Apparently not so Eco-Friendly after all

I’m all for saving the planet. It’s imperative, if not for our generation, then for the next, or the one after it. We in North America have been living above the world’s carrying capacity for a long time. One could argue that we are the least at fault, as we live in a vast area with many natural resources, and our continent’s population is a mere drop in the bucket of the globe’s, clocking in at a meagre 15% of all humans alive. We like to flaunt that we feed the world, our agriculture helping much more populous or poverty-stricken nations.

We’re still horrible polluters, with little to no excuse. Our public transit is a sham, we drive cars many sizes too large for our needs, and think nothing of waste. Why bother? There’s still plenty of land to build landfills on.

One thing that has to be kept in mind though is not to jump to quickly on board with new “greener” trends. Some of it is hype, and some of it is marketing nonsense. CFLs are a good example. When they came out, a few early adopters, myself included, went out and bought them as a green gesture, consuming less than ¼ the wattage of their conventional counterparts, they seemed like an intelligent and mature decision. Now we’re being told that the mercury they contain could be almost as harmful as the extra wattage that normal bulbs would have burnt. Is it a valuable trade off? I don’t really know. I haven’t tried to switch back, as I enjoy the extra light per-watt, and the fact that they seem to last much longer than regular bulbs – I’ve only had one burn out in almost 3 years.

The problem here is the government jumped on board with the “green revolution”, and has all but mandated that stores sell nothing but these new green bulbs. Are we setting ourselves up for pain further on down the line? For the same reasons that nuclear power should be considered, the mercury bulbs should be to. The pros and cons of any invention that has long-lasting hazardous waste associated with it should be weighed carefully, and objectively, before making a reflexive emotional decision.

I read recently that in most North American cities, the bus system is actually no better on a fuel-per-person-mile than cars, even cars with only one person in them. This obviously is a scale issue, but isn’t immediately apparent. In smaller cities, say under 200,000, there are a lot of empty or near-empty buses driving around in non-peak times. For public transit to be effective, it needs to be rolling all of the time on a consistent schedule, not just at peak hours. Diesel buses burn a lot of fuel, whether they’re loaded or not. Obviously in bigger cities, the networks are slightly less wasteful, as there’s enough people on them, or at least on a staggered schedule, to make the system worthwhile. I myself am a little guilty though – I can only think of a handful of times since I’ve taken the bus outside of rush hour.

I think we need to buckle down and start investing in new technologies, and doing what we can. Why do tractor trailers still only get 6, a figure they got back in the 1970’s? Where are LED light bulbs, a technology that was more or less ready years ago? Why are we still, in 2008, burning coal to power cities? These are questions that we as a society need to grapple with.

On a personal level, there are plenty of things we should and could be doing. When was the last time you checked the pressure on your tires? As derisive as the US media has been on Obama’s plan, he’s right. If tire pressure was kept up in every car in North America, the amount of fuel saved would be astounding. When was the last time you threw something out that was still perfectly useful, instead of keeping it or donating it to a second hand store like Value Village or Goodwill? My challenge to anyone that reads this is in the next week, do at least one thing that you wouldn’t normally have for the environment. I’ll strive for this as well. And maybe, if everyone out there did that, we’d be taking a step in the right direction. We must keep in mind that the rest of the world is industrializing, and with China’s and India’s industrial base transportation infrastructure growing exponentially, with 2.45 BILLION people involved, North America needs to step back and look at our own behaviour, and do our level best to curb pollution.