Media Clipping — August 20, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Cut back voluntarily

Letter to the Editor

Great to see discussion of how to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in recent issues of this newspaper. Some people may think climate change can't really be that serious, that the main effect may be an extended golf season! Think again. Climate change can cause disasters like Hurricane Mitch. And health problems such as asthma are aggravated by all the fossil fuels we burn.

We need to voluntarily cut back; hopefully, we can avoid an involuntary shock in years ahead. We consume about twice as much energy per capita as people in Europe; there's plenty of room for cutting waste.

When I pointed out once, as an example, that we can't keep importing tomatoes from California forever, an elected official seemed surprised: Why not? Well, for starters, it undermines our local agricultural economy and wastes fossil fuels to truck food over such long distances. And it makes us very vulnerable in emergency situations (eg. the ice storm of '98).

As an Aug. 8 letter to the editor stated, we need a less-wasteful transportation policy. Part of that policy should be finding ways to keep jobs and production closer to home, so we won't be so reliant on fossil-fuel-driven transportation.

Copyright © 2001, The Halifax Herald