Climate Reality Check

We know it is Climate Change so what are going to do? 

Scientists have been for over 20 years telling us to reduce, change our ways and how far have we gotten? Nowhere is where, temperatures are still rising and at the recent global climate conference in Scotland two of the biggest CO2 emitters, China and Russia, did not even attend.

The fact is no one wants to change the lifestyle that they feel they are entitled too. Just look at your local car lot and it is filled predominantly with huge fossil fuel consuming Trucks, not a line of electric vehicles, hybrids or compact fuel efficient vehicles. The world now consumes a 97 million barrels a day of crude oil and if the trend continues it will reach 104 million barrels by 2026. Prior to the Pandemic the world was consuming 99.3 million barrels a day. The world consumed in 2015, the year of the Paris Climate Accord 94.9 million barrels, this according to Statista a statistics research firm.

So if we are burning more and more Carbon, how do we stop global warming? You can’t plain and simple. We burn more carbon and the planet gets warmer. If you put more wood on the fire in winter, does the house get cooler? No, so if we burn more carbon how do we expect the world to get cooler?

The ability of Nature to absorb all this carbon is like a cup and saucer. The cup represents natures ability to capture Carbon and process it, but if you keep pouring tea into the cup, eventually it is going to spill on to the saucer. The saucer is Natures last attempt to absorb the carbon and as tea keeps spilling onto the saucer, more and more natural disasters are occurring, like the fires, heat waves and flooding we are enduring now. What the hell is going to happen when even the saucer can’t catch all the tea and it spills all over the table, floor, carpets and makes a huge mess….hmmm and then what are we are going to do when supposed 100 year floods happen every couple of years?  

So if we are not going to stop pouring the tea, how do we stop the saucer at least from spilling….you get a cloth to wipe it up. Since we won’t stop buying big trucks, flying everywhere and sucking on Oils tit at near unprecedented rates we are going to have to develop the technology to absorb the Carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somehow. We are going to have to spend 100’s of billions in the meantime, and I mean 100’s of billions globally on flood control and infrastructure to protect areas like BC’s Fraser Valley from these devastating floods. We are also going to have to spend billions on Fire equipment and personnel to battle these wildfires, which release millions of tons of Carbon themselves and further compound the problem.

I don’t believe for a minute that people will effectively change their consumption and what they feel so entitled too especially in Western countries like Canada, the US and most of Europe. Other countries like China and India aspire to the lifestyles of the west and are consuming fossil fuels at increasing rates and dumping Carbon into the atmosphere to achieve it. We have to realize the primary reason that our society is as developed as it is, is directly tied to industrialization and the use of fossil fuels from wood to coal to oil to power it.

So if we really are going to fix the climate we need to find ways to deal with the carbon as conservation and reduction is not a practical strategy because people don’t want to change their lifestyles. So if we cannot change global consumption of Fossil fuels, then the only solution is to deal with cleaning up the CO2 and building the infrastructure to withstand these catastrophes.