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How many fire-destroyed homes does it take?

January 16, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The very long list of celebrities in Los Angeles who have lost their homes to the raging fires is growing. Climate change is absolutely acknowledged to be among the causes of this aggressive, mainly uncontrollable, between only 38 per cent to 0 per cent contained conflagration.

Will it matter more, matter enough, if the famous, iconic “HOLLYWOOD” sign is destroyed?

My fervent hope is that many, most or in some way, all of these famous faces will now take climate change seriously, whatever they have believed. It is the tremendous influence of celebrities, particularly in the US that needs to be brought to bear on the reengaged leadership about to take control.

Simply put: it is by now “flat-earth thinking,” says I, to deny the harm done by the use of fossil fuels, our methods of farming, and our choices of transportation, to name but a few of the major sources of damage to this planet.

Like it or not, this is not a religion nor cult issue, this campaign against climate change is the realities of the rest of our lives – our grandchildren’s lives. The massive storms, floods and fires! They are not just weather; they are the harbingers of much greater calamities to come.

There is the endless blackmail from the oil and gas guys to start with, about the economy and jobs; how to replace the thousands of jobs in the oil and gas business; how your low-income Maritimer can go west and earn plenty of money in the oilfields, risking his own health and continuing the harm his job is doing in the planet’s big picture.

Actually, there are answers because creating energy will always make money, no matter how it’s done. Is energy created by hydropower a non-profit system, employing very few people?

No, it employs many people and it is renewable. There are five basic sources of renewable energy: solar, wind, geothermic, hydropower and biomass.

As the shutdown of fossil fuels begins, an extremely urgent step that is complicated by the additional necessity to also clean up the hideous messes these industries have created, like tailings ponds, truth is, there is huge potential for jobs by taking the broad sweep move to renewables. 

Yes, there are fortunes in the coffers of the fossil fuel industry to provide all that is needed for a transition and actual growth in renewable energy. Given a serious and determined approach to running the world safely, there will be thousands of jobs. That training must begin now for students coming up into a staggering world so desperately in need of a radical change of thinking: this is no longer a mystery to the majority of people in Northern America – no longer fringe but mainstream.

Just the board strokes: Wind, solar power and renewables have exceeded the supply of energy by 50 percent over fossil fuels in Europe. There are volumes of information to discuss this, far more than there is room in this column. A dig at research can tell you the how and where but I can tell you why: because we absolutely have to admit our insanity to have allowed the chaos and damage for so long, allowed it on every level of government and civil society because we are lazy or stupid or self-destructive, not because it has to be this way.

We have tolerated and even condoned the use of wasteful and harmful sources of energy at the government level because lobbyists – I don’t know how – threatened, cajoled, lied, and charmed every leader that ever came into power. It has been clearly understood for decades that our use of fossil fuels and our penchant for dumping massive piles of garbage in single places to leak into our precious waters and great truckloads of plastic into the ocean, that all of this behaviour has been short-sighted at best and manically hurtful to the environment at worst. 

None of this is new information. We have our parts to play. We voted them in and they betray us and share the lies with us as truths and necessities. Now we know and they know and it is up to us to stop the rot.

The late Doug Skeates believed that everything important begins at the grassroots level and especially here in Dufferin and Caledon, those grassroots groups are strong but they need us to back them. Environmental Defence, HeadwaterStopThe413, and Democracy Caledon are three. 

Some ask for donations to fund their endeavours but others ask you to write a letter to our politicians, urging them to stop the harm where harm is inexcusable, to join them when they stage a protest, to write a letter to the paper in protest of proposed damage in advance of it actually being done. 

Sincerely, I urge us all here to thwart this leader of our province, Doug Ford for his plans for true devastation with Highway 413, of precious waters, vulnerable land and wildlife, farms and homes because he listens to lobbyists and developers more than he does to us.


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