Since forever,
we have learned about all the world’s grievances. Poverty, water scarcity,
racism, the list goes on and on. However, there is one to pay particular
attention to.
Climate Change.
A lot of you
may ask why? Well, Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and author of This Changes Everything, gives us a
pretty good explanation.
It starts with
her struggle to understand our complex and ever-changing climate. What world
are we leaving to our future children? Will they appreciate the beauty of the
Great Coral Reef off the Australian coast? Will they see the beautiful animals
roaming Africa’s savannah?
Her explanation
of the ongoing Keystone XL pipeline debate gives the reader a good
understanding of the local fight in the US and Canada.
To give a
little background, the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, are much more difficult to
extract than conventional crude. They are Bitumen, a type of fossil fuel that
is much more carbon intensive. The burning of bitumen, as you can imagine,
would lead to more emissions, more sea-level rise, to more storms, and so on.
Besides, the method of extraction is extremely damaging to the surrounding
environment. Just take a look for yourself below.
Published by onearth.org |
To turn the page
a little, Klein also talks about the curious fact of lower emissions by
developed countries. It turns out that due to free trade rules, more
manufacturing is being done overseas. This means emissions produced in making a
product are instead factored in either at that the site of production and not
where they end up – usually the developed countries.
Additionally,
the transport of these products causes additional emissions, as tankers move
across oceans to deliver their merchandise. Do these emissions get factored
into a country’s annual rate? Absolutely not. So this means that while
developed countries’ emissions may be going down by recent reports, they may
actually be the same or rising.
Lastly, Klein
exposes the work some big environmental groups in the United States do.
Particularly with The Nature Conservancy, she states that a purchase of a
prairie reserve in Texas with donation money from ExxonMobil resulted after a
few years in drilling permits to extract oil.
This has caused
the endangered prairie chicken – which was the supposed to be protected by The
Nature Conservancy – to disappear from the site, as a New York Times article
recently stated.
Losing our
addiction to cheap and dirty energy is turning out to be very difficult. Unless
presented with reliable and affordable alternatives, our governments will
continue to cave in to corporate interests and elections to maintain coal jobs
and the like. Informing ourselves of the local struggles against oil extraction
and of our governmental policies on the environment are the right step to
ending our ever-damaging addiction.
Link to NYT article on The Nature Conservancy: