It’s funny how quickly change takes place when the right time rolls around. For the last thirty years, maybe fifty years, maybe even back to the Industrial Revolution— I don’t know– people have been trying to draw the attention of the public to the polluting of our world. No one paid them much attention, whether they were hippies in tie-dyes or Moses look-alikes carrying placards in the streets, but suddenly fear of Global Warming has focused our attention and snapped us around quite sharply, and politicians, entertainers—whoever– are clamoring to show people how “green” they are.
No one dares voice opposition at this stage. If you aren’t fully into Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming, you are a Neanderthal at best. A few brave souls seemed to be hanging on with meek suggestions that we could be looking at large weather cycles that have swept through our history over the last number of centuries, but their voices are fading from our hearing. David Suzuki, long regarded over the last thirty years as a pain in the butt who could ruin what might have been a good day with his proclamations of doom, has become a darling of the Canadian public, even appearing in curious TV commercials to convince homeowners that unplugging everything in the house will get them more beer in the long haul (but warmer beer, however).
So we’re swapping out incandescent bulbs like madmen, led on by entertainment stars who swear they’ve done the same to every socket in their 76-room estates. One actress is even recommending we limit ourselves to one sheet at a time in the “toilet tissue” department (Oprah says she personally draws the line at that). Meanwhile, China moves into first place over the US as prime contributor to greenhouse gasses, and we of the western affluence practice our feeble lines for Third World countries and the Far East: “We’ve enjoyed sixty years of burning up everything in sight to support our lifestyle, but we don’t want you to start on that, because it will cause more Global Warming.”
The science sounds reasonable. Certainly all this disregard for the thin skin of breathable atmosphere clinging to our planet had to result in trouble at some point. It’s more amazing that we have not done ourselves in sooner, though all this asthma, cancer, MS, immune deficiencies, and other plagues had to be spurred on by something.
But way in the back of the mind one can’t help but think of Y2K. That was supposed to destroy us all. At the stroke of midnight (OK, maybe at the stroke of a number of midnights) all electronic gadgets in the world were supposed to revolt and march against us, while Soviet missiles, out of the control of their incompetent handlers, would be winging their way through our skies raining death and destruction. Some of us were up as the clock tolled 12, and gazed at a sky that quietly gazed back at us. Outside of VCR’s flashing 12:00 forever, which they did anyway since no one bothered to get a 12-year old to program them, there seemed to be little in the way of catastrophe.
Might Global Warming be the same thing? We don’t want to get all excited again. This new millennium has been hard enough on our nerves as it is.
The stakes are a little too high to find out the hard way. Supporters of the Y2K emergency remind us that, although it (fortunately) didn’t live up to the dire predictions, one of the reasons we skirted on past was the $8 Billion spent in the year approaching December 31, 1999 getting ready for it.
Hopefully we will ride through the Global Warming event as easily, allowing detractors to say, “Well, that really wasn’t much, was it?”
If we do, however, I think the inconveniences might be a little harder to bear than a new VCR and some chisel work in the cemeteries.