Richard Zurawski

Now I am not a big fan of cars. They are probably the most CO2 heavy component of our daily lives and among the least dispensable or modifiable of our needs in the way our society is set up. In short, in just about any term I perceive, term we are stuck with this type of transport mode, until our governments start some serious re-planning of our transportation infrastructure and needs.

Cars are not only expensive to run and a burden on the climate through their CO2 emissions, they also take a huge toll, in their manufacture (mining, refining and transport of raw materials) and they destroy the fabric of our urban lives through roads, parking lots, high speed expressways and suburbanization of our living environment with attendant toll on living space and impacts on our fellow creatures in the form of roadkill and reduced habitat. In short there is very little I can find that is redeeming in the car. We have been sold a bill of goods, that the car represents a “free” lifestyle and that nature and the car are like a hand and glove. And we have bought it lock, stock and four barrel carbs.

So when I see the foofra around whether we should license the electric car as a road worthy substitute for the gas and diesel monsters we have degrading just about everything in our lives and the lives of our fellow creatures, I feel like, well, “here we go again”. Folks, just about the only thing I can say about the electric car in comparison to the fossil fuel guzzlers is that it is slightly less destructive, I think. And I am not quite sure that they are better when all the factors are taken into account. We still have to get the raw materials out of the ground, refine it, ship it, manufacture it and then drive it. But now we have rare, toxic materials in the batteries that need to be refined, cradle to grave, so that we don’t wallop the environment again. But that aside. We still churn up the countryside so that we can splatter bugs on the windshield, continue the reduction of our cities to motor clogged parking lots and sell our collective souls to the transportation demons.

And we name it things like the “Zenn” car like we have achieved some higher morality if we drive the stupid thing. Come on! Do the math. This is a business with its own ethic and the ethic is to make you buy the product over and over and over again to keep the economic engines churning. There is nothing zen like in the product at all and the only thing you will “enlighten” is your wallet!

So, before we debate the lessor of two evils into the next life with yet another reincarnation of the same monster, look at the big, ugly picture. Too many cars, too much consumption. GM or Zenn? Not a choice at all!

Now that climate change is unlocking the frozen Arctic, a place that has been, by and large ignored by industrialized society, we get a chance to turn our destructive ways on the last relatively pristine place on Earth. The Arctic was traditionally the home of a few spectacular animal species, indigenous peoples and a few crazy “explorers” from Europe and North America, mostly Caucasian. But that is all about to change.

Geologic exploitation was always difficult enough as it was and required huge resources  in the best of times and places. But in the Arctic, because of the cold, ice and wind it was almost unthinkable. Trying to find gold, diamonds or other minerals while sitting on a shelf of ice, some it three kilometres thick, separating you from your strike was difficult, if not nigh on impossible. Out on the ocean waters, marauding ice bergs, like some ghostly, midnight destuctors could turn any rig into scrap metal with just a shift of the winds. So by and large we stayed away, with notable exception.

But now the tendrils of our industrial greed and might has shifted the climate of the world and the North, more than any other region of the globe, is undergoing massive changes. The ice is melting and we see opportunity and money and exploitation in them thar formerly frozen wastes.

As the planet burns, instead of taking note and trying to undo the damage, we find another place where we can mine, poison, pollute and grab for the sake of a consumer lifestyle that has put us in this pickle in the first place.

There is oil and natural gas under the sea of the North and its another opportunity to continue along, business as usual, fueling our SUVs, a consumer society and increase the CO2 burden another few gigatons and ignore the pleas of all sane people and the thousands of scientists begging us to stop our fossil fuel addiction.

The business papers and newspapers are chock ablock with stories about how we have  new access to oil and gas under what used to be ice, and so much of it, that we can extend our wanton ways another couple of decades, as easily as you please. You see with all that ice melting, we can grow rich! rich! rich!

What in goodness name are we doing??? Have we learned nothing? How on Earth can you mine, drill and use fossil fuels, grow rich on the destruction of a planet and then say out of that same mouth “We care about the planet!”

While we move into the last third of the summer season, I have been watching the newspapers for reporting on the summer ice of the Arctic. I have pretty much given up on TV as a news source since that wasteland of ambulance chasers and sporting events long ago abdicated any credibility as a serious news source.

And what strikes me is how the the public news is twisted and spun, by our much vaunted newspapers, to satisfy the business interests of the world. It appears, according to newspaper coverage, that the fact that the ice is melting at unprecedented rates and will have enormous and profound climate change impacts waiting to drop on us all, that is now no longer a news story. Climate change has had its 15 minutes of fame and now we have switched gears to business interests again.

Now it is all about Arctic sovereignty and oil and resources. Its back to business and while climate change and the melting ice is now a fete a complet, what is quickly forgotten is how vociferously the new organs of the world distorted the melt and any link to climate change in the first place. The nay-sayers of the print media, who had been looking for any scrap of information that would bolster their pro-business and anti-climate change perspective have now so skillfully shifted gears it boggles my imagination. It seems that the Northwest Passage is going to be free of summer ice and within a decade the entire north will suffer the same fate and yet it can be talked and conjectured about with ever admitting to absolutely incorrect information the newspapers put out!.

Its now a business thing and a political thing. Somehow the Arctic will be free of ice for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, but that is no longer a front-page story. What is the front page story, is not the escaping tundra methane, the acidification of the oceans, the threat to the Ocean Conveyor or any of the thousands of other pertinent science stories that might point to media culpability, but rather its about sovereignty and resources. Back to business and with the wave of a word processor the ice is melting, the global carbon dioxide content is still increasing, but business is ready to jump on a new mother lode of unfrozen riches that we can use to further hike the burning of our precious planet. And that is the story! All this without ever, for the tiniest of moments, reflecting on the scads of BS that floated our way through the past dithering decades where journalists were empowered to proffer every cockamamy whack job theory that even hinted at making climate change a misshapen polyglot of an idea.

Wow! No wonder 80 per cent of the populace is jaded with the media, the government and businesses who still refuse to address the catastrophe on our doorstep. We are going to get a front row centre seat to more and stronger storms, anoxic ocean zones, red tides, extinctions and yes the ice is melting. And here we are looking at the newspapers conveniently forgetting their responsibilities to inform us and looking for ways to spin this into business and politics.