Rethinking Lifestyle

We all have opinions on the weather – it’s too cold, too hot, too windy, winters are not like they used to be, never known weather like this, wetter than usual, drier than usual. Weather is never just right!

We’ve had our share of weather events in North America over the past year – the hurricane season that affected the Maritimes and shut down New York, the winter blizzards, the flooding in Alberta. And the weather forecasters have been talking about this summer as ‘unusual’ with cooler temperatures than normal.

Makes you think?

What is ‘normal’? Is the climate changing?

Well the experts tell us that we should expect a new normal; that the old days are gone; things have changed; we’ve changed it.

Forget ‘global warming’ though – that doesn’t really cover what’s expected at all. For some such as Europeans, it could be colder; in Australia they can expect a new category of hot temperatures; for us in Canada we expect a 1C rise in winter which is barely noticeable. What we do know is that more unpredictable weather is likely – more flood generating storms, more winter blizzards, more hurricanes and tornados, more hot dry spells.

Can we stop it I hear you cry? Well, truth is, the tipping point is past and we can’t reverse it. We will have to live with the consequences and pay for them, and as extreme events get more frequent they will get more expensive.

I know what you are thinking, ‘so what’s the point, there’s nothing we can do’…

But we can do something to stop making things worse. We can think about how we contribute to the problem and do something about our own contribution.

Every Canadian produces approximately 5 tonnes of greenhouse gases directly each year, and if we take into account the industrial emissions used to make and transport the good we buy and the services we use, it’s more like 24 tonnes each year. That’s a huge amount of those climate changing gases pumping into the atmosphere on our account…

Even if the current government doesn’t want to set targets, we can still challenge ourselves, and most likely save ourselves some money. And looking around, there are plenty of tools to help us – carbon footprint calculators, energy apps for your phone, carbon offset schemes.

My own personal plan has the following steps:

1. Buy less – I think about the need for things carefully because everything we buy has taken energy and water to make.
2. Travel less – My journeys are usually multi-purpose, and I try to car share. I drive a small energy-efficient car, and I try to drive smart. I don’t travel by air often, and when I do I use a carbon offset scheme.
3. Heat/cool less – we have a small house, and we keep it just warm enough winter and summer.
4. Waste less – we think about the packaging when we buy things, we re-use where we can, we plan meals to avoid waste.

These steps make little difference to my life, but they have made a big difference to my impact on the planet. My personal carbon footprint is a fraction of the average. An audit once a year, keeps me on track.