This diary consists of a single, long-winded question about climate change. I’m hoping to engage any Kossacks who are climate scientists, meteorologists, scientists in general, or have great lay knowledge of climate science, recycling, and pollution to possibly give me an answer.
The past couple of days, the wife and I drove across southern Michigan, from Detroit to the Lake Michigan coast, and just wandered through the picturesque little towns there to kind of unwind.
On the beach at Grand Haven, near the lighthouses, I waited as my wife used the restroom, and as is my wont, I started picking up bits of trash sticking out of the sand and tossing them in the provided containers. As I did, I thought about what a futile gesture it was. There were probably tons of trash on the beach, some of it deposited by thoughtless beachcombers, more of it washed ashore, spread by the wind, picked up and strewn by gulls. I did it anyway.
As I put the trash out every week, I think about the plastic, paper, and cardboard we recycle. Our city is a small core city, with high taxes and excellent public services. I’m happy to pay my taxes if it means a robust recycling program. Still, I feel a little bit silly being part of a Rube Goldberg kind of chain- I throw the plastic egg carton in the recycling — 2 guys in a diesel-burning truck come and pick it up and take it to a center that uses a lot of power, where others sort it out so that it can be melted down by other machines that use a lot of power so that the egg carton can be made into something else. But… I also understand economies of scale. We’ve been recycling in our city since about 2005, and I’ve noted that the volume of garbage from our house that goes to the landfill has been reduced by about 2/3. Multiply that by 20,000 residents over 13 years and that’s an impact, for sure… right?
Living in a core city with a central downtown means that we walk more than other suburbanites and use our car less. Of course, we also drive our gas-burner all the way across the state so I can pick up a few pieces of trash on the beaches there.
I’m old enough to remember when Lake Erie was essentially dead, and you’d have to be crazy to eat a fish you caught out of it. Now, people fish there all the time, and I wouldn’t mind swimming in its waters at all. So positive change can happen.
But climate change keeps getting worse.
So my question is this: how much of an impact am I, are we, really having? I guess the question is: if things are this bad with human-made climate change, how much worse would things be if we didn’t have things like community recycling programs and gas mileage standards? How much more full would the landfills be? How much of an impact are we really having, and is there a way to make a significant dent in the Sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads?
Thank you.
UPDATE: I appreciate everyone’s comments and observations about how we all can make an impact. Please continue with these ideas. The main question I’d like answered, if it can be answered, is how much of a difference have we ALREADY made- i.e. if we hadn’t ever started recycling, if we had no such thing as car emissions standards, then how much MORE screwed would we be? Thank you.