Walking in the rain on the way to volunteer at my city’s climate action project, I strode warm and dry under my polypropylene and Gortex. I wondered what it would be like to live in a walkable community where our consumer culture feasted on good rain gear and bicycle fenders instead of Xbox’s? The car has certainly carried us far away from what was once our primary mode of transportation. It’s carbon consequences are now being discussed, negotiated, argued and refuted in Copenhagen this week.
Our President’s message from across the Atlantic was: It’s better to act than to talk. I couldn’t agree more, but do-able solutions like an aggressive tax on carbon, higher fuel prices and curbing consumption through stronger mandates bring with it a conservative backlash that invokes political paralysis back home. The ability to act by the legislative branch of our country causes eyes to roll across the globe.
We live in a world where clean tech companies and environmental entrepreneurs are muted by lobbyists for the biggest carbon emitters. Innovators are creating technologies like man made carbon filtering trees resembling giant fly-swatters that are designed to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it underground. One would think that public funding for this type of venture would be readily available in a culture that has no desire to change its behavior toward driving.
As long as the actions taken amount to more talking, then perhaps ideas such as adding lithium to water as a worldwide suicide prevention strategy is the solution to keep the masses mellowed and lulled into silence. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World provides a glimpse of that terrifying future where people like me who still walk in the rain and run errands on the bike would be considered savages.
Lisa Goddard
