Flat Earth Society nominees now in

Those who still steadfastly deny the effects of car pollution are getting downright otherworldly

by Andrea Reimer

Maybe it’s the heat but I’m starting to get a little cranky with the global warming deniers. It’s not just those talk-radio hosts blithely criticizing $1.10 a litre gas prices from their air-conditioned 20th floor perch that are getting me steamed. I’ve decided to devote my column this month to my personal picks for induction to the Flat Earth Society.

This is not the Flat Earth Society of popular mythology that would have us believe that Columbus spent most of his time reassuring restless shipmates that they wouldn’t just fall off the edge of the world. Early Christians and even the Catholic Church had a firm grasp that the Earth was round; they just lacked the technology to prove it. Resurrected from archaic times in the 19th century by a solitary scientist piqued by the Church establishment, the flat earth theory is notable not for showing a lack of medieval scientific sophistication but for its PR genius. The myth continues unabated despite reams of papers discrediting it. There was even a society set up in the 1970s (the first known in history) to support the flat earth theory as a literal translation of the Bible. Some people just have a really hard time with change.

Others in our more contemporary world have a hard time coming to grips with climate change.

Normally BC Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon would get a hands-down first place in the Flat Earth Society for keeping a straight face while claiming his multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded, pet “Gateway” project is (wait for it) actually an attempt to reduce vehicle emissions by stopping vehicle idling.

It’s true that if Minister Falcon could stop vehicle idling altogether he’d save a lot of atmosphere: an impressive 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted each year in our region from idling vehicles. But it’s an impossible equation to suggest that paving over ever more of the Lower Mainland would eliminate these emissions.

Notwithstanding the idling deficit you’d build up in the months of construction needed to add those two extra lanes to our highways and bridges, experts will tell you that once you’ve paved those shiny new lanes it won’t take long for them to be grid-locked too. Every day in the Lower Mainland about 80 new cars already take to the roads. Just to find parking spaces for these cars we pave the equivalent of a single lane from Horseshoe Bay to Hope. And if we could find the room for these cars to have a wide open lane to drive in every day, they’d contribute a whopping 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year on top of the emissions already produced annually by the region’s hundreds of thousands of cars that together produce 75% of the region’s air pollution. Multiply all those numbers together and you can understand why it’s getting as hard to see the North Shore mountains in summer as it is during the rainy season.

Sorry Kevin, but as former Mayor Gordon Campbell said: the only way to get out of gridlock is to design your way out of it, not build your way out of it. Which brings me to the first place winner, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. They not only kept a straight face but managed to sound downright indignant while calling on government to rescind all gas taxes in the face of rising oil prices. It sure would bring down the price at the pump but it would also make that gridlock problem a whole lot worse by ripping out the funding governments use for roads and to a lesser extent, transit.

Personally, I could do without more roads, but creating more transit options seems like it couldn’t come at a better time: according to a BCAA survey the vast majority of those new car owners say they would reconsider their climate-altering purchase if affordable and convenient transit options were available to them. Yet Translink’s budget for busses continues to be dwarfed by costly mega projects like Falcon’s Gateway and RAV, a fixed link money pit through staunch federal Liberal ridings. As a result only about 11% of Vancouverites use transit compared to Toronto at 20% or European cities that boast numbers well over 50%. Taxpayers would be better served by asking for 100% of gas taxes to actually go to local transit projects that are decided on by an elected authority whose soul mandate is public transit.

We’ll need that money too if City Councillor Peter Ladner has his way. Councillor Ladner is a surprise entry for Flat Earth nomination after his perfectly executed election year back flip on making the Burrard Bridge safe for cyclists. Claiming he’d been duped by the city’s “powerful bicycling lobby,” and citing concerns that the decision would pit cyclists against car-drivers, Ladner announced this month he’d changed his mind on his support for devoting two of six existing asphalt lanes on the bridge to cyclists. Instead, he would like the city to spend an additional $15 million to widen sidewalks on the bridge so that marginalized cyclists (only about 100 km of Vancouver’s vast road network is allocated for cyclists) can be pitted against marginalized pedestrians (see cyclists).

Also worthy of an honourable mention is that weather guy on BCTV for his cheerful nightly reminders that we’ve broken yet another temperature record somewhere in the province today. Monty Python couldn’t do a better job of putting a positive spin on our imminent collective demise.

However, the weatherman is paid to entertain us. I expect better from our politicians who, unlike the Catholic Church of many centuries ago, have access to the technology to find a solution if only they can find the leadership. While there are those who will say that oil prices will naturally rise to save us from ourselves, if I were a betting woman I’d wager that we’ll run out of atmosphere before we run out of fossil fuels.

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