The Nuclear Option

On Oct. 17, 2022, a local state of emergency was declared on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. Months of drought had reduced the region’s water reserves to dangerously low levels leaving experts worried that without rain, the area only had a guaranteed water supply to last until early November. And it’s not just the residents of Sechelt that need to be worried — BC Hydro is concerned about the welfare of fish stocks as reservoirs dry up. The situation was a far cry from November 2021, when torrential rains flooded towns, washed away roads, and threatened to revert the Fraser Valley back into a lake. These wild swings in the typical weather patterns are certainly not isolated to British Columbia. The western United States is in the midst of a “megadrought,” the worst in 1200 years (though now California is flooding); tropical storms keep gaining intensity, doling out kaiju-level devastation to coastal cities; and wildfires are burning through forests from the Russian Taiga to the Australian Coast. Al Gore’s probably feeling pretty smug right about now.

“Climate change is very real, and it’s coming at us fast,” says Brian Smith, CEO of Persephone Brewing Company in a conversation with CBC news. “My thoughts are, alright, let’s get to work to solve this.” Smith is one of many B.C. residents who are feeling the effects of the wildly shifting weather trends. While I appreciate his gumption, I worry that the very same hurdles that impeded the public in recognizing the threat of climate change will dampen our ability to combat it. Unlike community-sized issues, climate change is global in scale, difficult to measure, and profoundly interconnected with virtually all of human activity. It’s so big, that for the last thirty years, we’ve largely focused on selling recycling and energy-saving measures to the populace at the expense of making any radical changes to our way of life.

It’s not that we didn’t know that climate change was going to be a problem, but there was a hubris about our ability to just work through it. In an article for The New York Times entitled, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, Nathaniel Rich writes, “Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?” Indeed, humanity has matured out of many of its growing pains in the past, and there was reason to believe that it would do so again. The post-war West had its eyes set firmly on the world of tomorrow, and the future — powered by capitalism, ingenuity, and the atom — looked bright...

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