective cooling from the effects of the sun, on our Earth. The Earth will heat up beyond repair. We will burn up faster than the B.C. forest fires, the Australian forest fires, the fires in Portugal or the fires of the Amazon rainforest.
The single, most serious reason the Earth is burning up is because of the burning of fossil fuels: gas, oil and coal. And, what we call Big Oil, has known about the extreme damage this is causing since the 1970s.
We use it, we burn it. We must phase it out within this decade, not by 2030 or 2050, but within this decade. This isn't a Conservative problem, or a New Democrat problem, or a Liberal problem or a Green Party problem. We can't pretend it's "their" problem, it's our problem.
The single, most serious problem we face is not the burning of fossil fuels, but our refusal to give a damn. Frankly, if we want to live, there is no more time to spare.
The single, most important thing we must do is to stop burning any fossil fuels for any reason, no exceptions, within this decade, not later, not by 2050, but now.
We cannot look away, because it's staring us in the face. No more diddling about taking plastic bags to court or giving CEOs a bonus to do their jobs as human beings, no more pretending it will go away.
How desperate are we that a picture of Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been photoshopped to have her hold a reusable cup with a steel straw? We must move beyond staging and into the real world. May's heart may be in the right place, but we can no longer wait for someone else to get us out of this mess.
Should rogue actors get in the way, we must be brave enough to call them out and act collectively anyway. The rest of us have collective power. The expression "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a time-honoured concept we can rely on.
Everyone must be involved, not just a handful of businesses or individuals pushing and pulling at us for action from the edges. We must actually teach each other, learn from each other, discuss solutions openly, with everyone becoming upfront, front-of-mind aware of the danger we face. Then and only then can we act in concert to save the planet.
Collectively - everybody -we must break the problem down and act in concert to fix it. It begins by learning exactly what is going wrong, worldwide, and acting step by step to stop the damage.
We can start here in B.C., in schools across the province. Let's make environmental protection and restoration the first, most important topic in our schools. We need to relearn the compelling significance of our world's environment. Thinking critically and acting critically about this problem is absolutely essential.
Without a healthy environment, we just don't survive, and neither does anything else.
Jan Manning, Prince George
