Media Clipping — August 11, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Can N.S. become a leader in cutting greenhouse gases?

By Ralph Surette

I WAS DOWN HOME in Western Nova Scotia last weekend where a bark beetle has been ravaging the white spruce. A woods-savvy friend and I were contemplating the many dead and dying trees around Ste. Anne du Ruisseau, and agreed this wouldn't be half as bad, or wouldn't be happening at all, if we still had the cold winters that once kept such pests in check.

Then I found a neighbour raking leaves under his ash tree and cursing. The leaves were turning brown and falling. Usually they turn wine-red and fall in early October. We checked up and down the road. Sure enough. All the ash trees were doing that. Then on the way back, along Highway 103, I saw other stuff I've never seen before in early August - broad patches of young alders suddenly brown and dead, and leaves turning yellow and falling off young poplars.

A bad year? Local oddities? Somehow, the big picture is not reassuring either: spectacular cross-Canada heat, drought, smog, infestations of usually more southerly insects, and other eye-poppers.

What to do? Just as things are hot, as it were, GPI Atlantic dropped a report on Nova Scotia's greenhouse gas emissions, their cost, and how to cut them down - although it was strangely reduced on the front page of this newspaper on Thursday to a mere "pro-rail" report. The essentials of the report are that Nova Scotians, like other North Americans, are big energy hogs and that global warming is starting to cost us in terms of drought, floods and other climate chaos as well as, in future, rising sea levels.

Certain things can be done, says GPI, whose report is part of a series in constructing a "genuine progress index." We can drop our emissions by 17 per cent from 1995 levels by 2010, even though they're now 15 per cent higher than in 1995 (merely switching from coal to natural gas in power plants will account for a large part of the drop).

Not only can we do this, the group says, but why not become leaders - as we have with composting and recycling, bringing the world to our door to see how we do it? Plus, as has been shown relentlessly by a growing number of private companies and some public jurisdictions, saving energy, doing things more efficiently, saves money.

What GPI proposes is mostly not new. What it suggests - more rail and buses, more conservation in the household, more efficient industrial processes, and so on - has been talked about for decades, and should have been done 30 years ago, as many other countries with less energy to waste have done.

Some of it has even been half tried, then dropped for lack of interest. For example, GPI points out that Nova Scotia Power's thermal plants are only 40 per cent efficient - the rest is waste in the form of warmed up cooling water. A number of years ago, NSP and the government pursued the notion with the Tuft's Cove plant in Dartmouth, but it died from lack of interest by its neighbours. After all, natural gas was coming. Why go through all the trouble of laying down water pipes?

The point is that "doing something" is not a matter of finding magical solutions. Looking for technical fixes is counterproductive as often as not. Rather, it's a matter of human will, of attitudes changing at all levels - the public, business and government - and seeking administrative, political and social ways to make the common cause work.

It has been done brilliantly with recycling. Why not with greenhouse gases?

Doing it, however, means that prickly business of changing our ways, and it becomes especially messy when somebody's livelihood is going to be affected. This is the point with the truckers, entrepreneurs making a difficult living, whose association was infuriated by GPI's suggestion that 10 per cent more freight on the Halifax-Amherst line be shifted to rail.

And, of course, there's still a formidable and illogical resistance to the notion that something must be done. After all, even the U.S. government says we have to blow more energy out the window to stimulate the economy. I don't know how much more evidence we're going to need before the last thick heads are penetrated, but we're getting closer all the time.

I suggest that, in Nova Scotia, we don't wait.

Copyright © 2001, Ralph Surette