Our addiction to environmental destruction is not abating

Ralph Surette, August 27, 2007, Chronicle Herald -- A week and a half ago, scientists reported that the Arctic ice pack had shrunk to its smallest dimensions ever – and with still a month left to go in the melting season. This shrinkage is going on faster than they predicted, and it now looks as though the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2030, rather than by 2080 or so as earlier believed.

Considering that this is only one cloud in the ominous gathering storm of climate change, and that it’s a near certainty that we’re causing it by burning fossil fuels, what should the world’s response be?

No need to scratch your head over that one. The answer is already given: Climate change can go hang. The melting ice will "liberate" the presumed vast resources of the Arctic seabed, notably oil, and open the Northwest Passage to navigation.

Already the feeding frenzy is being prepared, with a clash of national claims over the Arctic seabed – Russia, Denmark, the U.S., Canada – with the Harper government displaying its manhood by announcing an Arctic military base and new icebreaking military vessels.

If it seems odd that there’s a rush for the very thing that’s causing the problem to begin with, then perhaps the Arctic is one more illustration of the fact that what we’re still inclined to call "economic progress" has become an out-of-control machine of destruction that we can’t turn off.

There have been other such manifestations recently.

At the premiers’ meeting in Moncton two weeks ago, the one clear message that came out is that Alberta will wage total war against any suggestion that even the slightest restraint be placed on development of the tar sands.

Alberta has been tagged as a "secure" source of oil by the Bush administration and, as a tool of the oil companies, the Alberta government will do everything in its power to keep the SUV culture and the three-hour commute going, even if it means wiping out northern Alberta and making Canada one of the most polluting nations on Earth.

And speaking of the Bush government, its legacy will include several emblems of environmental destruction to go with the political and the constitutional.

Boosting coal as an even dirtier substitute for oil, the administration is moving to sanction the practice of bulldozing mountaintops into valleys and streams below, in order to get at high seams of coal in the Appalachians, a practice that has gone on more or less illegally for 20 years.

Meanwhile, the mine disaster in Utah in which several miners died is raising questions about whether the coal industry is cutting safety corners in order to increase production.

And the nefarious effects of subsidizing the production of ethanol from corn – which requires as much fossil energy to create as it gives back – is starting to show up in the form of higher food prices and the stripping of vast new tracts of land to plant corn.

Anything, absolutely anything, no matter how destructive, rather than utter the word "conservation" or "restraint" in any meaningful way.

Meanwhile, the Harper government has once again declared that it won’t even try to meet the Kyoto protocol and has simply reissued its old environmental non-policy in another form.

A friend of mine, going at the business of putting in fluorescent light bulbs and making other conservation moves in the house, said to me gravely, "This isn’t going to do any good."

Indeed, as long as the signals up top are that consumption, environmental destruction and energy waste are to go on with wild abandon, the people on the ground are going to keep getting the wrong message, and may well conclude that there’s no point even trying.

One good example of the wrong message going around on the ground is the pressure on the provincial government to cut taxes on gasoline. It has already cut back on its portion of the GST on fuel oil to the tune of $75 million. This was a mistake, and cutting gas taxes would be too.

Except for kicking back to the truly needy, every such cut in energy prices is an incentive to not take conservation seriously.

Alas, to promote conservation without conviction, then undo it besides with contradictory policies, seems to be where we’re at generally in North America, except for a few enlightened jusrisdictions.

At the highest levels – the U.S. presidency, the prime minister’s office – the reality of global warming and its catastrophic effects has been accepted, after a long period of boneheaded denial dictated by polluters like ExxonMobil Corporation and the coal industry.

This looked like real progress for a moment there, until we found out what the next step would be: Do nothing.

Is there going to be a next step after that? If not, hunker down and wait for Mother Nature to make her own destructive moves.