Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

I wish you a Central American

 


My partner and I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for almost five years doing Cuso International development work in the 2010s. I concluded very quickly that if ever there was an apocalypse, I’d want to go through it with a small-town Central American at my side.

I’m feeling that more than ever in these eye-opening days of global reckoning.

Time and again during the period we lived there, I saw people in those countries come through with a quick fix for whatever unexpected weird thing had just happened. It was an ingenuity borne of centuries of certainty that nobody was coming to fix their problems.

They stepped up with little hesitation to help random strangers with their problems, too, because they knew a time would come soon enough when they’d need strangers to step up for them. It’s not just a nice thing to do down there, it’s smart and strategic. You need to be ready for anything, and living in a permanent state of pay-it-forward.

One day, the car we were in broke down on a quiet road past Leon, Nicaragua. Within 15 minutes, we were repaired and on our way after two strangers on a motorcycle pulled up and began scrounging up scraps of this and that from the roadside, and then used them to do something inexplicable but effective to the car engine to get it running again.

Such anecdotes are coming to mind more often these days as events play out around the world to remind me that nobody’s really got our backs.

How must the citizens of Israel feel to realize that their much-touted security systems were easily compromised? How do Libyans feel about all those decades of government ignoring dam maintenance? What do Americans make of the hard lessons first from Hurricane Katrina, and more recently in the Maui wildfires – that their emergency preparedness systems are in no way prepared?

How do we feel here in Canada, where successive governments were so wrongly presumed to be managing the work of making sure we’d always have enough housing? They weren’t even counting the number of new Canadians right.

How come we can’t access basic medical care anymore? How are 13,000 British Columbians dead from toxic-drug overdoses in the last seven years and we’re still bickering about public drug use?  How can governments be allowed to “step back” on fossil fuel use and the development of greener alternatives after the entire planet just spent a horrifying year seeing where climate change is taking us?

If I’d been born a small-town Honduran, I suspect I’d have known better than to believe that the big things of life were being taken care of by government. Honduras has no social safety net, minimal public health care, lousy schools, and wages so low that most people need two jobs and a side hustle just to get by. It’s a country where you learn early to take care of your own business.

But I was born a comparatively privileged Boomer in a peaceful, liberal democracy with a social and legal commitment to human rights and a better life for all. I just always figured everything was going to be OK, at least in Canada.

Ah, but there’s far less Canada in Canada these days. Free trade ties us to some of the world’s most fraught countries. With minor exceptions, we don’t make our own clothing, household goods, vehicles or parts. Ninety per cent of our medicines are made with ingredients imported from China or India.

We’re dependent on other countries’ supply chains, food production, human resources. When their wildfires burn, we breathe the smoke. When their people don’t come to fill our workforce, it’s our services that suffer. We're frighteningly dependent, yet still so blissfully unaware of that reality. 

For better and worse, the world has tied its fortunes together through intricate trade deals and border-crossing corporate entities outside the management of any government. No war, climate disaster, or economic collapse anywhere on Earth is far enough away to avoid a direct impact everywhere else.

And even though virtually everything tripping us up these days requires a long-term plan to fix, there is no long-term plan for any of it. Even when some government starts on a plan, it rarely lasts beyond the four-year election cycles that doom progress on the complex issues of the modern world.

This is the world we live in now. This is the world my grandkids will have to find their way through. If I hear that they ran away in search of cheap land where they could grow a simple diet, generate their own electricity and count on a handful of good neighbours who knew how to fix things, I will understand completely and cheer them on.

Develop your inner Honduran, kids. Things are going to get rough.

Friday, June 02, 2023

Curbs on social-media sharing will only intensify the divide


What will happen once social media cuts us off from sharing news stories with our connections? That strange development has the potential of sending us even deeper into our respective echo chambers, where no complex problems can ever be addressed. 

We have been heavily manipulated into our interest groups by social media for a number of years now, and it's becoming very obvious that it hasn't been a good thing. So on the one hand, so long, social media, and thanks for nothing for getting us all weird and angry at each other about every damn thing. But on the other, what now?

If you are reading good journalism from totally trusted sources and generally living life with your eyes open, you will be well aware that the world is in a kind of Black Mirror moment. It's like one of those movies where a bunch of chimpanzees or a flock of birds suddenly start doing something super-odd, and every viewer knows to interpret that as code for some very big which-what-everywhere weirdness to come. 

Those are the times we're in. And now, having been shoved into our corners by social media's marketing algorithms for many years, we face being blocked from sharing news items with our networks because of a game of chicken between social media corporations and government, which is  taking up arms on behalf of media companies unhappy that advertisers like social media best.

This is all taking place just as we are facing some of the biggest issues the human race has ever confronted. 

Climate change, artificial intelligence, book burning, the threat of nuclear warfare, one wild precedent-setting storm or fire or flood after another, people being killed on subways because their mental illness is annoying other passengers, communities running out of water. There's some intense stuff going on.

We're either going to start talking to each other reasonably about how to find solutions that are as fair as possible to all concerned, or we're setting the stage for human annihilation. (Not to be overly dramatic, but don't you think so?) 

We are wasting precious time, people. Whatever side you're on, whatever the issue, you know in your heart it's not possible to yell the other side into submission. We're going to need to talk. 

I'm not going all unicorns-and-rainbows here and imagining the lions lying with the lambs, peace and love among humankind. I know that's not going to happen. But we can find ways to identify common cause, and start there. Right, left or straight down the centre, none of us wants the water to run out on our kids and grandkids or to lose what a healthy environment gives us. 

Social media certainly has the potential to help. I still remember how excited I was at the thought of people from all around the world and a million perspectives suddenly able to talk to each other freely about all the big things on their minds. (Ha. Silly me.)

But we were never able to share information freely, as we all know now. Our feeds are curated, using criteria that is pulled from all the bits of information that we offer up about ourselves when we use social media. Advertisers like it that way.

I've noticed in my own page that my posts are no longer being seen by people who don't think like me, as judging by the very long time it has been since anyone contrary posted anything on my feed. I guess I'm supposed to be happy about an algorithmic defence against trolls provided to me by Facebook whether I wanted it or not, but I can't see how we ever solve problems if we all stay in our boxes surrounded by people just like us.

Meanwhile, a tiny fraction of the people in each of our social media networks even see what we share. If you're sharing a link these days, that seems to send your post into purgatory as well. I can tell that Facebook's algorithms like it best when I offer up a cheery here's-my-day kind of thing, or a photo of my dog. If only the world's problems could be solved with photos of my dog.

So yes, this whole social media business was fraught from the outset. There's a lot that's wrong with it. But eliminating the sharing of legitimate news articles is just about the last thing we need as we try to fight through all the hot air out here.

Modern media has much on its mind, including having to figure out new revenue streams and get more readers. But give me a well-researched Guardian or New York Times article any time over a bunch of random people's opinions about stuff they know nothing about.

The difficult conversations are stacking up. We're down to a talk-or-die situation on a number of fronts. We were never going to settle it all on Facebook, true enough. But it sure isn't going to be settled by making it even harder for people to get to information from a source they can hold accountable.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

When the end-of-days feelings get you down, choose up

Indri Robyy, Pixabay

Doom-scrolling is real, and I know to try to avoid it for fear of entering that hyper-vigilant, chronically worried state that can set in when your adrenal system gets worked up. But these days it's hard to find a news feed of any kind that doesn't feel like doom-scrolling. 

Historians hasten to put such gloomy thoughts about "these times" in perspective. They rightly note that in fact, many grand woes of the world are actually lessening. We have less poverty. Fewer nuclear warheads. Less global terrorism. We live longer, having invented cures, treatments and vaccines for many things that used to kill us.

All of that is good news at the big-picture level. But it isn't actually of much comfort to those who are alive in this moment and living in this destabilized state, when flu-stricken birds are falling out of the sky and the Earth is splitting open and every season heralds a new round of record-smashing extreme weather somewhere in the world.  

It's hard to appreciate your moment in time in the Big Picture when your Small Picture is scaring the hell out of you. 

Some of us are living in hellish situations of war and natural disaster while others are just stressed from reading about it, and I don't mean to compare the experiences. But I'd venture that all eight billion of us are feeling the heaviness of these times in one way or another. 

We all need to find our own ways of coping. Some people "check out" and simply don't take in the news, a tempting thought if only our collective alarm wasn't urgently needed to drive change. Nothing gets fixed when people check out. 

Others focus on the here and now. There's no earthquake in Victoria right now, is there? There's no balloon waiting to be shot down in our skies. No sabre-rattling super power getting jacked up about Canada. There's just you and the calm seas and the pretty paper whites, on a mild winter day on a coveted West Coast island.

I like "being present" myself, though I did discover on a road trip last year through California's drought-slammed former nut orchards that it also means bearing witness to whatever is playing out in front of you. 

Driving south through lands I once dreamed of living in only to be confronted with the realities of modern-day California - so, so different from my shiny young-person memories of thriving agriculture as far as the eye could seen and a full-to-the-brim Lake Shasta packed with happy house boaters - was an eye-opener that I haven't been able to shake.

Nor will being present lower stress levels when it involves passing through the pockets of poverty and human suffering that have developed in all of our communities. But it couldn't be more important to be present in those moments, because this hand-wringing state we've been in about social decline for pretty much 30 years now will end only when we shake ourselves awake and act. 

Another reaction to these unsettling times is to go all in, spiralling into an increasing state of rage and paranoia over whatever subject a person has ended up fixated on. 

With so much to fixate on, there are many ways to rage these days. I'm sure we all know someone who has fallen into obsession (and whose company we want less and less of as a result). I know a COVID rager, an anti-vax rager, several Trudeau ragers, and even a few pro-Trump ragers who ignited a few years back and can't seem to cool down.

Unfortunately, there's no problem-fixing going on when people are in a state of rage. That's just a time when we want to break things and yell at people. If you're stuck in a rage state, best to get some help with that. It's costing you friends and your personal health, and not changing a damn thing about whatever has you riled.

How does one go about feeling better in gloomy times? Personally, I seek out news stories about things that are making a difference on the issues facing us. A recent read reminding me that the world did successfully address acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer through collective action was heartening, and important to hold onto in times when all the doom threatens to paralyze us. 

Also good: Buy a copy of The Economist every now and again and get caught up on world news  presented with careful balance, research and thoughtfulness. So different than the hyped-up headlines that a Google News search pulls up.

Speaking of news, I highly recommend severely limiting your intake of that which calls itself "news" in these over-saturated times. 

Back in the day when newspapers were still a thing, I read two a day, mostly limited to goings-on in Victoria, BC and Canada. Now, every bit of bad news going on anywhere in the world is as close as a right-hand swipe on my phone. 

It's so easy to do that swipe in a distracted moment, just like I once used to mindlessly light up a cigarette to pass the time in between this and that. But just like those cigarettes, it's so bad for me. I can feel the worry and the outrage building in me almost immediately, even if I was having a perfectly OK time just minutes before. 

Of course, each of us as citizens of the world also need to be stepping up right now. Avoiding the bad news overload is one thing, but taking action where you can must never be avoided. If you've got anyone you care about who is still going to carry on living after you're dead, surely that's motivation enough to do your part right now to actually address problems where you can rather than just worry about them.

Find the news you can use, and use it. May the rest of it roll off you.

Monday, January 02, 2023

We won't slow climate change with niceness


Extinction Rebellion UK says it will prioritize "relationships over roadblocks" this year and move away from public disruptions as a prime strategy for getting the world's attention on climate change. 

That's a warm and fuzzy statement for a new year. But hopefully they aren't going to get too nice. Nobody's going to solve the climate crisis with niceness. 

Of course, one does want to be strategic when in the business of disrupting. Throwing cans of soup at famous works of art - not the work of Extinction Rebellion; that was Just Stop Oil - and other poorly considered attention-grabbing antics may get your unknown organization headlines, but simply being offensive in a public space is not a strategic protest. (Put away the soup cans, go disrupt a fracking operation.) 

That said, we sure as hell won't move this crisis with niceness. Co-operative behaviour is one component of an effective change strategy, just like acts of protest, but systemic change at this grand scale cannot be achieved without anger, shouting, threats, arrests, financial loss, deaths and a lot of other not-nice things.

In the case of the climate crisis, consider the long list of potential opponents who benefit from the current system, a number of them with deep pockets for dragging this out indefinitely.

First, there's the vastly wealthy fossil-fuel corporations, which have enjoyed almost $3 billion US in daily profits for the last 50 years. Then there are the governments that are absolutely dependent on the revenue and jobs. International energy policies so friendly to industry that countries that sign on have to promise not to make energy policy changes without consulting Big Oil first. 

There are the global investors clamouring for endless returns on investment. The billions of people completely reliant on fuel to heat their homes, operate their businesses, get to work, and wage war on real and imagined enemies. The travellers, the tourists, the legions of individualists who have never had a collective thought in their life and are just fine with riding Earth into oblivion as long as they can be "free."

There are mega agricultural operations spread across mega land holdings to serve a world that eats 350 million tons of meat a year. There are more than 50,000 merchant ships criss-crossing our oceans every day just to feed our hunger for stuff. There are trade agreements in all directions that bind our governments' hands even when they're willing to do better.

Every one of those things and so much more is going to have to change if the end of this global story we're living is going to be remotely happy. We need to have so many big, brave conversations. We need big, brave leadership at all political levels - leadership that gets past the typical political urge to pander and please and treats this issue like the global emergency that it is. 

And while we can strive to be respectful in all of that, we can't expect that any of this is going to be nice. 

Extinction Rebellion says part of its decision to shift tactics is because we live in times in which protest has been criminalized. "Thriving through bridge-building is a radical act," the group says.

But really, what big change has ever come about without arrests and conflict with the law? In the case of global emissions, we're talking about trying to stop activities that make people so much money. They're not going down that road without a really big fight. Read sociologist Frances Fox Piven's eye-opening Poor People's Movements for more on that.

While it's certainly important to get your allies in order and build those relationships, there still has to be disruption in a crisis this big. If XR wants to play nicer, then somebody else needs to step up to be the disruptor. Climate change is a disruptor itself, and those of us who want better for our world are going to have to meet its chaos head-on.

Change this big will be very painful for those who benefit from the current system. That can't be sugar-coated. 

For the sake of future generations, let's just go straight to being tough and skip the part where we all think we can settle this like friends. That's just going to drag out the bloody ending that's coming one way or the other. 


Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Climate change: Somebody ought to do something about that


For a while there, we could all write about climate change as if it were still coming and might possibly be avoided if people were exhorted sufficiently to do x, y and z to reduce their carbon footprint and governments were urged to own up to their policy paralysis.

I miss those days. Now it all feels just so much more right-now, a black cloud of fear and dread carried on waves of intense media coverage of weird weather events everywhere in the world. How does an average writer contribute helpfully to the dialogue once things have reached this state?

“What solutions would you propose?” a Facebook connection asked me recently after a post I did on the crappy legacy we Boomers are leaving behind for coming generations.

Well, isn’t that just the million-dollar question? Who DOES have the solutions for the gigantic issues of these times? And how will they ever be enacted in a world that seems incapable of taking collective action even as existential crisis looms?

We have wasted so much time already, first debating whether climate change even existed and then splintering into our various belief camps as to who was the most to blame and how they should be made to atone. As usual, we have let politicians use our longing for solutions that don’t require anything of us to take us down a number of garden paths during these years of finger-pointing.

The cost of inaction is staggering. Ben Parfitt and Marc Lee write that in 2021 alone, heat, fire and floods cost the BC economy at least $10.6 billion, and possibly almost double that. 

At this point, does it even matter how we got here, other than to give us context for prioritizing action? Sure, rich countries are rightly going to have to be on the hook for more money into the communal pot after enjoying decades of guilt-free emissions that fueled our economic dominance, but let’s just presume that and get going. What we really need to talk about is how we’re going to stop this train wreck.

I take heart from the scientists, because they’ve been studying this one for years even while the rest of us were still arguing about whether climate change even existed.

Devin Todd, Researcher in Residence at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria, wrote in the Globe and Mail recently of the need to keep the pressure on around reducing emissions from fossil fuels while also figuring out a plan for emerging “negative emission” technologies that can remove and neutralize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The technologies are fascinating: machines that suck carbon dioxide from the air with chemical sponges; changing ocean chemistry so it draws down more C02; direct-air capture with the C02 then stored deep underground.

I read about what the scientists are coming up with and feel hope, sort of like you do at that part in the epic disaster movie where the brave astronaut-physicist-miracle person is heading into space to stop the asteroid from striking the Earth and destroying every living thing. Please save us, heroic scientists.

But then I look at the glacial pace of climate action at the hands of so many of the world’s governments and the deeply compromised agendas of pretty much everyone, and wonder how the fraught and fragile democracies of the 21st century will ever get it together to make any plan, let alone execute it.

Not that it’s all on government. This historic period of climate change is about us, the eight billion people who divide up into people who buy stuff, people who make stuff, and people eagerly awaiting a day when they can do either of those things if they can only get out of poverty.

Those of us with money and those of us with cheap labour have entangled our needs and wants through unfettered trade. As Crawford Kilian noted in a recent Tyee column, Canada’s coal fuels China’s manufacturing, which then comes back as imports of all the stuff that Canadians can’t stop buying. Think of all the emissions that vicious circle of want costs the world.

So here we are, collectively entangled in the climate crisis, hooked on economic growth, wishing with all our hearts that someone’s going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and we’ll all get back to normal. Except when everybody’s wishing and nobody’s acting, not much gets done.  

Are we even capable of acting collectively? It’s not a hopeful sign when our countries can’t even come out of a global climate meeting with a few cheery accomplishments to lift our spirits. Perhaps poor countries think it was a win to extract a vague promise from rich countries to give them more money as climate change tears everything apart, but that is hardly a climate-change solution.

How do we come together as a world when so much sets us apart? It’s the question for these times. But if we’re still thinking that somebody else is prepping a hero for the big save and the rest of us are fine to cruise along like always, best to give that one up.

The world will do what it does, and I guess we’ll see if that’s anything at all. But what will YOU do?

Tuesday, December 03, 2019

A most unsettling story list of this thing we still call farming


Credit: Moscow Ministry of Agriculture and Food
I'm a loyal reader and financial supporter of the British non-profit news outlet The Guardian, and subscribe to its "Animals Farmed" newsletter. Every couple of months or so, the newsletter arrives in my email inbox with news of the wild, weird world of what we still call farming, but that mostly just looks like mass murder at this point.

Even just reading the little summary blurbs about the stories is an excellent reinforcer of my efforts to ramp back my meat consumption to almost nothing. I used to love my farm set when I was a kid, but realistic play with a modern-day "farm set" would require stuffing your cute plastic animals into an overcrowded, hellish stink-barn for a very short life of misery, with not a whiff of green grass or fresh air to be found.

So let's start there with my first link from this morning's newsletter, about how Russian industrial farms are experimenting with virtual reality for dairy cows, to see if tricking them into thinking they see an open meadow will make them happier. And able to produce better milk, of course. Because it's a given that anything we do in industrial farming that outwardly looks like we're being a bit kinder to the animal is in fact just a way to trick them into giving us better, tastier, or more products from their bodies.

Next time you eat a lamb shawarma in the Middle East, think about the 14,346 Romanian sheep that died last week when the cargo ship they were being carried on overturned. Romania is the third biggest exporter of sheep in the European Union, and the sheep were bound for Saudi Arabia. Speculation is that the ship was overloaded, but at any rate, the sheep were trapped in the hold and didn't stand a chance when the ship flipped.

Only 254 sheep ended up rescued. I'm hoping that none of the dead creatures were among these sheep that passed by us when we were visiting Romania this past spring, but the future's not bright for Romanian sheep overall.

The risk of mass sheep death at sea is not just an issue from "over there," either. More than 22,000 lambs a year make the journey from New Zealand to the United States to satisfy hungry consumers, and that number is up 20 per cent from a decade ago.

And how is life going for our pig friends? Not so good. African Swine Fever is in the process of wiping out what's expected to be a quarter of the world's pigs. In China alone, some 100 million infected pigs were killed last year in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease.

But that's great news for "farmers" of non-infected pigs, who are finding surging global demand and increasing sale prices when piggies go to market nowadays. The value of monthly UK pig exports hit £36.4 million - $63 million in Canadian dollars - in September, a 50 per cent increase over a year ago.

In other pig news, Britain's Conservative Party has backed away from a promise to ban farrowing crates, because they go against everything a mother pig would naturally do to prepare for and care for her piglets. But pig producers have worked equally hard to shut down that conversation.
The crates are small cages that pregnant pigs are kept in from before their piglets are born until they are a month old.

Now let's turn to China, the home of my ancestors but also a country that often seems viciously committed to eating every species from the face of the Earth. That includes donkeys, 4.8 million of whom are killed every year just to satisfy China's demand for a gelatinous traditional medicine called ejaio, which is made from the hides of donkeys. If demand continues apace, half of the world's donkey population will be wiped out within five years.

Bummed out yet? We ought to be. I get that humans are omnivores and have a long history of killing animals for food, but we're so far past any kind of hunter-gatherer framework with modern-day industrial farming. One last link before you go, this one to a deadly algae bloom of "red tide" in Florida that wiped out 200 manatees, 127 dolphins, 589 sea turtles and hundreds of tonnes of fish when it hit in 2018, and is now back again.

It's a naturally occurring phenomenon, but you can likely guess what makes it much, much worse. Yup, industrial farming, which in Florida is flooding the sensitive wetlands with agricultural runoff.

I started into "flexitarianism" mostly because there's only so long you can keep telling yourself that your eating habits are harmless, but reducing our meat intake is also a major step toward reducing our individual (and ultimately, global) carbon footprints. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that industrial livestock production is responsible for 14.5 per cent of human-caused carbon emissions.

Do the right thing. Put peas on your fork.


Friday, August 02, 2019

Don't Get Scared, Get Effective: A Linked-Up Guide to Doing Something About Your Personal Carbon Footprint


Copyright:(c) Allexxe | Dreamstime.com
The frightening realities of the global climate crisis have me looking for ways to reduce my personal impact. For those of you trying to do the same, this one's for you. (And for those of you still denying there's a problem, feel free to stop reading now and fire off an uninformed comment, and I will feel free to not read it.)

I was stunned to learn recently that there's a view out there that people shouldn't have to take personal responsibility for their carbon outputs, because the climate crisis is the fault of corporations and governments and must be left to them to fix.

Seriously? There is absolutely no way to mitigate the effects of climate change without taking personal action. Corporations exist because we feed them. Governments exist because we elect them. This one's all about us - collectively and individually. I am right there in rage with those who are fed up with corporate greed and government paralysis, but it's each and every one of us who has to step up to fix the damaging and damaged society we're becoming. (Did anyone else notice how much Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump from the back?)

It's pretty damn daunting to even consider how to get a grip on this crisis, I admit. I would love to be able to blame this one on someone, and leave them to clean up the mess. But like that little cartoon possum Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." If you really want to end bad government and hurt evil corporations, then it's about getting a grip on rampant consumerism and electing better people (and with better electoral processes).

Where to begin? The first step is in finding the tools to help us understand our personal carbon footprint so we can take action to reduce what we can and offset what we can't.

Today's Guardian piece on that very subject is a good place to start, though go into this exercise knowing that many people are already trying to figure out how to make money from your privileged North American guilt. (You have to hand it to capitalism - it's always there first.) Do a lot of research before you start donating to a cause promising to use your money on projects aimed at making you feel less guilty about your carbon-heavy lifestyle.

Plus if we're actually going to get serious about reducing our individual footprints, we'll need to put more skin in the game than merely sending money to some random organization promising to plant trees or start a hydro-electric project in our honour. There is so much that we can each do that will have real impact. Take a browse through these telling emission charts to see that while Canada may not be topping the charts globally in our carbon emissions, we are right up there with the United States in our per-capita emissions. We only look good at the global level because we have a small population.

Travel that involves flying gives me particular guilt. Now I see why. Using the handy-dandy flight calculator in that Guardian story, I learned that my flight from Vancouver to London and back this spring meant I personally generated more than 1.3 tonnes of CO2 just from that trip. There are 67 countries where the average person doesn't emit that much in an entire year. Yikes.

Then I tripped on over to the Offsetters site to expand that search (I couldn't get the first search to identify Bucharest as an option, which was our final destination). Their calculator put me at three tonnes for the return trip from Vancouver to Bucharest, with a stopover in London. (You may need to calculate total distances for your flights for some of the sites, so here's a place to do that.)

Seeing as the global goal is to reduce everyone on Earth's average per-capita carbon footprint to 1.8 tonnes by 2050, the extent of the challenge is obvious. I'm well over my annual allowance just from one holiday flight, and I haven't even begun to add in all the other emissions resulting from my day-to-day life.

Fortunately, Columbia University has a calculator to help me calculate those emissions, and a list of 35 simple ways to reduce my carbon footprint. They suggest this site for calculating your footprint.

My partner and I have an bit of an unusual lifestyle in that we live in other people's spaces as permanent housesitters, so we're already doing pretty good on a lot of these. Moving to a new house every 3-4 weeks turns out to be an excellent mechanism for keeping your stuff to a minimum. We live in other people's spaces, which also serves to reduce our impact.

But we do love to travel. We still need to do better in all of these 35 areas if we hope to offset a joy that we aren't prepared to give up.

We adopted a "flexitarian" eating regimen earlier this year that for the most part eliminates meat. That was mostly because we realized we could no longer bear the hypocrisy of eating creatures made to suffer from their earliest days so that we can eat their deeply unhappy flesh and consume their breast milk. I'm happy that it also coincides with efforts to reduce my carbon footprint.

I've talked to a surprising number of people who are really worried about the climate crisis but at the same time kind of shrug their shoulders in a "What can one person do?" way when they talk about it. We can actually do quite a lot, and in fact will have to if we want to steer this Titanic away from the rocks. And it's going to hurt, because humans just don't change until it hurts.

We need to be priced out of our cars. We need to be regulated into improving the energy efficiences of our homes. We need development that accounts for changing climate and the energy efficiences of renovating rather than tearing down and rebuilding. We need to curb our rampant consumption, and quit buying vehicles that look like they're armed for the zombie apocalypse when we're really just driving from Oak Bay to downtown. (Read this strangely radical Globe opinion piece on making do.)

We need every level of government to get its act together and do what's good for the planet rather than take it easy on their electorate in hopes of another victory. We need to quit electing governments that pander to the completely unreasonable beliefs of uninformed people. (Fascinating that "conservative" is now attached to a social ideology that doesn't view climate change as a big concern.)

I was changed forever by a year and a half of doing communications for the University of Victoria. My work introduced me to a lot of climate scientists. What they knew scared the hell out of me, and shook me out of that paralysis that I think so many of us are in on this one.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at UVic has some great research here, in accessible language. Through my conversations with climatologist Frances Zwiers at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, I came to understand the challenges scientists face when trying to determine whether it's climate change or just a weird weather event, but that there's still a lot that can be done to mitigate the issues either way.

Francis also introduced me to this marvelous site, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. They work on behalf of the insurance industry. I can get lost for hours in their fascinating and well-researched reports.

Good luck to all of us. It won't be easy. But who would you rather be, that person in the disaster movie whose reaction to the terrifying asteroid headed for Earth is to freeze up and do nothing, or the determined one who reaches deep and takes action? The Arctic is melting, for pete's sake. Do your part.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

The Thelma and Louise approach to climate change


Reading this piece on rising greenhouse gas emissions in today's Guardian reminded me of those old movie scenes where some character gives another one a good slap to snap them out of whatever foolish thinking they're engaging in.

In this case, the crazy thinking would involve anything to do with believing that the world is actually jumping on the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Nope. Energy use last year grew at its fastest pace of the decade. It was a "golden year" for gas, with consumption up 10 per cent in the US alone. That increase alone is equivalent to the UK's entire consumption of gas in a year.

I hate to be Nelly Negative, but this does more or less reaffirm my belief in humanity's ability to respond to a life-threatening - all life, everywhere - crisis. Unlike those apocalyptic Hollywood movies where citizens dig deep into untapped reserves of strength, ingenuity and hope to save the planet, I have long suspected that in fact we'd actually just look up at the big, fiery meteor hurtling toward us and mutter, "Oh, shit," and that would be that.

This is what future historians (clearly on other planets) will note about our civilization someday - that given the challenge of reducing fossil-fuel energy use or risking climate devastation, we put the pedal to the metal and gunned it into the inferno.



Sunday, March 03, 2019

The immensely irritating but effective way that climate-change deniers do battle

I'm seeing a pattern in my social media spaces right now, where I post some article or opinion piece on climate change and a climate-change denier emerges to comment in that way that the deniers always comment - which is to say, via distraction.

It's a technique that people used regularly to try to shut me down back when I was writing newspaper columns and they didn't like what I was saying. 

Men and women tend to use the strategy differently in my experience - a man typically diverts by repeatedly asking questions that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, while women will go to an emotional argument that is hot-potato-personal, like the weeping women who called me up after I questioned soaring Caesarean-section rates in Greater Victoria demanding to know if I was suggesting that their babies should have died.

It can be surprisingly effective as a tool to completely divert an issue into an irrelevant and useless direction that ultimately ends with the respective parties getting more and more het up until they finally yell some version of "Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you!" by which point all the reasonable people who the writer had set out to engage have been scared off. (Or, in the case of Caesarean sections, a writer vowing never to touch that issue again in the fear of yet another long week of being called out by emotional moms as a baby murderer. And the rates just keep rising...)

The strategy nicely destroys any hope of enlightened dialogue on the original subject matter. All the other readers are soon running like rats to avoid being caught up in the ugly mess, and any politician passing by reaffirms his or her position that this is a "hot button" issue best either left alone or manipulated for personal electoral gain.

The fundamental premise of the strategy is to ignore the point at the centre of the piece in question and instead, make some random observation related to one tiny aspect; raise a rhetorical question; fast-forward to the most extreme interpretation; or pick at a spelling/grammatical error that will require the writer (or poster, in this case) to divert their energies into heated dialogue about something that has almost nothing to do with the actual subject at hand.

Then everybody fights and the reasonable people flee, and any chance that thoughtful action might arise from the conversation is lost. Again.

So here's the latest case in point, in which random Facebook dude Carew Martin plays the role of disruptive climate-change denier. (Find the full version of the thread here, set to "public" for all to see even if they aren't on Facebook.) I'm currently enjoying time away in Honduras right now and specifically stated earlier in the thread that I wasn't going to waste any time engaging with climate-change deniers when I ought to be holidaying. But in truth, I find that a near-impossible position to stick to because deniers are so effective at getting under my skin.

Jody posts this Guardian opinion piece headlined "Remember the days when we weren't freaked out by freak weather?" and comments: Oh, I so feel this: "I used to find wild weather exciting, but now it evokes the apocalypse of climate change." Who could have predicted in halcyon days of yore that what would alarm me most one day would be the world's weather news? As the writer concludes, few things are more important now than that we all take individual action in "the desire to be a worthy ancestor."

Carew: If anthropogenic climate change is real, why does it not stand up to reason?

Jody: So the stacks of carefully considered scientific research don't count as "reason"?

Carew: No, studies are not logic, they are data, logic is asking questions like, why was the name changed from global warming to climate change?

Jody: Gotta say, that sounds like a lot like the kind of question people use to divert the conversation from what matters and get everybody wasting time and energy talking about some issue that has no relevance.It's what I think of as the "Look over there!" tactic. And was the name actually changed? I think of it as global warming causing climate change.

Carew: You can think of it however you like but the fact is, in common parlance the name changed from global warming to climate change and what you've just done is a diversionary tactic by not answering the question, hypocritically. So why was the name changed?

Jody: Sorry, I am not doing this. You go ahead and talk to people who want to talk about that, and I'll stick with my plan to actually change the things I'm doing so that there's something left for my kids, grandkids and on down the line.

Carew: So you're either unable or refuse to use logic when discussing climate change.

Facebook friend Diane McNally weighs in: That's not logic, that's sophistry and I'm not doing it either .

Carew: Sophistry is not the same as logic which is why I never understand why people consider it a good thing to be sophisticated. Regardless, Jody, weren't you a journalist? I kind of thought a big part of that job is asking questions.

Then comes a series of heated comments between Carew and a friend of mine, Glenn Phillips, who I have known since elementary school and who takes the approach that damn it, nobody ought to get away with saying stupid stuff without being challenged every step of the way. I admire his commitment but personally am done with wasting my time with people who are resolutely unconvinceable.

Irked by the journalist comment, even though I know I'm just rising to the bait, I return with this final long comment, which always seems to happen and leaves me thinking damn it, I'm wasting my energy on this ineffective thread being read by maybe three people when I could be blogging and being read by at least three times that many (ha ha):

Jody: Yes, Carew, I'm a journalist, and here's the question I always have for climate-change/global-warming deniers - why is it so important to be against the science? Why do you want to deny it? Is it because you want to keep using fossil fuels with abandon? Is it because you're a person who always goes up against whatever the majority of people have concluded after much careful thought and research, because you always need an argument? Is it because you genuinely think that all of us are wrong and being duped by people who have conspired to use fake science to extrapolate a false argument?

Here's the thing: If we're all wrong about this and you're right, then nobody would be happier than me to see you have the last laugh. I would genuinely love the deniers to be right, Carew, and that this unusual weather, storms, polar melting, etc we are observing on a planet whose atmosphere has warmed dramatically since the Industrial Age just turn out to be coincidental one-offs.

Unfortunately, I am a responsible person with maybe 30 years of life left if I'm really, really lucky, but I've got eight grandkids and one more on the way who I want to have a good life - one not torn apart by food and water shortages, massive displacement, war, wild and unpredictable weather, bigger and bigger storms. Just my grandkids who are alive right now need 100 more years. But they're going to have their own kids and grandkids, so they're going to want much longer than that by the time they reach my age, because they'll be in my same position.

So I look at all that as a logical, problem-solving kind of human being who has much respect for science but also does her own research and observes with eyes and ears wide open, and I say to myself, Jody, what's the best course of action for you to take to benefit the most number of people for the longest period of time?

And my answer is to consider my own carbon footprint and reduce it. To look at other Canadians' carbon footprints and provide them with the facts that they can use to understand that this issue is about ALL of us, and that they can reduce their carbon footprints as well for the sake of the planet. To keep a metaphorical knife at the throat of the politicians, who are all far too influenced by the sweet whisperings of wealthy capitalist structures that bring them money, and to push back hard at those same capitalists whose short-term, get-it-all-before-it's-gone mentality is quite likely going to kill us all. (The single best way to battle capitalists is to quit buying their stuff. Just quit, people.)

And if it's all for nothing because climate change/global warming is all just a made-up thing like you believe, then what the hell, at least I lived a less extravagantly consumptive and resource-intensive life. It certainly doesn't hurt the world to reduce my carbon footprint, does it? That really just means I will live a simpler life. Drive my car less. Consume far fewer goods. Be mindful of my energy use at all times. Destroy less species through kinder, sustainable habits. Waste less of my money.

And here's the other thing, Carew - you can quit wasting YOUR time posting on the Facebook threads of people who believe as I do, because as passionately as I feel about all of this, I'm a realist who sees with much sorrow that it's your side that's winning. Here in Canada, we are buying more new trucks to drive than ever before, and they aren't hybrids or even close to it. We aren't changing our habits. We're Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.

We aren't reining in the capitalists, or slapping down the politicians who promise us everything and deliver nothing. Around the world, global temperatures continue to rise because we just can't stop consuming and consuming and consuming.

So however old you are, Carew - and I'm guessing you're at least my age, because climate-change deniers skew significantly toward older men in my experience - you just go on to live out whatever years you have and get on with dying, while the rest of us do what we can to make sure there's something left for future generations.

***
And what's to be learned from this? As a veteran of many obfuscations, I just want to pull back the veil on this common strategy, which is alarmingly effective. Just see it for what it is - distraction. White noise. The real damage is done when we shy away from important topics for fear of having to deal with these disturbers, who exist solely to cast doubt and scare away the reasonable people.

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Missive from a climate-change fear monger

Graphic credit: Cakeburger.com
I'm in a heated Facebook exchange at this very moment with one of those people who don't want to be thought of as a climate-change denier, choosing to position themselves instead as brave challengers of fear-mongering and political correctness. Oh, please.

Anyway, I've just been thinking that I'm now writing mini-blogs via my Facebook messages rather than here on my actual blog. While part of me likes the transitory nature of social media, it does make me worry that much of my writing these days is like so much dust in the wind blowing across a social media platform that I'm not even sure I like anymore.

So I'm going to glue that Facebook exchange right here, for posterity. Also because I want to make climate change my No. 1 topic for 2019. What other issue possibly matters more than saving the planet from human-caused emissions so that future generations have a healthy, happy place to live that isn't tearing itself apart with fires, freezing, wind storms, floods and massive crop failures?

Here's my original Facebook post from this morning. Admittedly, it establishes a challenging tone with the use of "idiot" that I know brings out the critics, and is not a good tone for public engagement. But hey, I am so done with being nice about this issue:

When exposed to idiot ramblings around climate change/carbon tax from politicians like Doug Ford or Andrew Scheer, remember this: Nothing about addressing climate change will be easy or painless. So what's it going to be - petty political sniping and self-serving arguments because hell, you'll be long gone by the time of reckoning, or saving the planet? Then I linked to this story.

Reply from my Facebook connection:

Hey, Jody, without being TOO contrary a few points…
1.) The accompanying photo is of steam. So what, you say? When I am to be alarmed about an impending apocalypse and recognize steam, it insults my intelligence.
Right from the get go I am being mislead.
2.) They are called greenhouse gases. What do we grow in greenhouses? Food. If I am to be frightened by an impending apocalypse why has an image of lush greenhouses, filled with food been conjured?
3.) The NDP, Champions of the Little People, have taken it upon themselves to use BC’s carbon taxes for general revenues. Why then would I trust ANY government to claim that carbon taxes are to save the planet.
I am not a denier.
But I am surprised by the numbers of people who believe in climate stasis.


To which I replied:

Point 1: I see no issue with illustrating the article with steam, as what we're really talking about with climate change is the use of energy. Whatever's going on with the steam in the photo, I am sure you'll agree that there is much energy being used in the process. I would personally prefer a photo depicting infrared heat loss from a residence, because we tend to get fixated on industry as the cause of climate change without ever accepting our own significant role. Point two: I believe "greenhouse gas" refers to the greenhouse effect caused by C02, not actual greenhouses. Point 3: This is not about politics. I am not trying to say that all will be well if we elect NDP governments. It just so happens that the most idiotic viewpoints seem to come from the Conservatives. This is an issue for the world, not for politics. I guess that's one of my major complaints - we should not be using planet survival as a political soapbox. Please read this:https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/facts/energy-ghgs/20063

Responder then got into a short back-and-forth with another person, which ended with this other person thanking Responder for treating potted tomates well, which led to this post from him: 

ALL plants love CO2, The more CO2, the more plants. Science, botany in this case.

I replied:

Unfortunately, there is more than the happiness of plants at stake here. Climate change will destabilize all the things we take for granted - amount of rainfall, temperature extremes, wind extremes, capacity of wildfires, 100-year flood levels, crops that grow in different parts of the world, people's ability to work outside in areas of rising/falling temperatures, effects on weather from our poles, political stability, migrant movement, resource allocation. Seriously, M, perhaps you're not a denier, but you're certainly being contrarian without offering up any meaningful argument. Why do that?

His reply:

Well, I take exception to the outcome being an apocalypse. You mention 100 year flood levels. Given that the planet's geologic history shows us that the planet's mean temperatures are far higher than they are now and that atmospheric CO2 levels were far higher than they are now and that there were no polar ice caps, glaciers, even snow an apocalypse is not what comes to mind. A 100 year time frame is nothing. Also where did all this organic carbon come from in the first place? It came from that time of high temps, high CO2 and a planet covered in jungle. Canada's Arctic has 30% more vegetation now than it did in 1986 (NASA). The Sahara desert is shrinking (National Geographic). I do not see an impending apocalypse, I see a new Garden of Eden, an unfortunate analogy perhaps as I am not a Christian, but a world of much increased vegetation (read: happy plants, read: food). As well, plants are carbon sinks, more plants, less CO2. I grow weary of the fear-mongering. So... why do YOU perpetuate the fear?

To which I replied:

Believe me, I'm occasionally tempted by the idea of an alternate life in which I skip right over the big issues that scare me and just get on with a cheerfully ignorant life. That must be so much more relaxing. It does require that you shut your thinking skills down, however, so I'm not interested. I've worked alongside a number of UVic climate scientists in my work over the past couple of years. I read the IPCC report. I've researched, pondered, listened. And you know, it's looking pretty certain that human-caused GHG emissions are the problem. People can distract from that by talking about plant health or the way of the Earth throughout history, and I accept both of those points. We've been through ice ages and dinosaur ages and amazingly tropical ages, but let's be honest - those all must have been pretty bad experiences for whatever was alive and thriving under the previous conditions, wouldn't you say? What we're talking about is a wholesale change in everything that humans alive today thought they could count on. You can't just walk like Pollyanna into that scenario. Who knows if it's the apocalypse, but there are going to be fundamental changes happening at profoundly important-to-life levels that will affect every person on the planet. And here we are, still talking about whether it's happening. I'm not going to be one of those people wasting energy trying to convince those people. But yes, I'm going to be out here more and more with my fear-mongering, because I have children and grandchildren who need me to be doing that on their behalf.

Respondent's salvo:

I should add I have a degree in botany, B.Sc. from UVIC, '85. And with that bombshell, I've made my point.

And that's where we're at as I write this. If you have important points about climate change to add to this post because you care deeply about the issue and have put a lot of thought and research into it, I hope you will share those with me so I can deepen my own knowledge.

I'm fine with hearing from the deniers, too, of course. But from now I'm just going to send them these responses so I don't waste even a minute more time that could be going to actually addressing the problems. 

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

A garbage read. No, really

Just be glad you don't live in Kolonnawa, Sri Lanka, where 800 tonnes
of garbage is added to this dump every day. 
I'm reposting a 2002 story of mine on recycling here, and never mind that I quietly roll my eyes at my many photographer friends who trot out their old photos as "new" and repost them on Instagram. But here's the thing: it's such an interesting subject, what we do with our garbage, and perhaps even more relevant in 2018 than it was 16 years ago when I wrote this for the Times Colonist.

The subject of garbage was on my mind this week after I posted this story from the Guardian on Britain's rather appalling habits around its own waste; the country is still exporting plastic waste to countries that appear to be dumping it willy-nilly, and it hasn't yet even got a deposit program for its beverage containers.

The story prompted a lot of waste-related thoughts from my Facebook community, and curiosity about what was the latest on what we were doing with waste right here in our hometown.

Which got me thinking about my long-ago story. Here it is, with some updates in a few spots where I could find new information.

Thinking out of the box: Are we green enough?

Jody Paterson
July 28, 2002

The case for a garbage revolution in the capital region had been building for more than a decade by the time the local politicians gave the order to drain the lake.

It would have been an easy decision in an earlier time. This is, after all, the region that once towed its garbage out to sea, and Heal Lake on that July day 11 years ago was little more than a contaminated swamp ruined by decades of sitting next to the Hartland Avenue landfill.

But attitudes had changed over the years. The litterbug generation had grown up with a new sense of environmental responsibility. There was a lot of guilt around garbage by 1991, and Capital Regional District board members felt the shameful significance of destroying a natural wonder, even a dilapidated one, to make room for more trash.

No more, they vowed. From that point on, the region would reduce, reuse and recycle as never before, and the flow of garbage to Hartland would be halved by 1995. Facing unrest elsewhere over other dumps and landfills, provincial politicians made similar commitments around the same time in B.C. and across the country.

It didn't happen by 1995. It still hasn't, except in a handful of areas that are composting the huge flow of food waste and other organics that account for the heaviest component of any municipality's garbage stream. More than 10 years into the dream, less than a third of all the garbage in B.C. gets diverted from landfills or incinerators. The capital region has been stuck at 41 per cent since 1999.

**Update: I couldn't find current diversion rates anywhere after flipping through a number of CRD reports on its website, but I see that the City of Vancouver has a diversion rate of 63 per cent now, so let's presume we're similar or someone would probably be yelling at us by now. The trend these days is to measure per-capita waste production, which was 412 kilos per person/year in 2002 in the Capital Region when I wrote this piece and is now 348. Looked at another way, our population has increased by 25 per cent since 1990 but the waste we generate has decreased by 27 per cent. 

But while the dramatic forecasts of waste reduction may not have been borne out as quickly as expected, there are heartening signs that we're well on the way. We're generating less garbage and getting increasingly innovative about making use of what we've got. We're finally seeing our governments hold industries accountable for the waste their products create, which in turn builds markets for recycled commodities to help pay for the high cost of collecting them.

And while finding other uses for waste is still not as cheap in the short-term as throwing something away, the day when that may be so no longer seems quite so distant.

"Every year, Canada and the U.S. continue to capture more recyclables," says Jerry Powell, editor of the Oregon trade publication Resource Recycling. "We roared through the '90s catching the low-hanging fruit, and it's not going to be that easy anymore. But we're going to keep on growing."

The brewing industry was an early entry into recycling, having found during its infancy 150 years ago that it made economic sense to collect beer bottles for refilling. B.C. brewers followed suit in 1924 and continue to do so, encouraging participation by charging deposits and asking the province's 43 participating brewers to use a uniform style of bottle. The average bottle of B.C.-brewed beer is filled 15 times before it's retired.

Steel recycling caught on across the country during the Second World War, when the federal government was desperate for steel to make weapons. Motor oil, lead-acid batteries, paint and tires were banned from B.C. landfills several years ago, necessitating recycling industries around those products as well.

"Blue-box" goods -- plastics, tin cans, newspaper and office paper -- have been melted and pulped into new products for many years. But it wasn't until communities started collecting them in large amounts as part of recycling programs in the last decade that they came into their own as commodities on the world market.

The capital region launched its blue-box program in the late 1980s and now sells almost 16,000 tonnes of recyclables a year into the global market. More than three-quarters of British Columbians have access to a curbside recycling pickup, a major reason why the province generated 400,000 fewer tonnes of garbage in 2000 compared to a decade earlier, even while the population grew by 24 per cent.

In the early days of community recycling, the vision was of glass bottles turned back into glass bottles, of old newspapers pulped to become new ones. Waste would be eliminated and the environment spared; 20 recycled aluminum cans, as recycling advocates have noted, can be made new again using the same amount of electricity and water needed to make a single can from scratch.

But aluminum proved to be the exception, the only blue-box recyclable that pays for itself when collection costs are factored in. The reality for other blue-box commodities was more complex.

Reused newsprint doesn't have the same strength as "virgin" newsprint, making it an unpopular choice in large quantities for the high-speed presses of the newspaper industry. There also weren't enough de-inking plants in North America to handle the glut from the rapid expansion of community recycling in the 1990s, and markets are only now recovering.

Glass broke so often in the process of being collected that it was impossible to keep one colour of bottle separated from another, making it useless for future batches of bottles. Only domestic beer bottles, hand-sorted by colour by the brewing industry, return to use as bottles.

Plastic pop bottles were durable enough, but so cheap to make in the first place that the industry cared little about getting the old bottles back. Health laws in various locales often prohibit "post- consumer" plastics from being turned back into bottles anyway, unless it's certain that the consumer's mouth won't come into contact with the recycled material.

So while markets have developed as blue-box programs proliferated, the recycled use is almost always in something of lesser value. Newspapers become ingredients in cardboard. Glass is ground up for use in road aggregate and fibreglass. Plastic pop bottles are flaked and shipped primarily to China, to be turned into T-shirts, fleece jackets, sleeping-bag fill and carpet.

It was a harsh learning experience for many communities. Having envisaged a nice little nest egg from selling recyclables, they instead found themselves dealing with wildly fluctuating markets disconnected from the cost of collecting the goods.

In the capital region, costs have improved in the past two years since collection methods changed. Glass, metal and plastics are now sorted at recycling plants rather than curbside, making it easier for contractors to pick up more material on a single run and keep collection costs lower.

Even so, it still costs almost twice as much per tonne to run the region's blue-box program as it does to throw garbage in the landfill, $84.49 compared to $45.66. Of the almost $10 million spent last year on waste management (funded by the $75-a-tonne charge to dump at Hartland), $4 million of it went toward diverting recyclables. If profit were the measure of success, we'd be failing. **Update from CRD’s 2016 annual report, the most recent available: The region now spends $19.6 million on waste management, of which $6.1 million goes to fund recycling collection and another $3 million goes to other diversion efforts. It now costs $110 a tonne to dump waste at Hartland.

The goal, however, is garbage reduction, and on that count the program is working. The region has dumped less garbage into Hartland every year since the blue-box program began; last year's total, 135,000 tonnes, is the smallest amount generated since 1987, and less than half of the 300,000 tonnes that was expected to materialize by the early 1990s. **The amount of garbage going into the landfill got as low as 112,000 tonnes in 2015, but jumped to 133,000 the following year, mostly due to an increase in construction waste. There are no figures more recent than 2016 on the CRD website.

The landfill that was once forecast to be full by 2000 has at least 50 years left, and even more if a long-awaited composting facility finally gets built. That's good news in an era when building a new dump would cost tens of millions of dollars and almost certainly prompt a non-stop series of confrontations with unwilling neighbours, First Nations and environmentalists.

But if diversion rates are to hit the ambitious levels set in the years when Heal Lake could still call itself that, there's much work to be done.

“We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what we can do," said Prospect Lake resident Gary Moonie in the runup to the draining of Heal Lake, arguing for more aggressive recycling policies.

In fact, people in the capital region and across North America have proven resistant to recycling unless it's either very easy for them or worth their while, which is why areas with curbside pickup and bottle deposit programs have the highest recycling rates.

(In B.C., which has deposits on most beverage containers, three- quarters of all plastic pop bottles are returned for refunds. In the U.S., where only 10 states have deposit programs, barely a fifth of the 1.6 million tonnes of plastic bottles sold every year are returned.) **2016 figures: The US recycling rate for plastic bottles has inched up to 29 per cent.

So communities wanting to reduce their garbage stream face the challenge of keeping it easy -- curbside blue-box collection, numerous bottle depots -- without going broke paying for it.

Finding markets for recycled goods that will offset at least some of the high price of collection is critical. Glass has turned out to be the worst of the blue-box commodities, bulky to transport and worthless on the market.

"It's fused sand," says Resource Recycling's Powell. "There's no worth in that."

One industry insider says that if he was choosing, he'd grind up waste glass and dump it into the ocean, where he contends it would be virtually undetectable. Blue-box scroungers, who can be fined for stealing goods at curbside that rightly belong to the regional district, do the CRD a favour when they take glass, one staffer quietly admits.

Newsprint has held its own, although its price on the market has been as low as $5 a tonne at times in the past decade. Recycled aluminum can sell for as much as $2,000 a tonne; the Alcan aluminum smelter in Kitimat buys almost two-thirds of the 2.1 billion cans discarded in Canada every year. Cardboard is selling for $220 a tonne right now, a high.

Plastic, however, has been a disappointment. There's a hungry market out there willing to pay as much as $400 a tonne for pop-bottle plastic and HDPE, the heavier plastic used for shampoo and detergent bottles. And there's a load of plastic out there: Between 1995 and 2000, the amount of plastic beverage containers manufactured in the U.S. alone almost doubled to more than 600 billion.

**2018: Surprisingly little change in many of the prices for recycled goods. Here’s an estimate out of Alberta from June 2018. Aluminum cans now fetch considerably less than in 2002, with rates in the US just over $1,300 a tonne. Newspaper sometimes doesn't even reach $1 a tonne.

But many of those bottles were single-serving -- bottled water, in many cases. They were bought and consumed by people on the go, who threw them away instead of bringing them back home for recycling. As well, consumers are forgetting to recycle "household industrial" plastics, used as containers for things like hair products and cleaners.

The result: recycle rates of plastic beverage bottles in the U.S. fell to a low of 22.3 per cent in 2000, down from 40 per cent five years earlier. In B.C., the Recycling Council estimates that 87 per cent of the 7,000 tonnes of household industrial bottles we use every year end up landfilled.

The stats are less grim for B.C. pop bottles, as the province collects a deposit of five or 10 cents per bottle from consumers that's paid back upon return. The recycle rates last year of that type of plastic beverage bottle -- PET, short for polyethylene terephthalate -- were around 72 per cent.

But there's still more demand for used PET and HDPE than there is a ready supply, even while communities across the country lament the flow of plastics into their landfills.

"When the big overseas markets like China are buying, there's a tremendous volume accepted," says plastics broker Dave Smith, of Sarnia's Canadian Plastic Recycling Inc. "It competes with cotton, so when the cotton crop's bad, the demand for PET is big. I'd say the demand always exceeds the supply."

What's the solution? Recycling markets often need a push from government to establish themselves: the banning of a certain item from landfills; recycled-material quotas for producers; government- led purchases of new products made from recycled goods. Little of that has happened yet with plastic.

"Once government mandates that something is banned from a landfill, we have something to base our business on," says Doug Stevens of Metro Materials, the Victoria firm under contract with the CRD to process all blue-box items and ship them out for remanufacture.

His co-worker Matt Dupuis notes that "it's still cheaper to cut down trees" than to manufacture plastic two-by-fours.

"We may actually need artificial markets for a while, where a municipality commits to buying x-amount of plastic lumber for a building project, or to using plastic road dividers," says Dupuis. "If governments at various levels coordinated things like that, you'd start to see those costs go down."

Improving plastic recycling rates could reduce the cost of blue-box programs, but the biggest hope for shrinking the garbage stream lies in composting. Organics -- everything from restaurant waste to soiled disposable diapers -- account for about 38 per cent of the weight of all garbage in the capital region and other jurisdictions, the single-biggest source of waste. **Food waste has been prohibited in household garbage in the CRD since 2015 and has to be separated into a "green bin" for pickup. However, organics still account for 21 per cent of the waste stream as of the last study in 2016.

But only a few thousand tonnes of yard waste are diverted into composting at Hartland in any given year, and only two B.C. towns, Mission and Cobble Hill, have easy access to a compost facility for food waste. Interestingly enough, this is still true.  Since banning kitchen scraps in 2015, the CRD ships "green bin" waste to these two facilities.

The province and the region have talked about the need for composting for more than a decade, but the long-promised regulatory framework is only now being drafted. The considerable resistance of neighbourhoods fearful of smell and noise will no doubt hamper the search for a plant site for several more years.

Yet in areas where composting is already underway, the results are dramatic. The Cowichan Valley has seen its waste rates fall to among the lowest in the province since a privately run composting facility opened in the area two years ago, a situation admittedly helped along by the $125-a-tonne cost of shipping remaining garbage to Cache Creek after the town dump reached capacity around the same time.

Edmonton anticipates cutting its waste stream by 70 per cent at a new plant that makes topsoil out of organic garbage and sewage sludge. Nova Scotia banned organics from its landfills in 1998 and has cut its waste stream in half.

This month in Etobicoke, a suburb of Toronto, residents began separating their garbage into "wet" and "dry" at the curb in a pilot project that the city believes could end the need for a dump by 2010 if eventually expanded throughout Toronto.

"Because we haven't got our organics out, we're stuck at 41 per cent diversion," says CRD staffer Brenda Phillips, manager of environmental education. "And there are still a lot of regulations and land-use questions that will have to be addressed before a facility can open."

Ongoing involvement from all waste-generating industries is also essential in cutting the flow of garbage. Product stewardship -- the "cradle to grave" responsibility of an industry for its product -- has barely been tapped in B.C. The bottling industry leads the pack, having taken over the collection and recycling of beverage containers in B.C. through the Western Brewers' Association and four-year-old Encorp Pacific, a not- for-profit set up at specifically for the task.

Encorp even ended up with a $5 million surplus last year, albeit largely because of the $16 million worth of unredeemed deposit on containers that people threw away and another $12 million from non- refundable "recycling fees" consumers have paid on every beverage container since 1998. Encorp says the fees are necessary to cover the high recycling costs -- and poor markets -- for certain containers, and notes that all profits are put back into recycling efforts. Encorp's surplus was $7 million in 2017, $19.6 million of which came from unredeemed deposits. Read the annual report here

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Gatorade have all recently given in to government and environmental pressure to begin using between 10 and 25 per cent recycled plastic in their new bottles. These beverage giants are now promising to use 100 per cent recycled materials by 2025 or so. 

But other stewardship programs could be started for any number of products, says a study done four months ago for the Liberal government. Belgium requires stewardship of beverage containers, disposable razors and cameras, pesticides, paper and cardboard, while Taiwan goes after the manufacturers of electronic appliances, computers and vehicles.

B.C. currently targets tires, oil, pharmaceuticals and lead-acid batteries as well as beverage containers, but the programs could all use a little work, the study notes. Electronics can now be dropped off for free at Return-It depots in BC. An environmental handling fee of anywhere from five cents to $10 has been added onto purchase prices of some of these items to cover the cost of recycling them. 

"Product stewardship in B.C. today does not appear to be the result of a disciplined strategy. Rather, it appears to be the result of a combination of history, politics, revenue opportunity, and ad hoc industry and ministry initiatives," says the report.

Such a hodge-podge can be unsatisfactory for both industry and consumers, the report's author notes, citing the example of the government collecting $4 million every year in "eco-fees" for disposing of lead-acid batteries when the actual cost is only $1 million.

Whatever the strategies, any endeavour to reduce waste will live or die on people's willingness to participate.

Garbage diversion rates are highest when people need only shuffle their blue box to the curb, but so are collection costs. A little extra effort from the populace to recycle goods that aren't accepted in the blue box would go a long way toward saving both money and waste.

As well, the litterbug generation that learned as children in the 1970s to put garbage in the trash now needs to teach a new generation to put it in the recycling box instead. The beverage containers with the worst return rates in B.C. are the 126 million drink boxes and "gable-tops" consumed every year, almost exclusively by school children. Almost 60 per cent continue to be thrown away. We're still throwing away 40 per cent of drink boxes in 2018.

Encorp communications manager Malcolm Harvey says education is essential. But so are blue boxes and drop-offs in as many locations as can be provided.

"The only thing that really makes recycling work is that people want to do it," says Harvey. "We just have to make it easy for them."

***

Did you know:

- Every tonne of recycled steel saves 1.4 tonnes of iron ore and 3.6 barrels of oil.

- Five plastic pop bottles are used to make one extra-large T- shirt.

- 55 million plastic bags are taken home by Canadians every week. Yikes, this has now increased to 2.86 billion bags.

- Six million tonnes of glass are thrown away in Canada annually.

- A tonne of recycled newspaper saves three cubic metres of landfill space and 17 trees.

- 35 two-litre plastic pop bottles make enough fibre fill for one sleeping bag.


Beyond the blue box: End uses of locally recycled goods

· Cardboard: Shipped to mills in Vancouver, Washington and Taiwan to be made into cardboard boxes, liners, and cereal boxes.

· Newspaper: Shipped to Vancouver, Oregon and Taiwan to be made into newsprint.

· Mixed Paper: Shipped to Vancouver, Washington and Taiwan for use in duroid shingles, packing material, corrugated cardboard liner and Gyproc paper.

· Tin: Shipped to tin and steel smelters to be remade into tin cans.

· Glass: Ground for use in road aggregate and highway marker beads.

· Plastics: Divided into one of seven categories and sent to Merlin Plastics in Vancouver to be pelletized, eventually shipped overseas for use in clothing, carpet, drainage pipe, car parts, polar fleece and more plastic containers.