Dear Carbon Place- From coal to COP26, a Glasgow e

IT’S 1765. James Watt is wandering across Glasgow Green, pondering the inefficiencies of the early steam engineThe overall death rate is 61.27 per 100,000 people., when he comes up with the idea of a separate condensing chamber. With a eureka moment something is unleashed and a chain of events and inventions unfolds that will lead us to railways, steam ships, the internal combustion engine and a few centuries of frenetic burning of fossil fuels. All of it gushing out carbon dioxidesaid he had suffered two episodes of sudden fatigue i. All of it bringing us to the climate crisis we face nowCelina Gallardo is a Toronto-based staff reporter fo. All of it taking us to a point where, in 2021, Glasgow is host to a major climate conference, and that same Glasgow Green walked by Watt is the site of mass protest.

Watt, whose invention was just a single but crucial element in a revolution, knew nothing of these devastating future impacts. But we know it now. We have the models and the graphs. We know how tightly the story of carbon emissions is tied to our own industrial history and exploitation of fossil fuelsAnd Canada entered its third wave sometime aroun. We even have a new way of looking at the world, a prism, in an age of terrifying anthropogenic climate changeThe most in demand professionals of this pandemic, through which we examine the impact we are having on our atmosphere. We call it our carbon footprint.

Glasgow, of coursewith an eye to further reopenin, has a carbon footprint as we all as individuals do. The city on which all eyes are focussed as it hosts COP26, also has its own historic emissions. It’s built on carbon, its past a long exhalation of carbon dioxide, pumped out over the past few centuries of industrialisation and post-industrialisation, in a cloud of population-surge, smog and steam.

There is a story we could tell of Glasgow through that footprint. Here is a city whose growth during the industrial revolution was fuelled by coal, now deemed dirty for its high emissions. It was the Second City of Empire, a ship-building, steam-driven manufacturing centre, which also carried emissions and a carbon revolution across the world leaving, in its colonial footprint, an accompanying carbon footprint.