The article by Jay Burney was originally published in The Buffalo News on December 02, 2012. The author is founder of GreenWatch and the Learning Sustainability Campaign. Click here to visit GreenWatch on Facebook.
For decades, denial has been a river running through Washington, Albany, Buffalo and probably through your house. Harris polls conducted between 2007 and last year indicate Americans’ belief in climate change has dropped from 71 percent to 44 percent.
Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and an election campaign that ignored climate change, we face an onrushing economic, cultural and environmental reality that will shape our future. If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to call it climate change, then call it something else. Call it a “situation,” because whatever you call it, we have a situation.
The question is: Are we in a position in Western New York to address and mitigate the potential consequences of climate change? Do we have a sustainable future? The answer is: Maybe.
During his election victory speech, President Obama said, “We don’t want our children to live in an America … that is threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”
It’s about time. Now he and other policymakers, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, are raising climate issues, understanding that if we do not, we face a precipitous decline in our future opportunities. This includes the potential for disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which made many of our friends and families refugees – without shelter, food, power, heat and water. Imagine the consequences of a storm-caused, prolonged, deep winter power outage in Western New York.
Since the Clinton White House sent Dr. Peter Sousounis here in 2000 to release the initial Regional Climate Assessment (Great Lakes), we have witnessed escalating global and regional change, including warmer winters and extreme weather events.
Sousounis said at that 2000 event held in the Statler, “We can predict increasing average temperatures, changing lake levels and extremes in weather conditions in the coming decades.”
Last spring, NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Dr. James Hansen, initially a climate skeptic, declared: “Now we can go beyond global and regional predictions because we have actual evidence that climate change has arrived, and is worse than we thought it would be.”
This is all eye-opening.
What our region does in the coming months and years regarding climate change will help to characterize the future of our community. This is a collective responsibility. We have to educate ourselves and invest in personal, neighborhood and regional strategies that address our future. It must be a wide-ranging discussion that affects virtually every aspect of our lives. This will determine our ability to survive as a species. It is about you and me. We can make a difference.
For decades, denial has been a river running through Washington, Albany, Buffalo and probably through your house. Harris polls conducted between 2007 and last year indicate Americans’ belief in climate change has dropped from 71 percent to 44 percent.
Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and an election campaign that ignored climate change, we face an onrushing economic, cultural and environmental reality that will shape our future. If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to call it climate change, then call it something else. Call it a “situation,” because whatever you call it, we have a situation.
The question is: Are we in a position in Western New York to address and mitigate the potential consequences of climate change? Do we have a sustainable future? The answer is: Maybe.
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by Kristen Kaszubowski, Grow Social Media Assistant
on October 29, 2012
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
2012 is quite a monumental year for me for a number of reasons. But at the top of that list is voting in my first presidential election. Knowing that this responsibility lays ahead of me, I began researching, learning and understanding the candidates and their platforms. I recorded the debates, I read articles, and I watched the fact checking reports. All this left me more confused than when I began my journey as a first-time voter. To me, the debates seemed plagued with vagueness and an excessive amount of interrupting the moderator. The fact checks that followed the next day inferred that each candidate never completely spoke the truth.
While elections can stir up a lot of disagreements, I think one thing we can all agree on is the lack of attention environmental issues received from both candidates. Or did I miss something? As many media outlets have reported in the last week, this is the first presidential election in decades that we never heard the words “climate change” mentioned together in a debate. Is that because Americans are more worried about the economy, healthcare and foreign policy?
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by Kristen Kaszubowski, Grow Social Media Assistant
on October 23, 2012
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What's New )
GrowWNY is taking sustainability reporting to a new level. As you may have noticed, many companies are hiring a sustainability officer to manage their “environmental” programs. We are interviewing local leaders charged with sustainability in their organization. Stay tuned over the next few months to hear more about some of the innovative solutions they are developing to create a better and more sustainable future for Western New York. If you want us to talk to someone in particular, email us at info@growwny.org.
I recently sat down with Aliesa Adelman (AA), a Sustainable Design Coordinator at Wendel Companies, a full service architecture and engineering firm in Western New York. This discussion led to some insight on how planning a new building involves many green components, and how sustainable organizational culture needs to be both internal and external.
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