Green Daily

Today is Canada Day. For Americans reading this, Canada Day is much like Independence Day in that it celebrates the founding of a nation with speeches, fireworks and barbeques, although arguably there's a little less flag-waving and a little more beer-drinking involved.

But what it's got me thinking this year is how we – Canadian, Americans, Westerners - need to stop waiting for the world to agree on what to do and to take the lead in solving our pressing environmental problems.

Earth is a volatile place and humans have always had troubles that crossed boundaries, but in the past we only saw our little piece of whatever global hell was going on. 300 years ago, a volcanic explosion in the Indian Ocean could bring famine to New England and food riots in Europe. Our ancestors called it an Act of God, prayed for better luck, and starved or stormed the barricades as temperament and circumstance allowed.

Today we watch the world from space and talk and blog and twitter to each other incessantly. What happens in Mongolia is known in Milwaukee instantly, and in times of earthquake, flood or tsunami, aid can be rushed from one corner of the globe to another in hours. We also have a much better understanding of how what happens on one part of the planet affects people living elsewhere; we know that a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico will mean higher gasoline prices in Boston, and that flooding in southern China equals hunger in Indonesia.

However, more has changed than just our perception of how the world works. Now catastrophe is no longer just Mother Nature inflicting her dark whimsy on us - the human race has become the natural disaster.

Twenty years ago, as NASA scientist James Hansen was giving his famous early warning on climate change to a Congressional sub-committee, the planet was rocking out to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Little did we know that Astley was talking about oil.

Unlike Astley, Hansen is still around and he's still not pulling any punches. He celebrated the anniversary of his now-legendary Congressional appearance by giving a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he warned that we are nearing the point of no return. When he told us we were in trouble 20 years ago, Hansen made headlines but failed to spur a complacent world to action. Now, as glaciers melt, the Arctic sizzles, and epochal droughts, floods and catastrophic weather events of every description plague the planet, only a few die-hard skeptics, oil company apologists, and scientific illiterates still deny what a child can see: climate change is real, it's here, and it's us.

Hansen has a number of ideas about what we need to do, including a moratorium on coal-fired power plants (in the US alone, 20 are currently under construction and 100 more are in planning stages) and a carbon tax on oil, gas, and coal. However, almost as an aside, he notes the madness of continuing the quest for oil: ""To go around drilling for the last drop of oil... will extend our addiction a little bit, but it will put us past the tipping point."

Feeling eco-exhausted yet? An interesting article by Alex Williams in the New York Times this past weekend about "green noise" suggests that we're being bombarded with so much information on how to help the environment that people are starting to tune out.

That we're deep into media overload is undeniable. From the myriad websites and publications offering advice on how to save the planet in teeny-tiny steps ("buy used underwear! wash your counters with cat pee!" ) to global warming weather porn and green doomsayers of every description, it's a buyer's market for eco-info out there. What's worse, the consequences if we don't do the right thing are unimaginably dire. I haven't been inundated with guilt and fear like this since I was at Catholic school.

In pre-industrial times, everybody was a survivalist. The supply chain for your food was from your front door to your field, and if your house fell down in a hurricane, there was nobody to drive you to a gymnasium and stuff your backpack with t-shirts and fish sticks. If you got sick, you died or you didn't.

However, as we've come to rely more and more on the intricate machinery of a mechanized world to keep ourselves alive, there have been those who worried about what would happen if the whole thing fell apart.

In the 1950's, with nuclear Armageddon looming, some wondered if ducking and covering would really be adequate protection against several mega-tonnes of high-powered Russian technology. Sales of easy-to-install home fallout shelters boomed, along with freeze dried foods and other accoutrements of civilized living necessary for a couple of years spent keeping the mutant hordes at bay from behind 5 feet of steel and concrete.

As cold war tensions eased, people thought less about nuclear war, but the disintegration of industrial society remained a concern for some. The 70's saw the first use of the term "survivalist", often in reference to well-armed eccentrics with unconventional views on race relations holed up in the countryside somewhere.

While the survivalist trend waxed and waned with energy crises and predicted ice ages, and made a limited comeback during the Y2K scare, it never recovered the mainstream appeal it had achieved in the first couple of post-war decades.

But that may be changing.

Was it too good to last?

The last century or so has been an era of unprecedented prosperity. Technology and cheap energy have given us the ability to find, extract, manufacture and deliver buyables more efficiently than ever before, with the result that people around the world - but especially in the West - have enjoyed a decades-long orgy of consumerism, reveling in everything from monster trucks to hamburgers the size of your head.

But that may be about to end.

In a free market, the first indicator that the cupboards are getting a little bare of a particular commodity is a rapid price hike. A few examples:

OIL: With oil prices hitting new highs almost weekly, peak oil is getting a lot of press lately. However, whether we've pumped more than half the planet's reserves is of less interest than how much it's going to cost us to get what's left. While hundreds of billions of barrels remain in the ground, a lot of it is in places like the Alberta oil sands, where extracting it is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Consider also that the lightning pace of economic growth in places like China and India requires enormous amounts of fossil-fueled energy, and it's likely that the day isn't far off when filling up the family truckster at 5 bucks a gallon will look an absolute bargain. And since just about everything that we drive, watch, wear or eat arrives via oil-powered truck, ship or plane, look for price ncreases across the board.

Of all the things I don't get about the exercise in anti-science known as climate change denialism is what the desired outcome of all this debate is supposed to be. Is the assumption that if global warming either doesn't exist, or at least isn't such a big deal, that we should maintain our current energy-extravagant, CO2 intensive lifestyle?

It's a rhetorical question, because the idea is insane. Even the most fervent of global warming disbelievers, who consider climate change a Goreish plot to tip the developed world into bankruptcy, chaos, and effeminacy, should consider this: whether climate change is real or not, failure to abandon our fossil fuel addiction will still destroy our society.

When the idea of ecological responsibility first took tenuous root in the unwelcoming soil of 1960's America, it didn't catch on right away. In a society that worshiped industry and economic progress, many people saw environmentalists as acid-dropping, free-loving hippies who didn't use deodorant, and who only rolled out of bed long enough to shout slogans about what they didn't plan to do and when they weren't planning to do it.

However, in the 21st century, green has gone mainstream. The weather is getting weirder, the kids are pissed about inheriting a steaming ball of toxic sludge from their parents, and the ex-hippies are retiring from corporate life and rediscovering their treehugging roots.

Yep, nowadays, there are all kinds of ways of being eco-friendly without ever strapping on a pair of sandals. Below, a few of the more common species of modern greenie:

The Green Fashionista

Not entirely sure what "the environment" is but knows that Leo DiCaprio has a condo in New York that's friendly towards it. Also keenly aware that George Clooney is on the list for some kind of fancy electric car and that every bling-buying celebrity on Rodeo Drive carries a reusable shopping bag with a funky green slogan on the side. Still wouldn't be caught dead on public transportation.

Since consumers started embracing their inner treehugger (although generally not so much that we're willing to pay a green premium), savvy marketers have been hyping everything from SUVs to patio furniture as if they heralded the dawning of the age of eco-Aquarius. That, in turn, has led to a backlash, with civic-minded bloggers seeking out and slamming organizations perceived as exaggerating their enviro-credentials.

Exposing hypocrisy isn't a bad thing, and false advertising is out and out wrong, moreso when it makes a deceptive appeal to our sense of virtue. However, cynical society that we are, it's easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater by taking more interest in criticizing companies for what they don't do than recognizing them for taking steps in the right direction.

All our actions have an environmental impact, and the only truly benign human is six feet under, peacefully feeding the earthworms and fertilizing the hydrangea. Since we're generally agreed that mass suicide isn't the favoured solution to the current crisis, any steps we take to keep the planet healthy are in some degree going to be half-measures.

In other words, eco-friendly can only exist as a relative concept - no product or process is unequivocally green, but only greener than other products or processes intended to achieve the same goal.

The news this week that natural climate cycles may see planetary temperatures plateauing for a decade or so was a gift to climate change deniers. That select group of fact-ignorers have pulled their heads out of the tar sands long enough to declare victory and claim the news as proof that manmade climate change is a hoax, and that humanity can now look forward to a future of worry-free polluting. Excellent stuff, and reassuring.

Unfortunately, real scientists don't agree, saying that the shift may disguise - briefly - some of the effects of global warming, but not much, and not for long. But that doesn't matter, because the war against the truth of climate change is about PR, not science.

As a rising star in the green blogosphere, people often come up and ask me questions such as "Patrick, what's the best way to be more environmentally friendly?", to which I normally respond "I've already dialed 911 and the authorities are on their way". However, in the interest of saving the planet one consumer at a time, here's a quick Q & A to help you meander a little faster down the path to ecological righteousness

Am I green? How can I tell?

It used to be easy to know if you were green, because you had long, untamed hair (possibly in dreads), Birkenstocks, and smelled like patchouli. Since Al Gore suited up the movement, however, the visual and olfactory queues have been a lot more subtle.

Still, there are indicators you can look for. Do you use a picture of a lonely polar bear as wallpaper on your laptop? Have a wind-up radio/flashlight/MP3 player, still in a box in your closet? Do you own at least one item of clothing made of hemp? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you're already on your way to true treehuggerishness.

As Earth Day transmogrifies from funky hippie-fest into mass-marketed secular holiday, there's been a lot of hand-wringing about business jumping on the eco-bandwagon. After all, isn't it the greedy corporations who mucked everything up in the first place with all their smokestacks and oil spills and whatnot? There's an idea that saving the planet requires shunning the ugly corrupt world of money and power, and focusing on composting our poo and planting herb gardens in old hub caps.

Unfortunately, that idea isn't just wrong, but dangerously so. As individuals, we lack the resources, (and generally the willpower) to do what it's going to take to slow down the oncoming freight train of environmental disaster. That's why this is the time to form partnerships, not draw battle lines; time to embrace the occasionally fumbling but often well-intentioned efforts of the corporate world.

If that sticks in your craw, consider the fact that unless you're living Unabomber style, you and yours have been sucking at the teat of big business for decades anyway, sticking your head in the sand as the planet got ripped apart in the quest for consumables. That's why you've got an iPhone and a freezer full of Lean Cuisine, while about a billion people around the planet are casting a hungry eye on the family goat.

As a up-and-coming blogger who earns enough coin at this game so that pretty soon my mom might be able to stop sending cheques, I know a thing or two about celebrity - in fact, by my calculations, if I write approximately 7000 more posts I'll be as famous as the dog who won't go through a screen door, or a lesser known LOLcat. That's why I'm uniquely qualified to consider the question of what kind of a job our current crop of glitterati are doing to save the planet, and how they can do better.

If you're a casual consumer of celebrity gossip, you might think that Hollywood was already the greenest place on the planet, with movie star Priuses carpooling in convoys through the streets of Beverly Hills to drop off their recycling. It's not just Ed Begley Jr. and his electric car anymore; A-listers like Brad and Leo are talking green architecture, buying green condos, and producing socially aware films like there's no tomorrow. Which there might not be.

However, for most of the rich and famous, conspicuous consumption remains the norm. For every celeb up on the roof installing solar panels, there are a couple of dozen for whom a giant carbon footprint remains a kind of status symbol. At Beyonce and Jay-Z's wedding earlier this month, the happy couple had some 100,000 orchids flown in from Thailand, probably not on a plane powered by used cooking oil. And then there's John Travolta, who owns 5 jets and a private runway, and still finds time to lecture his fans about fighting global warming.

Since these people are, God help us, our society's heroes and role models, we need more of them to come to the table and set some kind of green example.

As even politicians and oil company executives have noticed by now, we have something of an environmental crisis on our hands, and while I'm guardedly optimistic, it doesn't hurt to have a back-up in case things come apart. I'm not suggesting that we give up reducing, reusing and recycling – not by a long shot. But still, given the potentially dire nature of our predicament, common sense dictates that just in case pollution and climate change do spin out of control, everybody should have a plan B to get through the next few decades.

Herewith, in no particular order, my favourites:

Space Habitats

PRO : Going to space has long been my principal back-up. I've always assumed that if things down here got really out of hand, the government would bring out the secret rocket ships and launch the best and the brightest - me, Stephen Hawking, Halle Berry etc – up to an orbiting Utopia with sliding doors and rooms like an airport Hilton, only with cleaner sheets and a bigger TV. From our vantage point miles above the earth, Halle and I would live a gravity and care-free life, blissfully unconcerned about the mayhem below. A related possibility is Mars, depending how much fuel is in the government spaceships. There I'd run a tour company that would take people off-roading in the Martian hills in methane powered dune buggies.

CON: Firstly, I'm not 100% sure that the government has a secret rocket escape program, or if they do that that I'm a candidate for it. Secondly, I read an article this week saying that right now humans can't travel to Mars or even live permanently in space, because cosmic rays would kill us or at least turn us into hideous mutants. Hell, If I'm going to be a hideous mutant, I might as well do it in the comfort of my own home.