When Environmental Regulations Fail Us

The vast majority of the world’s scientists have formed a consensus that human activity, including use of fossil fuels, is warming the planet at an alarming rate. There have been many calls to take action, big and small, to address this distress signal from mother earth. Environmental regulations vary from country to country, even state to state, but nevertheless are the most important aspect in even beginning to address the problems that we face in protecting our natural world. One of the biggest meetings to try to have the world’s leaders on the same page is coming up next month in Copenhagen. This is the big one; all the little things that individual countries are doing culminate in this gathering on the world stage to put the best minds together and find solutions. However, economic concerns threaten to trump any chance at real progress in curbing global warming.

Lack of environmental regulations, or protection of our way of life in the face of natural disasters of catastrophic proportions, is at the heart of the matter. The American way of life, indeed the way of life of the entire developed world, is dependent upon cheap fossil fuels. And the way of life that we’ve built since the middle of the 20^th century, is that of a suburban way of life. It is all interconnected; our dependence on oil is in large part due to our inability to even think about organizing our lives and our economy in a more sustainable way. A lifestyle centered on the automobile; from the rise of Levittown to the development of the interstate highway system, is our blessing and our curse.

There is no better example of either ignoring environmental regulations or lack of them, and our pursuit of maintaining this lifestyle, than the Alberta Tar Sands. This excerpt from a National Geographic article on the Tar or Oil Sands shows the lengths that our society will go to keep the lifeblood of the economy going, while exacting a terrible environmental toll: “Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake” (Kunzig, 2009). As the world moves toward stricter international environmental regulations, the Oil Sands have been identified as “the largest contributor to the rise of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada” (Environment Canada, 2009). If any significant legislation or regulations come out of the Copenhagen meetings, there is no way that Canada, or the world, could meet emission reduction goals with the specter of the Oil Sands threatening the environment every day.

Of course there are abundant examples all over the world of companies and governments ignoring or weakening environmental regulations. It is mostly done to protect economic interests, which in turn protects our way of life. Perhaps what needs to come out of the meetings in Copenhagen is not just regulations that give us a fighting chance at slowing global warming, but also plans to re-order the economies of the developed world in a sustainable way. These are extremely difficult decisions, but if we do not change our ways, some day Mother Nature will force it upon us.