'As much of it as as often as you can'

Note to self: when traveling, style be damned. Wear your flannel pajamas. I nearly froze to death on that flight. 

When I said, “We’ve got to start somewhere,” in my last dispatch, I meant the wider community. One thing I’m learning is that there are people who have been working on climate change issues for years, right in our backyard. On Nova Scotia’s trade delegation, for example, we have Robert Niven (of Carbon Sense Solutions); and on the politico side, George Foote (of the Department of the Environment’s climate change team). And while much of the media is treating this as like any news story – so it is bound by the ebbs and flows of the news cycle (and vulnerable to being eclipsed by, oh, say, Tiger Woods’ marital status) – these people seem to see COP 15 as, quite literally, the fifteenth: part of a long and ongoing process. I’ve been to a couple of briefings on the COP at this point, and have been amazed at the number of initiatives here in Nova Scotia. Why aren’t these more front and centre in the public eye? Nova Scotia could sell itself as much as a leader in clean energy and environmental projects as much as a destination for quaint fishing shores and highland piping. Past and future.

A couple of examples:

• The World Energy Cities Partnership, to which Halifax belongs.
• The Climate Change Statement of Action, with universities – including, as of today, Dalhousie – as signatories.
• The targets of the provincial Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act of 2007, especially with regards to greenhouse gases (to be reduced to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020), are ambitious but compared to what we’re seeing in British Columbia or Quebec, not really yet on track.

It’s an odd feeling to be going to my beloved Denmark more as a Nova Scotian, or a representative of Dalhousie, than as a Canadian. I really don’t know what kind of reception Canadians – not of all of whom support the federal position on the COP – will have.  As the man sitting across from me in the airport just said, “We should be (setting) the standards of good citizenry around the world. We should be model citizens.”

One other thing that often occurs to me when I think about the scale of these issues, and my ability as an individual, as a teacher, and as a relative newbie to climate change. There was a short-lived television show called Sports Night in the late ‘90s, written by the brilliant Aaron Sorkin. In one episode, a character, Dan, is debating which worthy cause deserves his money. A symphony orchestra? Medical research?  And his friend Casey says:

Casey: You're not going to solve everybody's problems. In fact, you're not going to solve anybody's problems. So you know what you should do?
Dan: What?
Casey: Anything. As much of it as as often as you can.