watercolour, crayon and marker
©2023 Charlene Brown
The elusive path to net zero is having a rough ride as various stakeholders have very different ideas about how best to achieve our climate change goals. Unfortunately, debate among federal and provincial governments, various political parties, environmental protest groups, industry lobbyists etc. has become belligerent. Almost everyone is putting most of their effort into attempting to discredit other’s policies and opinions.
For example, I believe nuclear power generation will be an essential component in the eventual elimination of excessive carbon emissions. However, organizations such as the Green Party, with whose objectives I generally agree, are strongly opposed to this method of producing electricity. They feel that nuclear reactors’ prohibitively expensive construction and generation of huge amounts of radioactive waste outweighs the environmental benefits, whereas proponents of nuclear power generation have confidence that technological developments such as small modular nuclear reactors and ‘spent’ fuel utilization will soon overcome these objections. They also point out that modular reactors could replace horrendously problematic diesel generation of electricity in remote areas such as the Arctic.
In general, in debating the negatives of various programs, a more useful perspective will be achieved by finding such additional positives to the proposed solutions.
*NB: Bruce Nuclear, one of the largest reactors in the world, is not an example of a small modular reactor.
Another way of achieving a more useful perspective when confronted with different solutions to climate change problems is to consider that they might be not polarizing, but synergistic! More progress would be made if the various stakeholders could work cooperatively instead of attempting to cancel each other in the battle against catastrophic climate change:
Instead of:
transitioning away from fossil fuels vs carbon capture
I wrote about this in a blog post a year and a half ago.
This concept of differing solutions being synergistic rather
than polarizing will be a section of the series of essays and illustrations on visualization
of the Anthropocene that I am compiling.
