4 ~- Wednesday, November 15, 1989 - North Shore News United Way pushes for goal CEO of B.C. Hydro: ‘I urge all volunteers to build on the great momentum they have achieved. And J ask peuple who may have delayed their decision to donate, to give now.” The campaign, on behalf of 119 agencies and ser- vices which annually help 500,000 Lower Mainland people, runs until Nov. 29. Tax deductible donations can be sent to United Way, 1625 West 8th Ave., Van- THE BIG PUSH is on by United Way volunteers to reach the 1989 campaign goal of $14 million by Nov. 29. As of Nov. 8, donations had reached $7.7 million, or 55 per cent of the target for this year. The fund-raising achievement was boosted by a re- cord $2.4 million coming in to the campaign during Bos HUNTER IN CASE anybody is wondering why the federal and pro- vincial environment ministers have suddenly turned their guns on the automobile — or at least automobile emissions — here are some informative, if appalling, figures. In 1985, cars in Canada spewed 470,000 tonnes of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, four million tonnes of carbon monoxide, 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 892,000 tonnes of nitrogen ox- ides. Canadians, of course, aren't the only culprits. There are 400 million motor vehicles in use worldwide right now. Fully 70 per cent of the world’s carbon monoxide pollution is caused by these vehicles. Af ee hee ee 7 Every time you burn up an 80-litre tank of gas, you blow 176 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is carbon dioxide, more than anything else, that is causing the greenhouse effect. ”’ A fast-forward tape of life on Planet Earth during the last 100 years would reveal something like an invasion of giant steel bugs, appearing out of nowhere, seething in hideous masses around urban centres, crawling in army-like ranks along freeways, with their torn-apart bodies heaped up in mountainous dumps. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the population of cars took a quantum leap. In ~ Canada, by 1951, there were 2.6 million of them on the roads. By 1986, that number had in- creased to 11.4 million. There are five cars now for every four households. The good news is that the cars rolling off the assembly lines now are far more fuel efficient than the ones on the road in the seventies and before. The bad news is that the reductions in pollution achiev- ed by improved technology have been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Furthermore, it has been estimated that 45 per cent of the cars on the roads in Canada today are so poorly maintained that they would be unable to pass emission tests. Every time you burn up an 80- litre tank of gas, you blow 176 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is carbon diox- ide, more than anything else, that is causing the greenhouse effect. That's why | find those BABY ON BOARD stickers so stupid and unwittingly ironic. Merely by driv- ing the baby around in a car, you are guaranteeing that by the time the tad grows up, the climate of the planet will be so thoroughly disrupted that he will not be able to live anything like what we con- sider a normal existence today. The burning of fossil fuels is tantamount to a direct attack upon the future of our children and grandchildren. This isn't speculation any longer. Top scientists are on record now saying that within as little as 60 years, we will be in the midst of an environmental catastrophe, **second only to nuclear war’? — caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Life in every region of the world will be violently disrupted. Precipi- tation and weather patterns will have changed so drastically that we can expect a 40 per cent reduction in rainfall in the agricultural! belts of North America. The Canadian Climate Centre predicts a drastic fall in the levels of freshwater inland lakes, but an equally drastic rise in ocean levels, thanks to melting ice caps. Soil erosion is already claiming six mil- lion hectares a year worldwide. Within the next 20 years — never mind 60 — we will all be ex- posed to 20 per cent more ultravio- let radiation than ever because of the decay of the ozone layer, which is affected not just by CFCs but by the nitrogen oxides coming out of the tailpipes of our cars. And herein lies the gravest danger of all. It’s not just people getting skin cancer that we have to worry about, it is the fact that the microscopic phytoplankton in the oceans, which convert the sun’s energy into food, will be devas- tated. And without the phytoplankton, the entire food chain, which is built upon it, col- lapses. The term ‘‘the banality of evil’ was coined to describe the dimen- sion that Nazism added to terror, meaning that they managed to make horror seem ordinary. This term can usefully be ap- plied to the way in which we are tearing our eco-system down around us, not through any delib- erate plan to destroy the world, but through the everyday use of electrical appliances that require power stations that split hydrocar- bons into the air, the use of paper that is produced by mills pouring dioxins into the water, sitting on foam cushions whose production required CFCs which destroy the ozone layer, and, perhaps above all, by casually driving around in machines whose vapors are turning the planet into a living hell — and with stickers in the back window saying BABY ON BOARD. It is to weep! Okay, that’s the bad news. The good news is that we are on the verge of a revolution in the way we fuel the ubiquitous auto. There ARE other ways to make a car run, and in the next couple of columns, I’ll take you on a tour of the alternatives. 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