Adapting to a changing world

Gray Merriam | Sep 02, 2016

This August we are in the tenth consecutive month of above-record temperatures. Not only is it clear that global warming is real but it is also clear that climate change is characterized by vastly increased variability in resulting weather. Forest fires here, flooding rivers there and killing drought in unpredictable locations.

Making good judgments becomes difficult when guidance from the past is made doubtful by strange new developments.

In the face of this warming trend and the difficulty of predicting where unusual weather will happen, we try to operate with infrastructure and policies that were designed for the much less extreme climate and much less variable weather of the 1930's through 1950's. So culverts are too small and bridges are too low. They were designed for less severe storms. Our agricultural and food production methods are not adapted to droughts that flare up. Our wells are threatened. Spring high water comes mid-winter. Adaptation is required both in our actions and in our thinking.

Climate change is real and is linked to our concern about future energy supplies. Thinking people recognize that we need to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Burning coal and oil to generate electricity will change our world by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and changing global warming. We must adapt to new realities. We need alternative sources of energy.

Our future will demand that we use all ways of meeting our needs for power. We will need all reasonable sources of power and all possible means of reducing the need for power. Our problem will not be solved by some large technical breakthrough but by accumulating adaptive small percentages both of increased energy production and of energy not used.

It would be foolish if we sacrificed other valued components of our quality of life to meet needs for power. It is foolhardy to cover higher classes of farmland with solar panels. Proposing windmills in the globally recognized Important Bird Area on Prince Edward County was equally thoughtless. Forcing the infrastructure for power production into rural environments when the demand for that power is in urban centres is exceptionally foolish. There are rural qualities of life that, over the long term, will prove more valuable than short-term relief from urban NIMBYism or brief increases in urban cash flow.

The Canadian way, from the last century, of imposing dams and their impoundments on northern and rural cultures is out-dated and never was justified. If Oakville wants power and a power plant is thoughtfully planned and clearly announced in advance, then it should go into Oakville's cultural future, at the site of the demand, not into someone else's cultural existence. Such politically biased erroneous decisions sacrifice democracy to gain votes.

Regulations and policies do not represent the fundamentals needed to judge future alternatives. Ontario's Green Energy Act does not characterize alternative power sources of our future ­­–- it was a political act by the same fallible politicians who caved in to NIMBYism on the Oakville power plant. To make the best decisions, we must learn about alternative power sources and how they would affect our quality of life, not about errant political acts.

Let's quit the divisive, often poorly informed, taking of sides for and against alternative power sources. Let's become critically informed about different kinds of energy sources and their side effects. Let's share the information and decide where to put them based on sound information. Let's not repeat the error of flooding northern river valleys without consultation or the equivalent error with solar panels or wind turbines. We draw electricity from a continent-wide grid; our baseboard heater may run on energy from far distant flooded valleys.

Let's attend community meetings to discuss possible alternatives with open minds, seeking adaptive solutions, not with closed minds attempting to defend poorly informed belief systems.