Earth Day

April 22 is Earth Day.

I remember back in university when I was on the solar vehicle team (big nerd, I know) and we were invited to bring the car to an Earth Day conference in Ottawa hosted by David Suzuki. I'd never been to one of these conference things before and I was in for a bit of a culture shock. Everything was so rude and artificial: the expensive yet still cheap backdrops, the introductions to people you don't care about (which I have since learned is important networking for those not in 1st year university), and especially the press conference. The press conference was David Suzuki and a bunch of colleagues sitting at the front and a small horde of "journalists" trying to get the right photo, the right sound bite, the right hook for a story. All the while, they didn't pay attention to what was being said, they talked (quite loudly) amongst themselves, had cell phones going off all over the place, etc. It was all very discouraging.

As for us, we set up our car next to the first model years of the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius available in Canada.

The cool thing is, I got to actually meet David Suzuki. Not only that, we got him to sit down in the solar car then closed the top shell on top of him, confining him in the car against his will. I can attest that he's not too comfortable in confined spaces.

The bad thing is, I had my physics final the next day. To get to the conference on time with the car, we had to leave at 5:00 am; we didn't get back until 1:00am. My exam was at 9:00am the next day. So David Suzuki is responsible for my physics mark dropping from about a 90 to an 82.

So where was I going with this? Oh yeah:

There are way too many cigarette butts at the waterfront park near where I work.

As an Earth Day initiative, my company instituted an initiative to clean up the waterfront. For once, the weather was good: nice and sunny and not too windy. Even though I wasn't late, they ran out of the company promotional t-shirts they were giving out. Crappy, that. They also gave us latex gloves and giant garbage bags. At the waterfront, the garbage is 99% cigarette butts. People park there and smoke, then chuck their butts out the window as they leave. It's revolting. A group of us worked a small area for an hour and it was very depressing; we'd go over the area, look back, and it was as if the cigarette butts were regrowing faster than we could pick them up.

Other people walking the sides of road picked up much more interesting stuff, like old rotted-out car parts and degraded pool covers. They had to wear safety vests and look like fools though.

I'd like to think we did our part for the environment, but probably the impact of our garbage bags offset the impact of the stuff we cleaned up; however, the waterfront looks a lot nicer now, and that's good too.

So is anyone else doing something for Earth Day?

Another reason to vote Liberal (as if Stephen Harper isn't the best one...)

(...and he looks like he's always wearing lipstick)

Canada can get rich by going green: Dion

This is a CBC.ca news story covering a speech by new Liberal party leader Stephane Dion about his views on how to deal with climate change. First hint: it does not include running away from the problem. Second hint: no hippy tree hugging, pie-in-the-sky Green party nonsense. The solution is to use tax incentives and penalties to force Canada into dealing with environmental problems in house as efficiently as possible. We need to catch up to the likes of Sweden and Germany. If all goes well, we can become a world leader in clean technologies and get rich in the process by selling off the products of our ingenuity.

I first heard this viewpoint expressed at an Earth Day summit, hosted by David Suzuki, that I attended way back in 2000. Since then, I've only had this view reinforced: People are lazy, and the only way people are going to clean up is if it pays to do so. And as the greenhouse gas crisis gets worse, it will only pay off more in the future.

Who gets rich: the leaders or the followers?