Protecting the environment true goal of Earth Day

Editor: I was happy to see that Steve MacNaull wrote about the important activities that we, as individuals and as a society, can do to protect the environment, like recycling and picking up litter, without once mentioning the impossible goal of “stopping climate change” (Everyday is Earth Day, April 21).

All sensible people are environmentalists. We want to enjoy clean air, land and water and we like to think that future generations will live in an even better environment. These were the original objectives of Earth Day, and I am happy to have presented at Earth Day events in the early 1990s.

Sadly, Earth Day Network, the organization behind Earth Day, is not so practical.

Their website for Earth Day 2017 highlights “climate literacy,” supposedly to explain the urgency of climate change to well-meaning people concerned about the environment.

This is a big problem for Earth Day’s future.

As the hypothesis that humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming falls into disrepute, all those associated with the climate alarm will also lose credibility. Earth Day participants, indeed all practical environmentalists, must distance themselves from the ideologically driven climate scare or risk the movement degenerating into irrelevance. Tom Harris, B. Eng., M. Eng. (Mech.) Executive Director, International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC)