�The thing that a lot of people cannot comprehend
is that Mother Nature doesn't have a bullet with your name on it,
she has millions of bullets inscribed with 'to whom it may concern'.�
[unknown]

Hey, I'm as much a lazy-ass procrastinator as the next guy. And I'm sure there's more that I could be doing to live a cleaner, greener lifestyle. We've got the composter out back that we didn't use during the winter months that we're going to start using again now that the snow has melted. I'm fairly diligent about recycling beverage containers but then I'm still using plastic bags from Sobey's. But then, my eco-footprint is still pretty small compared with the factories spewing crap into the sky. And while I'll do my damndest to reduce my waste in the coming years, our federal government responsible for making sure those factories do, the really serious culprits, are right now making sure they won't have to follow suit. Harper's plan calls for "intensity reduction". This is a fancy way of saying that, as is often the case, politicians tell the public they're doing a lot, when really they're doing a little.

We live in an information age. What better time than now than for people to dessiminate the truth? What better era than now for Canadians, possibly even mankind, to demand truly representative and responsible government of itself?

From Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to the repeated warnings in the news from scientists saying that the Arctic ice is melting three times faster than originally believed, the time to open our eyes is now. And regardless of how much doubt the naysayers may heap on in order to obfuscate, think simply of these two ideas:

1. It is better to err on the side of caution. Even if you suppose that some scientists or politicians are exaggerating, when you choose which side to believe, it is imperative to err on the side of caution, and that means aggressively working to correct this problem. You have a choice between looking back years from now and saying "remember the economic depression of 2008 when the government overspent trying to correct global warming?" or of maybe not being around to look back at all.

2. Doing the right thing shouldn't require an incentive plan. Being cleaner, being greener, being more respectful of nature and better to the planet... I fail to see a strong counter-argument to that. "No, I'd rather not do the right thing"? I like to think that when it comes to most arguments, that as much as I may be assertive, persuasive, and sometimes even overbearing, that I'm not totally rhetorical but here, on this point, I just don't see the other side. Why should you need to be convinced to do the right thing?

In case you're not following the news, here's how Harper's plan works, from what I've been reading: corporate polluters are required to lower their "intensity", but not their total pollution. In other words, if you currently produce 100 units of pollution per 100 units of product, then you're required to lower that ratio, but not your output. So next year, if you double your production to 200 units, but only produce 180 units of pollution instead of 200, you can claim you've made a 10% reduction, even though overall, there's 180% as much crap going into the air. You're "getting better at producing less pollution", even though you're actually producing more pollution than ever before.

And don't think for a minute that corporations aren't smart enough to even figure loopholes around even that small stipulation.

Politicians do this all the time. And we commend them for it because we don't know any different. They say they want to correct Problem X and then tell us they've passed a law, but fail to mention that either the police have no intention of enforcing it, or the fines in question are say, $1. Sometimes they create laws that actually are unenforcable. Sometimes they tell us the issue is more complicated than we realize and put us off for a while. Many long enough we'll forget all together.

And what do we do? We say "fuck it, whatever", because at the end of the day, sooner or later there'll be another government, or we'll figure another way, or someone will pick up the ball and run with it while we're too busy picking up our dry cleaning or the kids from daycare. But this time there's a problem with all our apathy.

The price.

The real governor of this planet is Mother Nature, and right now she's a woman scorned. She treats us all as straw dogs and is unfamiliar with the term 'mercy'. And when an angry, insane woman with no conscience puts a gun to your head, you don't poo-poo her with some "there there"s, you hop to it before she pulls the trigger.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/harperdotherightthing

�Men think, nature acts.�
[Voltaire]