Jimmy Carter asked the American people, during 1970s, on TV, to have the soap in their hands before they turn the taps on;it was the time of his presidency. There was no discussion yet of any climate change, global warming, disappearance of ozone layer etc. on the radars of the media, such matters were being discussed only within academic circles, and small ones at that.
Carter was ridiculed by the so-called pundits for not knowing what his focus should be. They questioned his judgment and his ability to set his priorities right.
Fast forward four decades, California is in the throes of a massive drought, climate change is on the agenda of almost every government and global warming is galloping at a faster pace. That is, almost 40 years after his TV appeal, we now know that Carter’s plea for conservation was a perfect example of statesmanlike foresightedness.
Although there are still individuals, thankfully an increasingly small minority, who believe that current warming is cyclical and not man-made, governments of 175 countries around the world fortunately don’t think that way. And heads of state or government of those countries put their signatures under last year’s Paris agreement, on Thursday, April 21, meaningfully enough the Earth Day.
By doing so, they formalized their commitment to the reduction of emission of green-house gases, the primary source of global warming.
Our federal government is among those governments that want to ratify and implement the agreement without any delay,and for good reason: Canada is responsible for the emission of 1.5 per cent of the global green house gases on an annual basis. One might think that this is not such a bad performance for a country whose economy is much more resource based than other industrial nations.
But the reality is that, given the much smaller population of our country as compared to the other G7 nations, the leading industrial powers of the world, Canada is among the worst per capita polluters of the earth.
That means we have some serious homework to do.
Our provincial government has already taken this task seriously and passed two important measures, first to phase out coal mining in the province and second to impose carbon tax.
Predictably, the main opposition Wildrose has been trying to make easy political capital out of their resistance to both of the measures.
But this matter has to be kept beyond the mundane political wrangling as it has more to do with what kind of an environment we will be leaving to the next generations to live in.
Or if we base our argument on the very wise premise that we haven’t inherited the earth from our ancestors but borrowed itfrom our children, preventing further global warming, reducing green house gas emissions, protecting the environment are all about how much we are stealing from what we have borrowed from our offspring.
So, carbon tax may be really bad, tough not because it will allegedly kill jobs, bring more poverty and further deepen the economic crisis, but because its impact is so indirect and achieving the intended results will not be fast enough.
Taking the cue from Jimmy Carter’s presidential appeal, maybe we need our politicians to start to tell us to rethink before we go into the line in the drive through lanes of the fast food restaurants; to ponder why and how much we need to warmup our cars for our morning commute to work and to calculate how much we are deepening our carbon foot print on the environment when we leave our engines running as we go into grocery or convenience store to pick up a few items.
Yes, we are blessed in Alberta with the endowment of this land by Mother Nature with abundant natural resources and fertile agricultural soil, but that doesn’t mean we can or should dodge our responsibility towards preserving and protecting the source of our wealth.