08-01 Going Green

It was 1994 in Jakarta, driving by cab to our hotel, that I had to ask the driver to close his window. Not only was the air polluted by sulphurous car exhaust, it was burning our eyes. I never saw so many cars and so much traffic. It was a nasty journey.
We were driving an old Toyota, and like most of the cars, they were spewing black smoke out of their exhaust pipes. Apparently, in Japan, they take old cars off their road by law and then sell them to developing countries. Cute.
And no point being smug. Anyone driving into a big Canadian or American city can see the smog hovering above. Pollution is about what we breathe. And the reason my wife and I retired to the country. Love that clean air.
Of course, there are many kinds of pollution. I used to consider the music my kids played as teenagers a form of pollution. But I digress.
Apparently about 90 per cent of the world's population do not breathe clean air. And most of those monster cities were people breathe lousy air are fortunately not in North America. There was our visit to Beijing in 1985, watching people wearing gauze masks because of the sulphur in the air from burning coal. Note the nasty photo of a steel plant in China spewing who knows what into the atmosphere.
The issue for North America in the future as the broader public goes green, is restricting trade with nations that are mega- polluters. In the meantime, Canada and the US will have to clean up their act.
But air pollution created by the burning of fossil fuels is not the only issue that is driving the “green movement” and building a political base for what is called “Green parties”.
There is the debate over climate change and the extent that human activity is building a carbon dioxide barrier over the earth that is preventing heat from escaping into the atmosphere. People are confused.
Easy to politicize something that seems simple but is, in fact, very complex. President Trump called it a hoax. But the monster hurricanes blasting the east coast of the US are not hoaxes. Climate change is making storms both stronger and wetter. Feel sorry for the folks down in South Carolina. I guess we have all seen an aerial photo of a hurricane gaining fury while crossing the warm Atlantic ocean waters.
Then there is the increasing number of forest fires in places like California and British Columbia. Hotter and drier air impacts everything. There is no such thing as predictable weather patterns. Wonder if new weather patterns around the world might turn the Sahara desert into raging grasslands and forests. Talk about "going green".
And the melting of the ice caps in Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica is not a hoax. I have seen the evidence. In particular, I remember seeing the hills around Qaqortoq in Greenland that were green for the first time.
And it was amazing to learn that the warming of the oceans is driving massive schools of mackerel into Greenland waters. Not all impacts of climate change are bad news.
And how about the population explosion in Africa and South America that is polluting the atmosphere. Not a big deal for people in Canada and the US. Well, not until they start migrating to our shores.
Then as a significant environmental threat, we have 1.5 billion cows not just “feeding the world” but “farting the world”.
A little humour here. Farting methane. Methane would be useful if we could bottle it and burn it, but it is just another gas that contributes to the warming of our atmosphere.
It is good to see legitimate green parties taking their place in democracies around the world. But not so good to see environmental activists trying to shut down pipelines and roads. It can become a form of domestic terrorism rather than a legitimate shifting of public understanding and public policy.