Tomorrow the world is meeting in Bali for the UN conference on climate
change. Nice venue. I wouldn’t mind being in Bali
right now. Except for a few die hard deniers like Rush Limbaugh, the
debate about whether or not the earth is warming is pretty much over.
Deniers like Limbuagh point to selected data points to say that
nothing’s happening (or even that the earth is actually
cooling). For example, on this December 2nd day on Cape Cod
it’s roughly 10F below average. Despite
today’s cold, this Fall on Cape Cod has been atypically warm.
In any case, Cape Cod is only a single data
point. We’re talking about global
climate change so we need to take a global view. That view is simply
alarming. Greenland ice sheets are melting and moving at rates far
higher than previous worst case scenarios. Those ice sheets
hold a lot of water and could, by melting and moving off of land and
into the sea, cause sea levels to rise six feet by the end of this
century. In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore makes the
heartening point that the world came together to fight CFC production
and that damage to the ozone layer is being slowly reversed.
Maybe Bali will be the first step for the world to truly come together
and fight Global Warming.
Even though I think Limbaugh is seriously misguided in his views of
climate change (among other things) he does make some good points about
the hypocrisies of many of the people who are leading the fight against
it. I think Al Gore’s use of carbon offsets is disingenuous.
If you want to lecture people on reducing their carbon footprints then
you should lead by example and reduce your own… in a real
way like by moving into a house that has less than twenty rooms and
10,000 square feet (Al Gore’s) and into something more energy
efficient like a 4,000 square foot ranch house that’s
described as a “model of environmental rectitude”
(George W. Bush’s home in Crawford).
My family lives in a 2,000 square foot house with a lot of windows and
half baked insulation. Our biggest global warming sin is that
during the cold months, from late Fall through early Spring, we have a
fire in an open fireplace almost every night. We burn a cord
and a half of wood each year simply because we like it. We
like lying down next to the warm fireplace to watch TV and fight for
the spot closest to the hearth. It’s not efficient in any
way. A wood stove would actually heat the house, but the aesthetic
would be gone. We’d miss the sounds and smell and
look. So… just because we like it… not
because we need it… we burn 1.5 cords of wood a year.. I
feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to stop. I tell my
lefty-granola eating enviro-minded friends about this sin and all of
them give me a pass. I say, “you know, I could drive a Hummer
and have less environmental impact” and they look at me and
smile and say, yeah, but… a fire is sooo nice.
It‘s not the same.” But on the environmental
balance sheet I think it is. I don’t like oversized
SUV’s because I think they threaten my safety on the highway
and take up too much space in parking lots. But…
with regard to the environment… I’m not in a
position to throw stones. Few of us are. But all of
us are willing to do things that don’t affect the quality of
our lives. The trick in fighting global warming is for us to find ways
we can make positive changes that don’t consist of denial.
Here are some selected headlines from the past week:
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