Comment 24557

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 01, 2008 at 12:03:21

I'm tired of hearing that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is unrealistic. Canadians and Americans burn more energy than anybody anywhere, and more than anybody ever has. The notion that we can't find a way to curtail that is laughable. For most of humanity, luxuries like automobiles, air conditioning, clothes dryers and the like are nothing but pipe dreams.

We could easily do without them, we simply choose not to. We are some of the richest, most technologically advanced and educated people who have ever lived, and yet we constantly approach this crisis (and others, like oil depletion, mass extinctions and loss of farmland) with the characteristic forethought of drunks, smokers or junkies. "I know it's killing me, but what do you expect me to do, quit?"

We could cut our emissions drastically and relatively quickly with some fairly simple changes, many of which have been elaborated at length many times on this site. Rational land use decisions, organic farming and vegetarianism, sensible home design (insulation, passive solar, etc), and a general re-naturalization of our landscapes (sorry, but wildflower medians simply sequester more carbon than machine-manicured grass), are all it would take.

A clothes line represents next to no energy in manufacture, about $5 to buy, and requires no long-term energy or financial inputs to operate. Similar low-cost, low-tech solutions are available everywhere, from bikes to backyard gardens to mended clothing and shorter showers, and are practiced extensively by some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people around, be it North Hamilton or South America. It's not a question of cost or technology, it's a question of will.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds