What I will be listening to hear from all federal parties is their climate policies. I am overwhelmed by how the climate has been pushed to the back of the bus.
I believe the climate crisis remains the No. 1 threat to sustainable life on Earth and that no amount of mitigation is now going to shield us from its damage. We can’t go back to an earlier time and expect life to be the same. We cannot go back to an economy based on fossil fuels, nor can we change the temperature, the wildfires, or the rainfall patterns to some previous normal that we remember.
Housing and employment must anticipate the future, and our attitudes must change to realize this factor and move on to new goals that can be achieved through the expansion of renewable energies and a changing job environment. The status quo does not work anymore. We should be building housing for 2050. Housing that will be able to survive the harsh effects of heat domes, with required heat pumps or air conditioning, powered by required solar panels that would allow future families to shelter in place. Water will need to be collected from fireproof metal roofs to provide summer time outside use when piped water is banned.
If new gas car sales are banned in 2035, as is the plan at present, EV use will still increase for those who must commute for employment. Currently, there are 17,000 trips a day on Highway 14. If Sooke's population grows an average of four per cent per year until 2050 it means that the population will double from 15,000 to 30,000 people. That’s double the number of housing units, and if the car commute persists, this could push the trips per day to 34,000 or close to 17,000 cars in the morning rush and 17,000 cars coming home in the evening. Bumper-to-bumper traffic from Sooke to Langford every day.
This simple example shows how we and the government ought to think of the future livability of our region. It should motivate governments to change development and building codes now to accommodate the changes by the year 2050 and beyond. We cannot keep pushing our lack of progress onto future generations.
Even Ebenezer Scrooge changed his ways in the present when he saw what was in the future. We must do the same.
Chris Moss
Sooke
