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Whistler takes a pass on The Age of Stupid

I never know what to make of someone imploring me to help save the planet. They're often earnest and energetic, burdened with altruistic motives, naive enthusiasm and uncertain aim.
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I never know what to make of someone imploring me to help save the planet. They're often earnest and energetic, burdened with altruistic motives, naive enthusiasm and uncertain aim. I generally try to explain - gently - that their goal is noble but their target is wrong. The planet will take care of itself; it's humankind that needs saving... from the scariest predator on Earth: itself.

The planet will be just fine, thank you. As soon as humans stop pumping poison gas into the air, toxic waste into the rivers and oceans and anything they want to get rid of into the ground, in other words when humans simply disappear from its surface, the Earth will silently, inexorably get on with the task of renewing itself.

Depending on which dogma you believe, science or religion, the Earth is either 4.5 billion years old or 5-6,000 years old. While I prefer science to imagination, it really doesn't matter which number you hitch your wagon to when it comes to pondering the damage humans have done to that which sustains their own lives. Wholesale destruction of the human habitat only dates from the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the late 18 th century, and really only got up to speed in the 20 th with the rapid perfection and spread of internal combustion engines, electrical generating capacity and industrial agriculture. In either geological or Christian time, the caca only recently hit the fan.

But there's hope, isn't there? We're more enlightened than we were before, aren't we? I mean, like, we can drive a Prius and maybe even electric cars soon, can't we?

If you'd like a quick peep show of how enlightened we've become, click onto this website. http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/the-15-most-toxic-places-to-live/26145

Makes you wonder what an anomaly this town is. Makes me wonder how the Alberta tar sands tailings missed making the top 15. Guess no one "lives" there.

While it's easy to tsk-tsk those wretched, backward, unenlightened saps in China, Indonesia, India and Appalachia, the irony is our own enlightened contribution to the problem. Just this week, in 130 countries around the world, thousands of people joined a flash protest mob calling on world leaders to tackle the thorny issue of climate change. Pictures from these protests show happy, enthusiastic, young, white faces holding their cell phones, PDAs and other digitalia aloft in triumphant protest. Organized through various social networking outlets, the flash mob demanded someone - else? - do something about environmental degradation.

The International Energy Agency recently released a report they might want to consider. It traced the arc of the rise of consumer electronics. Among the tidbits of information the report contained was Americans - and one would not be going out on much of limb to extrapolate Canadians, Brits, French, Germans, etc. - boast 25 consumer electronic products per household. The number in 1980 was three. Each of these indispensable gadgets suck enough electricity that they now consume 15 per cent of the power used in the average household. Oh yeah, that amount is projected to triple over the next 20 years.

So what? So to meet the demand from those phones, iPods, game consoles, computers, flat panel TVs and such, 560 coal-fired power plants will have to be built. Don't want to burn coal? How about 230 nuclear plants? Yeah baby, wave that phone in victory.

Earlier this week the heads of 100 countries held a day-long session at the United Nations to discuss climate change and what to do about it. They agreed it was an important issue... but not as important as economic growth. The developing world wants to catch up to the West. The West isn't willing to, as one commentator put it, "impoverish ourselves and become a third-world backwater out of principle when everyone else cheats." Stalemate, dude.

So, with the global premiere of the film, The Age of Stupid , this week, it looks like the age of stupid is in full swing. What's an enlightened resort community to do?

Well, if some of our elected leaders get their way, that may include chasing a different shade of green. The snit hit the fan at last week's council meeting when a report on the Library Mahal stated the greener-than-green building was costing almost four times as much to run as was projected. Motions were made, reports requested, allegations of willful ignorance and heads up as... er, in the sand were made.

Should we be concerned? More concerned than the mayor seemed to be when he punted the question of whether spending the money on green building standards was worth it by saying, "... it's simply the right thing to do?" I'd be the first to tightly roll up last week's Pique and swat him across the nose for that cavalier rejoinder but the fact is, he beat me to the swat. "It's like I left my brain at home," is how he put it when I asked.

Somewhere in that brain left on the shelf was the answer to the questions being raised. The library's performance wasn't news to staff or council, although no one was done any favours when the projected costs were stated at $7,000 annually instead of the correct figure, $12,800. That number is still an outrage away from the August 2008 to August 2009 actual figure of $28,000 but only half the outrage.

It's also only about half the story.

Ted Battiston has most of the rest. Ted's got more facts and figures than StatsCan. He's measuring pretty much every iota of energy the muni uses, practically by employee. If it can be tracked, he's tracking it.

Given the "as built" library as opposed to the plans that formed the basis of the $12,800 estimate, Ted calculates the bill for the library should be around $21,000. That takes into account the increased size, heat tracing, parking lighting and such. Factoring in the complexity and newness of the building, it's not as efficient as it should be, but the numbers should get closer, not further apart as the complex mechanical systems are fine tuned. Regardless, we're way ahead of where we would be had we not opted for the green solution. And really, that's the point.

At the end of the day, this isn't nearly the drama that played out in council last week. In fact, it's beginning to look a lot like Kenny wasn't the only one who forgot to pack his brain before he left for the meeting. We have a simple choice to make. We can abandon our commitment to becoming a carbon neutral community, we can abandon our commitment to building greener buildings if we want. Sadly, I'm not sure anything we do will matter in the overall scheme of things.

But personally, I'd just as soon take a pass on joining the Age of Stupid. It already seems like a movement that's overcrowded.