It's interesting that according to the BC chief coroner twice the number of people died over last weekend than would normally have died (with the implication that they died from the heat). Those 100-odd extra deaths dwarfs both the COVID and opioid death rate, but it's only COVID and opioids that really makes the news on a regular basis. Much like deaths due to air pollution, this kind of death is just a footnote in the odd environmental article that will be forgotten once the heat wave is over.
That pretty much just sums up exactly the problem i'm talking about. People go "wow it's hot out", so then they turn on the air con, or they jump in their car to go for a drive (because it has air con), or head down to the (air conditioned) mall to buy a whole new air conditioning unit "for next time", except then they start running the air con every time the mercury hits 30 (as opposed to more extreme temperatures that actually might be life-threatening to them), because hey, why should they have to suffer when their neighbors are having a nice, cool, air-conditioned day, and hooray now we have more heat waves.
If we want to really address climate change as a species, i think one of the first things people in rich countries need to accept is that their lifestyles are not sustainable. People in rich countries tend to imagine that if they didn't have all the mod cons their lives would insufferable, but people survived perfectly fine without air con for millennia, and billions still do today. There are other lifestyle changes we can make to deal with heat (e.g. siesta), and other ways to build shelters that don't depend on polluting machinery (e.g. wind catchers). We could do it if people as a whole started accepting some shared responsibility for this.
That pretty much just sums up exactly the problem i'm talking about. People go "wow it's hot out", so then they turn on the air con, or they jump in their car to go for a drive (because it has air con), or head down to the (air conditioned) mall to buy a whole new air conditioning unit "for next time", except then they start running the air con every time the mercury hits 30 (as opposed to more extreme temperatures that actually might be life-threatening to them), because hey, why should they have to suffer when their neighbors are having a nice, cool, air-conditioned day, and hooray now we have more heat waves.
If we want to really address climate change as a species, i think one of the first things people in rich countries need to accept is that their lifestyles are not sustainable. People in rich countries tend to imagine that if they didn't have all the mod cons their lives would insufferable, but people survived perfectly fine without air con for millennia, and billions still do today. There are other lifestyle changes we can make to deal with heat (e.g. siesta), and other ways to build shelters that don't depend on polluting machinery (e.g. wind catchers). We could do it if people as a whole started accepting some shared responsibility for this.
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