Thursday, October 15, 2009

Take That Diving Vacation Soon or You May Be Swimming in a Sea of Acid



We put 22 million tons of CO2 into the oceans every day.

If you put a tooth in a glass of Coke, which is basically a tooth in water with Co2, it cracks into pieces—and a tooth is much stronger than a seashell.

Coral reefs may be gone in your lifetime. Two million years in the making, destroyed in a few decades--coral may be extinct within 50 years. We may someday live in a world without fish. At the very best, we will see hundreds of species become extinct.

2% of our GDP is all it would take to correct the problem, according to mainstream economists.

How do we say to our great grandkids that we let this happen because we weren’t willing to spend two cents more on a dollar soda?

I wonder if when my niece, Elsa is old enough to understand the problems that my generation left to hers, if she will wonder what we did about it.

I’d like to say to her that I did what I could to lessen my impact and spread information. I determined that the biggest things I could do to reduce my footprint would be to not have biological children, to live in a city instead of the country, to rebuild old homes instead of building new ones, and to drive and fly as little as possible. The average American's carbon footprint in my lifetime was about 20 tons a year. Experts agreed that an average reduction of three tons a person would begin to reverse global climate change. My footprint has been pretty close to zero for 33 years.

As for spreading information, I don’t know that I’ve reached more than a half a million people with my blog and the columns I write. Maybe I could do more. It’s tough to know without the perspective of time.

Here's one idea--how about we show up at this guy's presentation in Phoenix next month? "Why Man-made Global Warming is Exaggerated.” Or at least email him--coyote at coyoteblog. com.

2 comments:

M said...

It really is a shame that most people/governments are not more careful with the environment. I guess people will always look for ways to make more money at the expense of nature ...

EA said...

So sad, and here I love to dive.