How many more Frankenstorms and how many more Calgary floods does it take to wake people up?
The clock is ticking; in geological terms we are seconds away from global disaster.
Natural gas is not the bridging fuel the oil and gas industry wants to make us believe. It is at the most a small rotten gangplank, and it may break and we all fall in a very unpredictable hot hole.
Who is paying for the clean-up and the rebuilding after the ever-increasing storms around the world?
Here in Canada you can’t insure your house for land-based flooding. If the water pipe bursts and fills your basement it is insured. But if the big money-making oil and gas industry screws up the global environment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gives you a pat on your back and promises to help you, with your money, taxpayers’ money.
When will you stand up and demand alternative energy? It is there, it is available. It was and still is suppressed by Big Oil. Start organizing co-operatives to install solar, wind, and biomass and geothermal energy production. Solar and wind energy can be stored or converted into other forms of energy, such as hydrogen or thermal. In some parts of this Earth they use excess green power to pump water back up into power dams.
As a boy I saw cars, trucks and tractors run around on wood gasification. My parents steadily reminded us: have you turned the lights off? Look at houses these nights; almost every window is lit up. The TV is on, all other electronics are on too, or at least at standby, burning electricity.
Do we really have to fly halfway around the world for a two-hour meeting? What about Skype, or teleconferencing? Do we really have to be so wasteful and by doing it destroy our planet, the only one we have?
Company officials and politicians talk about best practices. Best practices compared to what? Best practice in the fracking industry is that 35 per cent of all wells - 1.8 million in 2012 worldwide - are leaking methane in totally uncontrolled quantities.
Methane is the most potent greenhouse gases on Earth. Why is every global warming prediction lagging behind? Because no one really knows how much methane is escaping? All we know is that for thousands of years the methane content in the atmosphere was constant till about 1750. Since then it increased by
150 per cent.
When will you start changing your lifestyle, when will you start demanding from your MLA, from all politicians to change how we use and produce energy? We can do it. The technology is there and it just needs the political will and foresight to think about the future of coming generations.
Join the movement for a sustainable future; don’t be a fossil that we’ll eventually convert into oil and gas.
Werner Rhein
Whitehorse