Kicking our Fossil Fuel Addiction

In other words, we now need at least 1.25 planets to meet our present natural resource demands. Indeed, if everyone consumed resources at the rate of your average Canadian, then we would need 4.3 planets to support us.

Setting aside a few of my favourite Star Trek episodes, these extra planets are not currently available to us, so we have to get on with the business of learning to live within this one, precious, blue-green planet that we call home.

The good news –stick with me here– is that half of this ecological footprint comes from the way we generate and consume energy. It comes from our over-reliance on coal, oil and gas – the very things that are giving the globe a fever, melting our Arctic and whipping up bigger and bigger storms and droughts.

So how is this good news? Well, we know how to change this.

To waste less. To be more thoughtful about what we need and where we get it. To learn to work with the sun, wind, water and earth to provide the energy we truly need, rather than digging up buried carbon and throwing it back up into the atmosphere, as if there literally were no tomorrow.

I don’t know if shaking off our addiction to fossil fuels is a twelve-step program, but I do know that signing on to The Good Life is one of the first steps. Stronger action by governments and businesses are also early and overdue steps. And the sooner we take these steps, the less costly it will be.

Because the choices we make now will shape our opportunities far into the future. The cities, power plants and homes we build today will either lock us into a damaging pattern of over-consumption, eventually undermining our standard of living, or they could help us move towards, if not utopia, then at least a fairer and more sustainable future — one that allows us to live in balance with nature and each other.