A milder winter comes with a price - Keith Roulston editorial

As Christmas approaches, I must say that, as an old man, I’m happy to see only a skiff of snow on the ground. It wasn’t this way when we first moved here in the 1970s when we had some of the fiercest winters we ever experienced.

But then I remember how the climate has changed and I feel a little ashamed of enjoying the milder winters we’ve experienced lately. I just need to remember last summer when many days were affected by smoke in the air, flowing down from northern Canada as we lost millions of acres of valuable forest to fire.

Global climate change was tackled at the COP28 conference that ended early this week in Dubai - of all places, a major source of the oil which is generally seen as a major cause of climate change. There were 12,000 people at the conference! It’s hard not to think about the amount of carbon emitted by all the air flights to get so many people together to discuss how to reduce the effect on the climate.

Most of the extremes of climate change have  occurred during my lifetime, as we also experienced more and more luxurious lives. I grew up on a farm near Lucknow. We had a tractor, but it was tiny compared to the monsters on farms today. My dad also kept horses in my early years, a gesture to how he would have preferred to farm if it was still possible.

We had electricity and some of the luxuries that it made possible and cars that were so archaic that we could almost choke to death from the clouds of dust that fogged the car as we travelled our gravel road.

I knew of about two families that took southern vacations in those days. Air travel had passed beyond the primitive days of a decade earlier, but planes were still smaller and slower than what we’ve become used to and airports were much smaller. They were just beginning to build super-highways like Highway 401.

Even my wife’s family, who lived in a developing Scarborough, experienced a life that seems primitive compared to today (although they had a much more dependable car than we did and no gravel roads). Today, her relatives live suburban lives many miles more distant from the city. The Premier wants to build more super-highways to make it easier to get to the city.
Our same Premier has dropped the charge for our licences to drive our cars and cut the carbon tax from the price for gas at the pump. It’s part of a movement to stop blaming burning gas and oil that’s led by provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan that prefer to ignore climate change if it means reducing the importance of the petroleum that boosted their economies.

Meanwhile, in federal Parliament, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives led a campaign last week to slow the government agenda, leading up to the Christmas break, by forcing separate votes on all legislation unless the federal Liberals removed the carbon price from natural gas and propane used by farmers for heating their buildings or running their grain dryers, a bill proposed by Huron-Bruce MP Ben Lobb and passed in the House of Commons last March with the support of all parties, except the Liberals, but not passed by the Senate.

Most local residents who are farmers will support Lobb’s efforts, but looking at the cold, hard facts, we wouldn’t grow so much corn in Huron County except for the ability to dry corn down to levels acceptable for storage. If we went back to my childhood, farmers grew only as much corn as they could keep in a corn crib to dry naturally. We only grew more corn after we got artificial drying.

It’s one of the ways where the inventiveness of my generation led to a more comfortable life for those of us alive today. But what will the lives of our children and grandchildren be like? Will they pay the price?

My generation, and our children who are now middle-aged and well-established, don’t want to think of the consequences of our lifestyles. We have more energy-using “toys” like power tools for every job we can think of. We travel more today than ever before with air flights and modern highways for our cars when we vacation. Meanwhile, my great-grandparents arrived in Caranda after long trips on sailing ships. We talk a good game when it comes to climate change, but our use of petroleum products keeps increasing, despite government pledges to cut green-house-gas emissions.

And, for many of us, like me, the reward for this is a Christmas without - or with very little - snow. There is going to be a price to pay for this modern lifestyle, but it will be paid by future generations while we continue to enjoy the luxury of our energy-wasting lives. Each of us needs to make changes to prevent our grandchildren or great-grandchildren paying a terrible price.