{"id":492,"date":"2016-03-16T04:01:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T04:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=492"},"modified":"2018-06-25T04:04:18","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T04:04:18","slug":"could-climate-change-warnings-on-gasoline-pumps-actually-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=492","title":{"rendered":"Could climate-change warnings on gasoline pumps actually work?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Originally published at Grist.<\/em><\/a><\/em><\/div>\n
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Later\u00a0this year, someone stopping to fuel up in North Vancouver will\u00a0be the first customer to see the controversial warning labels. They\u2019ll be wrapped around the gas pump handles. The exact wording isn\u2019t settled yet, but here\u2019s the gist of it: Every time you pump gas, you\u2019re contributing to air pollution and climate change.<\/p>\n

What will they look like? We don\u2019t know that, either, but here\u2019s one candidate considered by the city council that\u00a0voted in the new warning-label law:<\/p>\n

\"Gas
Our Horizon<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This label was\u00a0developed by Robert Shirkey, a Toronto-based lawyer who has been obsessed with climate change for,\u00a0as he put it<\/a>, \u201cas long as I can remember.\u201d A few years ago, his\u00a0grandfather told him to \u201cdo what you love,\u201d then promptly died and left him with a\u00a0small inheritance. Shirkey used the money to found\u00a0Our Horizon<\/a>, a nonprofit\u00a0that functions as\u00a0a one-stop shop for anyone curious about getting their local municipality to put climate change warning labels on gasoline pumps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It might seem\u00a0unfair to post labels at gas stations implying that individual drivers are guilty of nudging caribou closer to extinction. After all, lots of\u00a0others are out there warming the troposphere: power plants, trucking, the military, you name it. Shirkey decided to focus on gas pump warning labels precisely because the responsibility for climate change is so diffuse. Unless you\u2019re living some kind of Little House on the Prairie lifestyle, the energy that goes into heating your home\u00a0and\u00a0keeping you fed is invisible.<\/p>\n

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But the experience\u00a0of fueling up\u00a0is a real, gassy, in-your-face moment of personal responsibility.\u00a0You can smell it. You have to pull levers to make it work. \u201cThere is nothing else,\u201d\u00a0Shirkey wrote<\/a>, in an article for the amazingly named\u00a0Municipal World<\/em>\u00a0magazine, \u201cthat currently connects us to the problems of climate change in such a direct way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in West Vancouver, a teenager named Emily Kelsall heard Shirkey being interviewed on the radio on her way to school. In the same way that some sixteen-year-olds\u00a0would travel from town to town for soccer matches, or to see punk shows at VFW halls, Kelsall began going from local city council to city council<\/a>,\u00a0proposing new legislation requiring\u00a0gasoline warning labels.<\/p>\n