CHECK THE CLIMATE IMPACT BEFORE YOU BUY A HOLIDAY HOME.
It is odd when the elite have to check the climate credentials of their new holiday home when they are in the group that most affects the environment.!!! For previous generations, the questions surrounding where to buy a vacation home were simple: What’s your budget? And do you want to be near the mountains or the beach? But now, in the disturbing wake of tragic natural disasters like the wildfires in Hawaii and catastrophic floods in the Europe, many people are pausing to consider the ways climate change may wreak havoc on where they choose to settle: hurricanes that can sweep away beach homes, fires that can incinerate properties, tornadoes that can flatten condos — not to mention the risk to human lives. It’s such a hot topic that websites are now being created to give people detailed climate risk data and reports for individual properties, portfolios and geographic corridors so you can assess your exposure to extreme weather events now, and up to 40 years into the future, according to these websites. There are a lot of reasons people purchase real estate: Be around the grandkids, be around kids, a job, or you’re thinking about retirement or vacation. You think about those needs and price point, but climate risk is certainly one factor to consider amongst all the other parts to the decision-making process of where to purchase. And it’s not just the major weather factors to consider as you look at where to purchase real estate (and how to protect your home from natural disasters with the right insurance). Extreme heat can severely affect your quality of life, keeping you inside and racking up your air conditioning bill, while wildfire smoke, even from miles and miles away, can cause health issues. So when you want to double your footprint and deprive a local of a home check before you buy.
Too many people continue throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute or flush pollutants down toilet/sink drainage pipes as though they’re inconsequentially dispensing that waste into a black-hole singularity where it’s compressed into nothing.
Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion.
Then there are the corporate-scale toxic-contaminant spills in rarely visited wilderness. … Out of sight, out of mind!
Ergo, every day of the year needs World Earth Day attention thus action — with a genuine, serious effort and not just brief news-media tokenism.
Obstacles to environmental progress were quite formidable pre-pandemic. But Covid-19 not only stalled most projects being undertaken, it added greatly to the already busy landfills and burning centers with disposed masks and other non-degradable biohazard-protective single-use materials.
Also, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize the fossil fuel industry [etcetera] for whatever environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
Here in Canada, meanwhile, carbon taxes induce some of the shrillest complaints — including, if not especially, by the corporate news-media — even though it’s more than recouped (except for high-income earners) via federal government rebate.
Many drivers of superfluously huge and over-powered thus gas-guzzling vehicles seem to consider it a basic human right. It may scare those drivers just to contemplate a world in which they can no longer readily fuel that ‘right’, especially since much quieter electric cars are for them no substitute.
The disturbing mass addiction to fossil fuel products by the larger public is once again exposed, which undoubtedly helps keep the average consumer quiet about the planet’s greatest polluter, lest the consumer be deemed hypocritical.
I am not very good with English but I line up this really leisurely to translate.