The Addiction of a Lifetime

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:

Group Earns Oil Income Despite Pledge on Drilling