As Montreal prepares to host a UN conference on climate change next month, Elizabeth May, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, said Canada must be a leader in committing to reducing carbon emissions and changing the way the world uses energy.
By Zoe Morawetz <morawetz@dal.ca>
Posted: Oct. 27, 2005
Elizabeth May: "We have lost any margin for error in our civilization." Photo: Zoe Morawetz
Elizabeth May, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, said nations need to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere and drastically change the way they use energy, in an address she gave as part of Dalhousie University's annual Killam Lecture Series Tuesday night. Carbon emissions must drop by 30 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, May told an audience of about 350 people, in order to avoid crises such as rising sea levels, severe droughts, and the threats to global security they would create.
May said humanity's "fossil-fuel addiction" could destroy the atmosphere and that "all life on earth is at risk." Though she said the title of her lecture -- "Can civilization survive climate change?" -- was not an exaggeration of the issue, she stressed the possibility and necessity for change, saying it was not too late to avoid scientists' worst predictions.
In 1996, the world hit the six billion tonne mark for greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, a four-fold increase since the 1950s, said May. She identified the most serious environmental threats from climate change as the potential collapse of the Gulf stream - a scenario posited for the year 2010 by a Pentagon-commissioned study released to Fortune Magazine in 2004 - the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the potential collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet, which holds 10 per cent of the world's ice. Its collapse would result in a four to five metre increase in sea levels worldwide, she said.
"Stuff is happening I initially wasn't worried about happening in my lifetime," said May, an environmental activist since the 1970s, and executive director of Sierra Club since 1989. She said phenomena such as droughts in Australia, a heat wave in France that killed thousands, and the increase in the severity of hurricanes indicate how climate change already affects peoples' lives. The melting of permafrost in Canada's Arctic is another example, she said.
"If you're in an Inuit village, you can see the ground around you collapsing," said May.
The worst-case scenarios, she said, are not inevitable. But they are "where we end up if we keep doing what we're doing."
"We don't even have enough bike racks on campus:" Tamara Lorincz said Dalhousie University should encourage people not to drive to campus. Photo: Zoe Morawetz
In the future energy must come from a variety of sources, said May. People need to build energy-efficient buildings and buy energy-efficient appliances, she said, and North American society has to get over its "addiction to cars." She said the world could no longer depend on fossil fuels.
Tamara Lorincz, a part-time student at Dalhousie and co-ordinator of the Nova Scotia Environmental Network, said she hoped the lecture would inspire the administrators of the university in the audience to create energy-efficiency initiatives.
"Dalhousie is doing very little around trying to become more energy efficient," she said. Dalhousie could save energy through initiatives such as construction of energy-efficient buildings, retro-fitting of old equipment, and more environmental education, she said.
Lorincz added that Dalhousie was not alone in universities across Canada in terms of energy efficiency initiatives. Even after the United States pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, she said, U.S. universities still took the protocol seriously and attempted to reduce the amount of energy they used.
"So far, there has not been one university in Canada that has stepped forward to say, 'We as an institution are going to ... be a leader in society'" when it comes to reducing emissions and contributing to meeting Kyoto goals, she said.
Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, countries accepted binding targets for reductions in carbon emissions below 1990 levels. Next month's UN climate change conference in Montreal will be the first meeting since enough countries ratified the protocol for it to come into force and become legally binding. May said Canada must work to make sure countries continue to try and meet their Kyoto targets. And, she said, the conference is important because it will be the first meeting of the parties held in North America, making it easy for activists and journalists from the United States, which has not ratified the protocol, to travel to the event.
Ron Colman, executive director of GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research organization based in Nova Scotia that focuses on sustainable development, said May's lecture effectively demonstrated "the magnitude and urgency" of the climate change situation. Last week, GPI - which stands for genuine progress index, an alternate way of measuring resources and gross domestic product - released a report that concluded Nova Scotia's current energy system is unsustainable. Colman said the provincial government and Nova Scotia Power, the province's energy utility, need to do a lot more when it comes to energy conservation.
"The government's new energy strategy says a lot of the right things," he said. "It's just the scale and the speed at which they're doing things don't match the urgency of the situation ... Every time we put up a wind turbine - though it's always a good thing - we can't just be patting ourselves on the back." Colman said the approach of peak oil production, which he said most analysts estimate will occur in about 10 years, should "scare the living daylights" out of even "conventional economists and politicians."
He said the context of May's lecture indicated how the idea of a climate change and energy crisis has spread to the mainstream.
"It's very significant that this was a Killam Lecture," said Colman. "It's Dalhousie University's most prestigious lecture series. Once this message is heard in that kind of forum, it raises the profile and the status [of the issue] and it begins to reach a much wider audience."
May said the urgency of the climate change problem has failed to get across to a lot of people and organizations partly because it was labelled as just an "environmental" issue, when really it affects every aspect of the planet. But, she said, climate change is now increasingly considered in relation to issues such as the economy and national security. She noted former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix recently called global warming a bigger threat than any ongoing military conflict.
"Climate change is an environmental issue in the same way that drowning is a water issue," she said. "It's bigger than that."
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