What are our real problems? Yes, there are high fuel prices, high housing and food costs. Why all of a sudden have we become so concerned about increases in cost of living when we should have noticed decades ago that these changes were inevitable? Every few years, there have been “whole world” climate conferences. The entire world has been warned about the ever increasing climate warming which someday would have to be addressed. Elections have been fought, won or lost about whether we should make concerted efforts to slow down and/or reverse the gradual warming of our planet. After the climate conference in Kyoto, Japan, one political leader even named his dog “Kyoto” to remind him of the oncoming crisis that the world’s most educated environmentalists had warned about at the conference. The following federal election was fought mainly about whether Canada should begin an expensive plan to slow down global warming in our country even if other larger polluters did nothing. The voting public spoke and very little was accomplished during the next term of office. In 1996, General Motors produced a total electric car and sold them for three years. Although the buyers of those cars didn’t want to give them up, GM bought them all back and crushed them. Why? GM decided that the future of the Hummer and large pickup trucks offered more profit than continuing the electric car. A little more investigation will also show that some of the GM shareholders are the same people that are invested in oil companies.

Several years later, both big oil and environmental scientists agreed that the use of fossil fuels including gas and oil must gradually decline to address the oncoming climate crisis. The following federal election chose a leader that had formally worked for big oil. He persuaded the public that it was too expensive to go ahead with this project and who would vote against reducing taxes? So here we are a few years later after battling covid in the world and facing years of unknown costs which someday must be paid and the world is still warming up. British Columbia has advised everyone to conserve water for this year. Many of the water reservoirs in North America are empty or in very low condition! Just this Mar. 24 we were told about an out-of-control forest fire at CFB Petawawa which was the first one in our area in 2024. There was ash and cinders from that fire falling on vehicles 20 miles east of Pembroke.

Now we are faced with a major decision closer to home. Garbage has turned into a huge problem in the world. A large per cent of our domestic garbage is also made up of some form of plastics, or other products made from oil. Those products are not like paper packaging that grandpa used and could be used to light the morning fire in the stove. When burned, most plastics give off dioxins which are carcinogenic. Plastics do not decompose quickly in land fills either. Everyone will agree that over-packaging of many many products is a huge cause of too much garbage. Then our chemical scientists are developing new pharmaceuticals every month. Some of those new forever chemicals never break down and have already been discovered on farmland that received sludge from towns or cities. Although they were not detected before being spread on farmland, later on they were found to be concentrated enough to cause the farmland that the sludge was spread on to be declared never to be used again for growing anything for any purpose. So far, no compensation has been paid to the landowner who was stuck with this contaminated land. If smoke and fly ash from an incinerator which burns garbage with some of these forever chemicals contaminate surrounding farmlands, who pays? If no food can ever be produced on that contaminated land, how much will food prices increase? If the incinerators are completely safe for our environment, why not put them right beside the cities that produce the trash?

Lots of real worries for us to think about. I’m sure that our politicians would gladly receive any logical solution to some of those big problems.