Weather events have unfolded that are unprecedented in recorded history. While massive storms ravaged the Caribbean and the southern US, modern technology allowed us to witness these events as if we were there. While the debate rages on as to being a direct result of global warming, the facts cannot be ignored; violent weather has become more common, and severe, since weather reporting started.
The magnitude of the oceans temperatures is unprecedented; it is a recorded and verifiable phenomenon. Nature’s heat cycle strives to equalize large differentials in temperature, and hurricanes are what nature dictates must occur to correct this imbalance. Oil and the emissions that occur when it is thermochemically altered, plague the environment.
However, we owe our modern society to the development of petroleum hydrocarbon which provides almost all of our life sustaining advantages. Because of petroleum’s chemical capabilities we have developed medicines to treat disease, fertilizers to help feed our nations, and the ability to travel which allows for the dispersing of both people and humanitarian aid on a scale never before attainable.
These advents have allowed a population explosion that is unparalleled in human evolution. The abundant supply of inhabitants, nurtured by the addiction to petroleum, leads rise to even more oil being consumed, causing increasing global temperatures.
Oil may have provided the modern civilization we are loath to relinquish, but it also has given us a unique chance to recognize and address the short comings it presents. However, human nature, has an innate proclivity for moving backwards. Leaders, both corporate and government, argue incessantly over established scientific facts, frequently disputing anything, or anybody, that threatens their status quo.
Unfortunately, sociopaths and psychopaths, make convincing leaders. Governments can tax, corporations can discredit and rail incessantly, but until we can actually benefit individually, transitioning to earth friendly sources of energy is likely to take far longer than it should.
Education is needed to elicit a change in attitude and religious belief, not only to allow a reduction in numbers through the voluntary control of the size of the family, but if we are to follow through with the reduction of GHGs, we also have to provide for an economic ability to access the tools of that change.
If those in control of the organizations that rule our daily lives can ascertain how to profit from those technologies benefiting the environment then, undoubtedly, we will start to make significant progress.
Simply put, if electric vehicles with their recharging, and photovoltaic panels or wind generators are not affordable for the masses, if people do not have jobs which allow them to make the purchase, then a major change in the current paradigm is not likely to happen.
Providing for our families, having jobs which allow us to afford new technologies, which are actually affordable, may be a utopian goal but it will take a commitment by more than a just a few esteemed scientists, concerned media activists, and socially narcissistic government leaders. We need a small business grassroots revolution.
Lorne Oja can be reached at lorne@solartechnical.ca.