Too much hot air

The hullabaloo over global warming has obscured more immediate environmental threats

In 1970, my father, Bob, then the Mediterranean correspondent for The Toronto Star, covered a funny little conference in Rome organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It was the year of the first Earth Day, and the topic was climate change. No one beyond FAO cared, not least the Star’s editors. Headlines at the time were dominated by the Vietnam War, the Kent State shootings, Apollo 13, the Beatles’ last album and Trudeaumania. The globe-as-griddle story was cut back and buried in the paper’s nether regions.
Two decades went by before the media went big on climate change. In 1990, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report. The Kyoto Protocol came seven years later, followed by Al Gore mania. Today you’d have to encase your head in dry ice to avoid climate change stories, conferences, summits, speeches, rallies, studies and T-shirts. Borrowing from the Gore Guide to Instant Popularity, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton have reinvented themselves as climate change warriors. Some of Europe’s leading politicians, including Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, are doing the same.

But guess what you’re not seeing? The crowding-out effect has all but obliterated worthy environmental stories such as acid rain, pollution, garbage, clear-cutting and overfishing. Somewhere along the way, the broad-based environmental movement gave way to the hyperactive climate change movement. The media followed the activist herd. The concern about what affects our lives, here and now, gave way to worry about what could affect us mostly in the future.

Governments and industries such as oil, petrochemicals and forest products must be delighted by the climate change diversion. Academics and scientists who used to get grants to study, say, water management, pesticide use or sustainable forestry are now loading up on grants to study every nuance of climate change. Questions from reporters and citizens about chemicals being dumped right now into water bodies such as the Great Lakes and the Danube have been replaced by questions about carbon dioxide output in the year 2020.

The Globe and Mail (Canada)