Day 11 - Prime time!

Titles are hard, so I figure a weak numeric joke is better than nothing today.   My wife brought up an idea - that "carbon offsets" are equivalent to "papal indulgences".  I thought it was an excellent idea, and something that I should think about entering in a CBC contest "Canada Writes."  After talking around the topic a bit, we both recalled hearing this proposition before, but it is still an interesting thought.  I figured I'd expand the ideas a little farther, branching out to the more general topic of "global warming" and what people think about it and are doing about it.  Like most things, it's probably a good idea to practise composing such a piece, so I'm going to write up some of my ideas here and enter the contest later with something more coherent.  Or less - I'm not sure what they're looking for ;)

Anyway, the papal indulgences vs carbon offsets is a very strong parallel: you get to sin all you want and use money to erase the sin.  The money paid goes somewhere that's not exactly clear and whatever your theological grounding, what gets done with the money to fix the sin is rather murky.  Some examples are the planting of various trees in different parts of the world to offset that plane trip you took from New York to Lake Tahoe to go skiing.  Everything comes down to the "leave it the way you found it" idea I was given growing up.  You can mess things up all you want if you spend the time to clean it up.  Doing all the messing up followed by all the cleaning leaves you in a pickle - the mess becomes like compound interest.  Messing the mess results in more clean up effort than mess-cleanup-mess.  And when we're talking the environment, the "leaving it to the end" is equivalent to "leaving it until I'm almost dead", at which point you've done very little cleaning up and a lot of messing up.  These lessons lead one to try and create less mess and clean more frequently.  This works in the kitchen and in the tar sands - there is a minimum mess necessary to accomplish something, but after that, it should be dealt with.  Economically, once you've made the money, that's the time to do the cleanup, not years later when you've gone bankrupt.  Well, that's what companies do because the gov't (that's us) has to come in and clean up.

Every now and then there is a back-and-forth about "global warming" - it's important to act now, the data is flawed, the science wrong, someone is manipulating the media, etc etc.  The first step is to try and get every person to reduce their daily impact on the world around them.  Next, the impact of their general lifestyle.  A lot of progress can be made through technology and now is the time to pursue them.  Some propose huge projects to fix things, but those smack of desperation and is wrong-headed.  Humans are very adaptable and getting the humans to change is easier, cheaper and more predicitble than trying to bend the planet to our will.  The latter has always been thwarted, never working out as planned or even in a predictable fashion.  So let's get on to working small and building up from that.  Use less water, less electricity, less gasoline.  All these things will be cheaper for you as an individual and then you can look to the things you buy and decide how to select things that are better.  Eating food that is in season near where you live is cheaper and it has to travel less.  It keeps the farmers near you going and it generally tastes better too.  Generating power more locally would save creating huge towers everywhere with lots of cables susceptible to ice and wind and so forth.  

Anyway, that's enough ranting for tonight.  I'll have to look into some more potential topics for the Canada Writes topic.  Everyone that reads this post will know my main problem will be keeping any submission to 200 words.