gsurtees

Climate denier?

2008-03-31T08:24:00.002-04:00

Let's clear the air here
Climate denier? Oil industry shill? Moi? Nah. Cutting through the bunk? You bet
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, TORONTO SUN

It's amazing what gets you labelled as a climate denier and/or oil industry shill these days.

For more than a year now, having done a fair bit of research about the issue on my own, I've been writing critically about global warming. During that time, I have stated the following:

That I accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the Earth is warming unnaturally and that it is "very likely" human activity is the cause.

That, regardless of global warming, it's important to conserve energy and to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) as cleanly and efficiently as possible, not just for environmental reasons, but for geo-political ones. The less we have to rely on Mideast oil, the greater our security will be.

I've said Canada, as a resource-rich country, should be a leader in the responsible use of fossil fuels and government subsidies to the oil industry -- unnecessary when oil costs more than $100 a barrel -- should be re-invested into Canadian research and development of new sources of renewable energy and clean technologies.

I've said if Canada imposes a carbon tax, presuming a majority of Canadians favour this, it must be done in concert with the U.S. and our other major trading partners, so as not to damage our economy.

I've argued it must be truly revenue neutral, providing already overtaxed Canadians with realistic ways of moving toward a carbon economy.

These aren't radical views. From the overwhelmingly positive response to my columns, I'd venture to say many Canadians share them.

However, in the bizarro world of the climate hysterics, I'm evil incarnate.

For one thing, I don't support the Kyoto Accord, which really is, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper once described it, a socialist, money-sucking scheme.

Worse, it's a scheme whose purpose is not to lower man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

China's skyrocketing, coal-fuelled GHG emissions alone over the next few years -- exempt from Kyoto because it's a developing nation -- will more than wipe out all GHG reductions prescribed by Kyoto, even if the few dozen developed nations to which they apply, including Canada, achieve theirs. Many, including us, won't.

That's just China. India and the rest of the developing world are also exempt.

The United States, either the world's largest or second-largest GHG emitter, along with China, depending on whose figures you use, is unaffected by Kyoto because it has refused to ratify the treaty dating back to the Bill Clinton/Al Gore administration. Yes, you read that right.

Leaving aside the developing world, even if every Kyoto target in the developed world was hit over the next four years, it would represent about one-twelfth of what the science says needs to be done.

Kyoto isn't an environmental plan. It's a plan to transfer wealth from the First World to the Third and damage the American economy in particular.

Beyond that, the scientific "consensus" on man-made global warming breaks down once you start looking at how long it will take, how severe it will be and what we should do about it, which is not a scientific decision but a political one.

Climate hysterics, led by environmental radicals and opportunistic politicians, who screech that every time there's an extreme, or even unusual weather event it's "proof" of man-made global warming, don't know what they're talking about. They constantly confuse "weather" and "climate."

They don't understand the difference between man-made global warming and the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, which keeps us all from freezing.

Given their concerns about GHG emissions, they irrationally oppose nuclear power, which does not emit them.

EXTREME WEATHER KILLS

They act as if there were no hurricanes or glacier retreats before mankind started burning fossil fuels and that extreme weather never killed anyone before industrialization.

They confuse carbon monoxide, a poison, with carbon dioxide, necessary for life on Earth.

They insist we know far more about climate than we do.

They aren't interested in saving the planet, they want to control human behaviour.

They are the worst sort of people to put in charge of anything -- ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, often hypocritical.

They can, however, write e-mails.

Global Warming Fanatics

2007-04-13T08:05:00.000-04:00

April 12, 2007

Maintaining Third World poverty
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's professed concern for the world's poor in its latest hysterical report on global warming is utter hypocrisy.

Nothing will keep the Third World poorer than denying it access to reliable, affordable electricity -- the practical impact of IPCC policies, parroted by Kyoto accord fanatics.

Consider the irony. Affluent, First World politicians, UN bureaucrats, government-funded scientists and "environmentalists," having decreed the countries they live in have irresponsibly heated up the planet by burning fossil fuels, now presume to tell the Third World, in effect, "oops -- we screwed up and not only will you pay for it through increasingly severe weather, but you can never aspire to our standard of living, to what we have."

That's the thinking behind Kyoto, which will arbitrarily transfer billions of dollars of wealth from the First World to the Third as reparations for man-made global warming, while, incredibly, doing next to nothing to alleviate the root causes of poverty, disease and low life expectancy.

Third World countries not run by totally corrupt leaders -- in those cases, dictators and their armies will get most of our Kyoto cash, as they now do with foreign aid -- are desperately trying to improve the standard of living of their citizens. That's why China's building hundreds of coal-fired (and greenhouse gas emitting) energy plants. That's why Africa desperately wants to develop its fossil fuel reserves.

It's not because they hate the environment, it's because they know affordable, reliable energy -- not handouts from the West -- is the key to permanently improving living standards in the Third World, where two billion people, one-third of the world's population, lack access to electricity, resulting in poverty, disease, hunger, low productivity and premature death.

But well-fed, First World, Kyoto fanatics, awash is their naive, pastoral fantasies, don't want the Third World building coal, oil or natural gas-fired energy plants to supply electricity. They also object to nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases. They would deny the Third World any realistic means of modernizing itself. Instead, they insanely demonize industrialization and development, the only things that can lift poor nations out of poverty, while lecturing the world's poorest to use wind and solar power, a farce given how impractical and expensive this would be.

Meanwhile, the IPCC and its cheerleaders give us ever-more-hysterical "climate porn" updates -- theoretical predictions of the additional deaths that may occur due to man-made global warming, that ignore the real deaths happening right now because of the Third World's lack of electricity.

Here's African economist and author James Shikwati, interviewed by Channel 4 in Great Britain for its documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle: "One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that somebody came to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told 'don't touch your resources. Don't touch your oil. Don't touch your coal.' That is suicide."

Kyoto exempts developing nations from emission cuts up to 2012. The idea was the First World would set the example, then get the Third World to follow suit post-2012. Some example.

Many developed countries, including Canada, have spectacularly failed to meet their emission targets.

Now we're going to tell the world's poorest they must not aspire to what we have, to satisfy our latest, hysterical, trendy environmental crusade? Right. Who the hell do we think we are?

Why we Fight

2007-03-26T13:07:00.000-04:00

The reason we have to fight
By MICHAEL COREN

Imagine a history book being read by people in 100 years time. In a chapter entitled, Why We Fought, it would list the crimes of an ideology and a movement, Islamic fundamentalism, that became so powerful and so grotesque in the opening years of the 21st century that the civilized world was obliged to resist.

The book would explain that some of the wars of resistance were unsuccessful, or even ill-advised, but that in the end the forces of light triumphed over the death-black darkness.

It would also recount how some people in the civilized world opposed the struggle, out of self-loathing, cowardice, leftist politics or simply because they were part of the jihadist movement.

But right always wins in the end, the readers would be reminded, and did so in this great culture war. Because the crimes were as many as they were devilish.

They beheaded Christian girls in Indonesia who were making their way to school. They stopped them at gunpoint, forced them to kneel down and then cut off their heads, the blood drenching their tiny uniforms.

They planted bombs in places of worship that belonged to their own Muslim faith, murdering scores of people who they knew to be innocent, apolitical and intent only on worshipping and praying. They demanded that others respect Mosques but simultaneously used them as killing fields.

They murdered 150,000 of their own people in Algeria in an attempt to destabilize their government. Often they would slit the throats of children in front of their parents before in turn killing those horrified mothers and fathers.

In Iraq they kidnapped people who had devoted their lives to helping the impoverished and the abused, tied those good people up like animals and then tortured and humiliated them. They videotaped their screams and their wild pleas for mercy and help and then slowly cut off their heads with a knife, holding the severed object up to the cameras.

They pulled organs from within the bodies of their victims and offered them to children, then ran away with severed limbs as if they were treasured trophies.

In Lebanon they dragged badly wounded co-religionists from their hospital beds and beat them to death on the street. Many of these men had been their allies only days before. In northern Israel they kidnapped families and forced fathers to watch their tiny sons having their brains literally beaten out of their heads on the rocks.

They declared their intention to target children because, they said, they knew their enemies valued children most of all and loved life. For them, they boasted, death was more important than life. They vomited this philosophy all over the world, in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Australia.

They indoctrinated their own children and taught them to hate and loathe and lust for blood and death. They bombed schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, crowds of children asking for candy, old people's homes, funeral possessions.

They despised progress, freedom, grace, gentleness, empathy, tolerance, civilization, truth, thought, understanding, joy, laughter and love. They hated humanity and they hated God.

That, the readers would be told, was why we fought. And that is why we fight. Because if we genuinely care about all that is fine and grand and important we have no choice.

Native Dependacy

2007-03-19T12:00:00.001-04:00

March 18, 2007

Status quo is 'the enemy'
Writer stirs up controversy with new book urging Natives to stop pointing the finger
By LICIA CORBELLA, EDITOR

"One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement."

-- SUN-TZU, The Art of War

--- Thus starts the remarkable and often irreverent book, Dances with Dependency: Indigenous success through self-reliance, by aboriginal lawyer and entrepreneur Calvin Helin.

Helin, 47, a true Renaissance man who hails from B.C., admits his book is "politically incorrect."

Yet, unlike other politically incorrect tomes, this one is not sneeringly so. Indeed, this 300-plus page book is filled with hope and written out of deep love and concern for aboriginal people.

Just how politically incorrect?

In his book, Helin recounts a joke told by a well-known aboriginal comedian.

The comedian says the minister of Indian Affairs slipped and fell on the stairs and landed on his backside.

"He said: 'You know what happened when he landed? He broke the noses of seven Indian chiefs!'"

Despite the harsh criticisms Helin levels against chiefs in general, he says he has been called by many, who congratulate him for speaking the truth.

In the book, Helin sugarcoats nothing. While he recognizes and acknowledges the historical reasons and complexities behind the numerous social dysfunctions in Canada's aboriginal communities -- including massive unemployment, high incarceration rates, epidemic suicide rates, rampant addictions and tragic rates of child abuse and neglect -- Helin says none of that will change until Natives stop pointing the finger of blame at others and start to take responsibility for their own futures.

"It's going to require an entire change of attitude and that's perhaps the toughest thing of all to do," he admits, "but we've taken the first step because most of us agree we cannot continue with the status quo and I think this book gives our people permission to speak frankly."

At that, Helin refers to a quote from the great children's book, Alice in Wonderland that he's included in his book, a national bestseller.

"'Cheshire Puss,' ...(Alice) began, rather timidly... 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

'I don't much care where,' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat."

Native people, points out Helin, are at least in a better position than Alice.

"We know that the welfare trap is one path we shouldn't continue to take, that the status quo has to change," he writes.

"The system of welfare and transfer payments have literally rotted the souls of many and damaged their families beyond measure."

Helin points out that for 9,600 years, Canadian aboriginals were completely self-reliant. That started to change in the last 150 years or so.

"There's a quote in the book by Quebecois singer Felix Leclerc that says: 'The best way to kill a man is to pay him to do nothing,'" adds Helin, who visited Calgary recently to promote his book, which is causing ripples throughout the aboriginal community and beyond.

Former prime minister Paul Martin has met with Helin after reading the book and vows to get copies of it into the hands of his former Liberal colleagues.

Helin says aboriginal programming expenditures in 2005-2006 were around $9 billion with 88% of federal government spending going to reserves, where only 29% of Aboriginals live, and yet living conditions are on par with the Third World.

Helin says as one-third of the Canadian population reaches retirement age, Native communities are having more babies and have the youngest population in the country.

That's a reality he calls a "demographic tsunami".

"To those that might defend the status quo," writes Helin, "I would suggest they look carefully at the wholesale misery and poverty that the welfare trap is delivering now."

Helin says the time has come for all Natives to elect their national leaders rather than have chiefs -- many of whom are corrupt and want to continue riding their own personal gravy train -- do it for them.

"The book acknowledges our past but looks forward, not backward," says Helin.

The time has come, he adds, "to recognize that the status quo and our acceptance of that is our enemy. We must slay that enemy if we are to have a decent future."

Enviro Wallet Attack

2007-03-14T10:34:00.001-04:00

Enviro wallet attackFull-speed thrust to go green will make your life more expensive
By GREG WESTON

Among the many colourful signs and slogans that decorated Sunday's rallies across the country in support of the Kyoto accord on climate change, a popular theme seemed to be: "Make Polluters Pay."

This has long been a key ingredient in the NDP's recipe for saving the Earth, particularly with respect to Big Oil.

Even Jack Layton can sound convincing when he argues that oil companies making billions in profits from a global addiction to fossil fuels should bear the financial burden of cleaning up the resulting environmental damage.

MORE COULD MEAN LESS

While hitting up corporate eco-culprits for the massive costs of reversing global warming may seem perfectly fair and rational, those demanding polluters pay might want to be careful what they wish for.

In the long run, more green for Mother Nature could mean a lot less of it in the pockets of ordinary Canadians.

Taxpayers are already being soaked by the green tide.

Next week, for instance, Stephen Harper's eco-desperate government will unveil a federal budget that will include at least $1.5 billion in new environmental spending.

At the same time, provincial and municipal governments across the country have been topping the federal environmental plans with new spending on everything from cleaner power to better public transit.

But more than anything, it is the reality of trickle-down economics that should make consumers wary of who will actually pay for pollution.

Let's start with the oil and gas industry that accounts for around 20% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, including the fastest growing source of global-warming pollution, the Alberta oil sands.

The technology does exist to reduce emissions from oil extraction and refineries, and it is all enormously expensive.

Does anyone honestly believe the oil companies wouldn't pass along much of those costs to consumers?

Ditto for the single worst greenhouse polluters in the country, the giant coal-fired electrical generating stations.

They can be replaced by technologies such as nuclear power plants, or by building new transmission lines from hydro-dam systems to the big cities, but at what cost and to whom?

COSTS GO UP

Most of the power in the country is provided by either public utilities or government-regulated companies, both of which operate on the same basic formula: If costs go up, so do electricity prices.

A study at Simon Fraser University conservatively estimated that even if the Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions had been implemented in 2000, consumers would have seen increases of up to 100% in their electrical bills, and been paying at least 50% more for gasoline and natural gas.

And how about those gas-guzzling SUVs, pick-up trucks and family vans that Canadians have come to love by the tankfull?

The government could try to tax the guzzlers out of favour with consumers, or directly hit the auto manufacturers with new regulations and punitive levies.

But again, at whose expense?

Aside from punitive taxes simply being passed along to consumers, there is the likely economic cost of losing tens of thousands of jobs in the Canadian auto industry which, as it turns out, largely makes SUVs, minivans and pick-up trucks.

Down on the farm, governments are already ploughing a fortune in public subsidies into ethanol-fuel production from distilling corn.

That's good news for farmers getting inflated prices for corn for ethanol.

But it's bad news for those who have to feed their livestock, and for consumers who have to feed their families.

Finally, get ready for a blizzard of government subsidies for everything from transit passes to home insulation -- all, we will be told, to "encourage consumers to do their part to reduce greenhouse gases." As if paying for all the other polluters isn't enough.

Enviro-wacho Recycling

2007-03-14T10:21:00.000-04:00

March 4, 2007

Enviro-whackos should stop recycle of abuse
By IAN ROBINSON

Somehow, in this bizarre, topsy-turvy world in which we find ourselves, arguing against recycling is akin to endorsing the political platform of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

No, I didn't make the aforementioned organization up. It actually exists, and its mandate is to make acceptable the sexual abuse of boy children who haven't reached puberty by homosexual pedophiles.

A powerful City of Calgary committee has endorsed the notion that every household in this city pay $21 a month -- a $252 annual tax grab -- to impose curbside recycling.

Actually, "curbside recycling" is a misnomer.

What it actually means is the City of Calgary is going to force every citizen to work as an unpaid garbage collector.

We will have to muck about in our own waste, separating paper from plastic from coffee grinds from aluminum, sort it into different boxes and put it out on the curb to satisfy this latest whim from the enviro-whackos on council.

The neo-pagan passion for the "environment" permeates all our lives.

It is, in essence, a form of self-hate that not only elevates the interests of the otter and the whale over the interests of human beings, it elevates those interests over any possible, ephemeral threat to the otter and whale.

It has seen -- again, bizarrely -- Al Gore, former vice-president of the United States of America, winning an Oscar for a documentary on global warming that is so inept, so inexpert, that one of the most left-wing, politically trendy young women that I know, said it was a piece of garbage that failed to make its point.

Besides, it's Al Gore. Who lied about inventing the Internet. Who lied about being the inspiration for Love Story. Who lied about seeing anything resembling combat in Vietnam. One wonders what he's lying about now.

The notion behind the recycling program is to divert garbage from Calgary's landfills.

Why? Because ... because ... garbage is bad?

Garbage is a necessary side-effect of living.

If we were running out of the natural resources required for living, we wouldn't have to pay for recycling. Businesses would call us up to beg us for our garbage. But they aren't.

The private firms already engaged in the business of recycling actually charge those who want to recycle.

That means the stuff we're recycling is economically worthless.

And why are we worrying about diverting stuff from landfills?

A landfill -- we called them "dumps" when I was young -- is a well-engineered hole in the ground that has minimal environmental impact. There are Calgarians living above former landfills with no ill-effect.

If our landfill is getting full, how 'bout we just dig a bigger hole?

Ald. Ric (Dr. No) McIver -- worries this tax-and-spend liberal council will steal the recycling money from us and not return it in the form of a tax break.

"In the past," he said, "city council has demonstrated they will not give the taxpayer back the tax money that gets switched over on to the utility bill -- it just becomes double taxation."

He's right. He usually is.

Not to mention the private recycling companies -- who serve those guilt-ridden folk who think recycling matters -- will probably go out of business.

And if you think this committee's estimate of the cost of curbside recycling is anywhere accurate, I think you're placing way more trust in them than is warranted.

One expects governments to be dumb. One expects governments to sway with the political whim of the moment. But I had hoped they wouldn't be quite this stupid.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

2007-03-14T10:10:00.000-04:00

March 14, 2007

Debunking global warming myths
By LICIA CORBELLA

The British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle is, well ... great.

The program, which aired last Thursday in the U.K. to much buzz, has since been watched by hundreds of thousands of others around the world via the Internet. It exposes numerous lies and myths presented as fact by those who believe in the unproven hypothesis that human-created carbon dioxide (CO2) is the driver of the Earth's warming climate.

The same broadcaster -- Channel 4 in the U.K. -- that recently exposed the extremist ideology being preached in Britain's supposedly "moderate" mosques has now similarly helped to tear away the veil of lies and religious zeal surrounding the global warming industry.

The film features an impressive group of experts in the fields of climatology, oceanography, biogeography, meteorology, and paleoclimatology from reputable institutions such as NASA, MIT, The International Arctic Research Centre, the Pasteur Institut in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Jerusalem, Alabama and Virginia.

That should help top the claims there is a consensus of scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

Expert after expert in this film blasts craters into the theory that CO2 -- which only makes up 0.054% of the earth's atmosphere -- has ever driven climate. Ice core records, in fact, prove the opposite, that CO2 lags warming by as much as 800 years.

The main cause of warming is, not surprisingly, the sun.

"The analogy I use," says Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, "is my car's not running very well, so I'm going to ignore the engine, which is the sun, and I'm going to ignore the transmission, which is the water vapour and I'm going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel which is the human produced CO2. The science is that bad."

The film starts off covering indisputable facts. There was a Medieval Warm Period that was warmer than today -- that led to incredible wealth in Europe when the bulk of the continent's great cathedrals were built and when Britain had thriving vineyards. Then came the Little Ice Age that started in the 17th century and was so cold London's Thames River would freeze so solidly festivals were held on it.

About 10,000 years ago, during a time known as the Holocene Maximum, it was much warmer even than the Medieval times.

Dr. Ian Clark, Prof. of Isotope Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology at the U of Ottawa, notes polar bears (which have become the poster-animal of the global warming industry) survived that sustained warm cycle and that volcanoes produce more CO2 every year than all human activity.

What's more, prior to 1940 temperatures on Earth were rising long before industrialization took place.

Then, when carbon dioxide emissions rose markedly in the post-war economic boom period, temperatures fell for the next three decades, again, in direct contravention of the theory being espoused and believed by so many.

Ironically, in the 1970s, just as scientists started predicting another climate catastrophe -- an impending ice age -- the planet started warming again.

The documentary ends with a quote from Dr. Fred Singer of the U of Virginia.

"There will still be people who believe this is the end of the world, particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the U.K. telling people that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the Earth with be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who move to the Antarctic. I mean, this is hilarious," he says with a chuckle.

"It would be hilarious, actually, if it weren't so sad."

See the film at:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog?entry=24760&only

Inconvenient Truths

2007-03-05T15:02:00.001-05:00

4, 2007

More inconvenient truths
Planting trees won't save us, ethanol isn't cool, and rebuilding a city below sea level is insane
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

The more you research global warming, the more you realize we're being told things that don't add up.

Here's some examples.

"Green" celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying "carbon offsets". One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.

Let's do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.

A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.

Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won't complete the job until 2047-2057, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they'll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.

As Guy Dauncy and Patrick Mazza write in Stormy Weather, 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, from which I took these figures: "(I)f we imagine that tree planting can be the solution to the world's climate problems, we may be making a massive miscalculation."

Flying is also just about the worst way to emit greenhouse gases. Taking one long flight can easily exceed a year's worth of car emissions. Plus, it injects the gas into the atmosphere at high altitude, heightening the greenhouse effect. The only way to be "carbon neutral" when flying is to get off the plane before it takes off.

Then there's Kyoto's "clean development mechanism" allowing developed countries to obtain "carbon credits" to emit more greenhouse gases by bankrolling projects to reduce them in developing nations. But we can't even be sure our foreign aid is reaching the people who most need it now. How can we possibly know these projects will ever happen, or do what we're told they'll do, particularly in corrupt dictatorships? Remember the widespread fraud in the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq? Wait until Kyoto, a UN treaty, is fully operational.

We're told ethanol added to gasoline reduces greenhouse gases. Most ethanol in the U.S., the world's biggest emitter, comes from corn. It takes about 74 units of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to produce 100 units of ethanol energy. You also lose the carbon dioxide absorption value of the corn. While ethanol added to gas produces a net of 30% less carbon dioxide emissions compared to plain gas, to plant enough corn to make this significant for global warming, would, as Robert Henson writes in The Rough Guide to Climate Change, require covering 15% of the world's agricultural land -- a country the size of India -- with nothing but corn, solely for ethanol. That would cause starvation.

There's also a war between proponents of "adaptation" and "mitigation" in addressing global warming.

Supporters of "adaptation" argue people living below sea level near any large body of water, especially the oceans, will always be vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, tsunamis, with or without global warming. They want to start moving the most vulnerable populations inland. For them, rebuilding New Orleans where it is, is madness.

They also argue that since we cannot abandon fossil fuels overnight, we must invest in new technology to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide burning them emits. They note global warming has some positive effects -- for example, a longer growing season in Canada -- of which we must take advantage.

WORTHLESS AND SINISTER

Incredibly, some "environmentalists" who advocate "mitigation" -- focusing only on reducing emissions -- describe these strategies as worthless, even sinister, arguing they distract from the crisis.

Their logic is insane. Man-made greenhouse gases last up to thousands of years. No matter how fast we reduce them, their concentrations in the atmosphere will rise for decades, the earth's temperatures for centuries.

That's what the science says. If it's right, the only policy that makes sense is mitigation and adaptation. Unless you think ideology is more important than humanity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Correction: In this column, I incorrectly wrote that one airplane passenger generates 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide by flying round-trip from Toronto to Vancouver. The correct number is 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide “equivalent”, a figure which estimates carbon dioxide emitted by a plane is three times more potent than normal. This is because the plane is also emitting other greenhouse gases as well, all at a high altitude, compounding the greenhouse effect. I also mistook a two-way trip for one-way in doing my calculations. (The actual amount of carbon dioxide emitted per passenger on this round trip is 0.9 tons.) My main point, that you can’t pay someone to plant trees after such a trip and claim your flight was “carbon neutral,” stands. I wrote it would take 15 trees, 40-50 years to remove most of the carbon dioxide generated by one passenger on this trip, assuming none of the trees died, thus releasing their carbon into the atmosphere. The correct number is 7.5 trees to absorb most of the carbon dioxide “equivalent”.

Drugs

2007-02-28T08:01:00.001-05:00

CARP research on politicians' drug plans gains huge media exposure
CARP’s revelations about the shocking discrepancies between drug coverage in the provincial formularies of BC and Ontario, and drug coverage available to politicians and civil servants in those two provinces, received wide coverage in Canadian media.

The story was picked up by major newspapers like The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Vancouver Province, Halifax Chronicle Herald, Hamilton Spectator, and Victoria Times-Colonist. It also ran on Global and CTV news.

In the study, CARP examined the 73 drugs that had been submitted to the intergovernmental Common Drug Review (CDR) by January 12, 2007:

Of 27 drugs that CDR recommended for inclusion in provincial drug plans, only 15 were covered in the Ontario plan and only 15 were covered in the BC plan. Yet politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 27 drugs under their own plans.

Of 26 drugs that CDR recommended not be included in provincial drug plans, only one was reimbursed under the Ontario plan and only two under the BC plan. Yet again, politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 26 drugs under their own plans.

There were 17 drugs that CDR was still reviewing, and a further 2 drugs in the queue to be reviewed. Of these 19, none were covered under the Ontario plan or under the BC plan. Yet politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 19 of these drugs.

“The optics stink,” said Halifax Chronicle Herald in an editorial. “The gold-plated political plans even reimburse MPs, MPPs and civil servants for drugs not recommended public coverage and – to top even that generosity – drugs still under or awaiting review… On top of politicians’ often lavish pension plans, the message yet again is one of being entitled to their entitlements.”

The Victoria Times-Colonist editorialized, “It’s troubling that Canadian politicians and government employees have benefit plans that give them access to prescription drugs they deny to ordinary citizens… Public support would be easier to command if politicians were leading by example.”

“The double standard should be an embarrassment to provincial and federal politicians,” said the Kelowna Daily Courier. “They receive the gold standard in care, while frail and elderly citizens make do with generic drugs, if they are even approved… If our politicians deserve the full treatment, why don’t seniors deserve the same treatment?”

And the Vancouver Province said, “The fact there’s a pampered elite indulging in the benefits of a two-tier health system is an affront to the principles of equal access to health care. It’s got to stop. Now.”

Published by CARP
Copyright © 2007 CARP, Canada's Association for the 50Plus. All rights reserved.

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Suzuki vs Crichton

2007-02-21T13:54:00.001-05:00

David Suzuki vs. Michael Crichton

Barbara Kay
National Post

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

More Columns By This Writer
:: Happy Valentine's Day. Don't forget the pepperoni

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:: Training the conservatives of tomorrow

:: How I fell for PETA's gay ram scam

Last Thursday, environmentalist guru David Suzuki stormed out of a Toronto AM640 radio interview with host John Oakley because Oakley dared to suggest that global warming might not be the "totally settled issue" Suzuki insisted it was.

Oakley only reported a fact: Many accredited scientists -- some full professors from top universities, including Nobel prize winners and a former president of the National Academy of Sciences -- would argue that "global warning is at best unproven and at worst pure fantasy," according to novelist and independent scientific researcher Michael Crichton, author of the best-selling 2004 environmental techno-thriller, State of Fear.

Crichton, one of the first to expand on the theme of environmentalism-as-religion, would doubtless see Suzuki's gesture as a result of confusion of his role as environmental advocate with that of chief of Morals Police. Suzuki's very public censure of Oakley for his perceived blasphemy is disquieting because it smacks of the totalitarian impulse to silence and humiliate the dissenter --or even, as in this case, the dissenter's messenger.

Suzuki keeps high-profile company in his tendency to suppress environmental infidels. Al Gore called skeptics "global warming deniers," evoking (if only unintentionally) invidious and fallacious comparison with Holocaust denial. Rejecting the historical record of what has actually happened in the past is one thing ; expressing skepticism about events that are predicted to happen in the future on the basis of computer simulations is quite another. But once you get into the realm of reigning ideologies, such rational distinctions fall by the wayside. The object is to shame the one who questions the received wisdom.

Suzuki would have better served his cause if he had addressed skeptics' actual concerns. Such as:

- Why was climatologist James Hansen -- the father of global warming--off by 200% in his prediction that temperatures would increase by 0.35 degrees Celsius by 2008 (the actual increase has been .11 degrees); and why did he (and colleagues) say in 2001 that "the longterm prediction of future climate states is not possible"?

- Of the world's 160,000 glaciers, some are shrinking. But many --in Iceland, for example --have "surged" in the last few years, while most of Antarctica is getting colder; if warming is "global," why?

- Why haven't sea levels risen to the extent predicted? Why have the waters off the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean not only experienced no rise over several centuries, but an actual fall in the last 20 years?

- Where is the predicted "extreme weather?" There has been no global increase, and in many cases a decrease, of extreme weather patterns.

- From 1940-70, carbon dioxide levels went way up, but temperatures went down so abruptly that a new Ice Age was the prevailing fear; wherefore this disparity?

- The Sahara Desert is shrinking--purportedly due to the greening effects caused by man-made global warming; but isn't the greening of the desert a good thing? I know to ask these questions only because I've read State of Fear. And as the environmental hysteria burgeons, I continue to press the book on everyone I know. Forget the silly (but riveting) plot, which is to the embedded environmental science in the novel as blini to caviar. You cannot read State of Fear with an open mind and continue to believe global warming is a "totally settled issue."

Nor should readers be put off by Crichton's status as a "mere" novelist. Crichton's scientific research on environmental issues is so impressive he was invited to address the U.S. Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. Even Crichton's most frenzied critics (the Los Angeles Times called State of Fear "the first neocon novel") did not repudiate his peer reviewed, impeccably sourced data.

Amongst the hundreds of books, journal articles and scientific reports in his bibliography, (no mention of Suzuki, strangely), Crichton lists every publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its formation. He has read them all, and in the end humbly "guesses" -- the most one can do -- that we are experiencing mild warming, possibly more beneficial than harmful.

The remorseless pressure on Canadians to sign up for environmental orthodoxies that they are not cognitively equipped to judge is demoralizing and divisive. Tantrums by self anointed prophets do not help the situation. Whatever the eventual outcome on the global warming front, we could all use a little non-partisanship, maturity and attitudinal cooling on the behavioural front.

Bkay@videotron.ca

© National Post 2007

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Kyoto

2007-02-19T13:07:00.001-05:00

February 18, 2007

The Kyoto horror show
While the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters take a pass, Canada gets clobbered
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Here's my list of the "top 10" problems with the Kyoto accord on global warming. Feel free to add your own.

1) The United States, the world's biggest man-made greenhouse gas emitter -- 20.6% of all global emissions as of 2000 -- refuses to participate, arguing it would irreparably damage its economy and makes no demands on the developing world.

2) China, the world's second-biggest emitter (14.8%), is exempt from reducing greenhouse gases because it's a developing country.

3) The 27-member European Union, collectively the world's third-biggest emitter (14%), undeservedly benefits from the economic collapse of East Germany following the meltdown of the Soviet Union in 1989, not because of anything East Germany ever did to reduce greenhouse gases.

4) Similarly, Russia -- the world's fourth-biggest emitter (5.7%) -- undeservedly benefits from having huge "emission credits" to sell to other countries, not because of anything it did to reduce greenhouse gases, but because its economy also collapsed around 1990 (Kyoto's base year) after the fall of the Soviet Union.

5) India, the world's fifth-biggest emitter (5.5%), is exempt because it's also a developing country.

6) Australia, the world's biggest per-capita emitter of carbon dioxide due to its heavy reliance on coal, refuses to participate in Kyoto. Even if it did, it would be allowed to increase its emissions by 8%.

This as opposed to Canada, a big, cold, sparsely populated, northern country -- necessitating the burning of more fossil fuels -- which must reduce its emissions under Kyoto by 6% compared to 1990, by 2012.

COAL FIRED PLANTS

7) Almost 850 coal-fired energy plants planned by China (562), India (213) and the U.S. (72) over the next few years -- none covered by Kyoto -- will pump an estimated five times more carbon dioxide into the air than Kyoto removes, even if every other country hits its 2012 emission targets, which they won't.

8) Canada, which produces 2.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions making us the world's ninth-biggest emitter, is 35% behind our 2012 Kyoto target due to years of inaction by the previous Liberal government -- which locked us into the treaty -- followed by a year of inaction by the Tories.

But even if we were to hit our target, which would mean savaging our economy and spending billions buying "hot air" from places like Russia, it would have no significant impact on global emissions, for the reasons cited above.

9) Kyoto is mainly about transferring wealth from the first world to the third through the purchase of "emission credits" and the like, not reducing greenhouse gases.

10) Kyoto's unenforceable.

Finally, do Canadians support Kyoto? Our national media seem to think so, based largely on a recent Globe/Strategic Counsel poll, which asked people whether we should "try" to achieve our Kyoto targets. That received a 63% to 30% favourable response. But surely, Canadians believe we should "try" to do many things. Whether we're willing to make unfair sacrifices in a doomed effort, is the real question.

Interestingly, when The Strategic Counsel asked the same people if they supported charging "significantly higher prices" for gasoline and heating their homes -- a far more relevant question -- the vote was 64% to 34% against.

A CanWest/Innovative Research poll which was in the field at almost the same time as The Strategic Counsel, found about seven in 10 respondents agreed with the statement: "I don't care whether the new federal government implements Kyoto or not, so long as they take real action to make our environment better." Hmmm.

The serious issue here is whether Canada's three opposition parties are crazy enough to force an election on implementing this worthless, unfair treaty.

If I was Prime Minister Stephen Harper, I'd be saying to Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the rest of them: "Go ahead, make my day."

Then I'd campaign on a "made-in-Canada" policy setting hard caps for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the energy and transportation sectors, while taking a chunk of the money we now spend subsidizing big energy companies and auto giants and using it to help people retrofit their homes.

Finally, I'd tell voters what's really in the Kyoto accord.

Diabolical, I know.

Pardoning Criminals

2007-02-19T12:55:00.001-05:00

February 18, 2007

Pardon me for being astonished
An army of scumbags has been unleashed upon unsuspecting Canadians
By IAN ROBINSON

OK, I'll bite.

What in the name of all that's holy does somebody have to do to be well and truly punished by the judicial system?

A Sun Media investigation discovered last week that 100,000 convicted criminals have received pardons over the last six years.

That means this army of scumbags -- and an army it truly is; the Canadian Forces couldn't field that many combat troops if the life of the nation depended on it -- can get passports, work for any federal agency, including the Armed Forces (New slogan: The few. The proud. The perverted.), or any business under federal authority.

And they can tell prospective employers that they don't have a criminal record.

Fabulous.

I guess to be truly punished, you've got to videotape yourself raping high school girls that you kill later and then get caught and have your wife testify against you.

That would make you Paul Bernardo.

Of course, if you're Paul's partner-in-crime, Karla Homolka, you get a taxpayer-funded university degree in a prison so lax that you get to enter into loving, lesbian relationships -- and model lingerie.

And, when you get out, find a fella and have a baby.

On that note, can you imagine this poor kid's life?

How'dja like to have Karla volunteering as a concerned mom in your kid's kindergarten class?

And what about the poor teacher who has to grade little essays like: "I luv my mum. I am very proud of her becuz she doznt kill peeple aneemore. The end.

" P.S. If you don't give me a gold star on my papeer I will kill you."

In the U.S., they don't even let convicted criminals vote.

Here, the courts have decided it's their constitutional right.

Wonder who old Paul votes for?

Hint: It's probably not for Stephen Harper and the Tories.

If I had to guess, I'd say it would be for the party that has ruled this nation for most of the last century.

These people may be criminal scumbags, but they're not completely without brains.

(I'm talking about the criminals, not the Liberals.)

They must know who their political friends are -- the ones who created a system that goes easy on them, and installed judges to make sure nobody could do anything about it.

Thank you Liberal Party of Canada! Way to go!

Since 2000, one first-degree and one second-degree murderer got pardons.

More than 150 for manslaughter.

Not to mention the 28 people who had the slate wiped clean for sex assaults causing bodily harm. Other criminals saw their convictions virtually erased for killing babies and having sex with family members.

Let's get this straight.

You kill your baby or have sex with your son or daughter. And a few years later, Canadian society tells you it's OK by giving you a pardon.

Plus the ones who went away for: Armed robbery, arson, bestiality, bigamy, buggery, taking hostages, importing and distributing child pornography, producing child pornography and having sex with the feeble minded.

Look, I get redemption and forgiveness and all that stuff they jammed into my head back in Sunday school.

However. It's one thing to offer a pardon to some guy who got caught with a pound of grass in the trunk of his car on the border when he was 20 and is now 40 and has kept his nose clean.

I get that.

But killers and rapists?

And hostage-takers?

I don't know about you, but I've never put myself in a situation in which it seemed sensible to take hostages.

If you live anything even resembling a normal, decent life, the decision to take hostages pretty much never comes up.

Each pardon given to these individuals -- I find it hard to call them "people" -- denigrates the suffering of the victims.

There are simply some crimes that leave an indelible stain upon the victims and the criminal and society.

Producing child pornography is one of them.

So is distributing it.

So too making a withdrawal from a bank with a shotgun instead of an ATM card.

And people who have sex with animals?

Do we really want to make it easier for them to get passports and send them off to other countries as goodwill ambassadors for the nation?

Dear Lord, what have we become if we allow all of this?

Muslim's

2007-02-19T12:50:00.000-05:00

Disturbing reality buried
Fear of causing offence and wilful blindness will only end the day innocent Canadians die
By LICIA CORBELLA

In the news business, it's called burying the lead.

It means you missed the most important or interesting part of a story and led with something less significant.

On Feb. 13, the CBC published and aired the results of an Environics poll, which on their website was billed as "Glad to be Canadian, Muslims say."

Apparently "more than 80% of Canada's roughly 700,000 Muslims are broadly satisfied with their lives here."

That's a nice and cuddly kind of story, but hardly surprising. I've been to Afghanistan -- where many of Canada's latest Muslim population comes from -- and even the upper-middle class in Afghanistan live in difficult conditions. I stayed in Kabul's only five-star hotel in December 2003 where hot water was available one-to-two hours a day, electricity was sporadic and my lovely room was utterly freezing.

Poor and middle-class Afghans -- the vast majority -- have no running water, no heat, no electricity and most are totally illiterate to boot.

They are handsome hospitable people -- and extremely resourceful -- but Canada's homeless shelters would look like luxury to your average Afghan refugee. But I digress.

Waaaay down in the online CBC story about this poll is the news that when "asked about the arrests last summer of the 18 Muslim men and boys who were allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario, 73% of Muslim respondents said these attacks were not at all justified." That portion of the poll ended there. No more details. Why? The Environics website made no mention about this portion of the poll either.

However, on CBC's The National television program on the same day, this part of the poll was fleshed-out and the results are alarming.

Fully 12% of Muslim Canadians polled by Environics said the alleged terrorist plot -- that included kidnapping and beheading the prime minister and blowing up Parliament and the CBC -- was justified.

Predictably, the CBC managed to find a talking head -- in this case York University sociology professor Haideh Moghissi -- who dismissed this disturbing revelation.

"It's really negligible that 12 percent feel that the attacks would be justified," said Moghissi. "I don't think it even warrants attention."

Clearly, other news agencies and those who put the poll results on the CBC website agree with Moghissi.

But just how "negligible" is 12% of 700,000 people.

Well, if Moghissi knew arithmetic like she knows denial, she'd know if this poll is accurate, 84,000 Canadian Muslims think it's justifiable to behead our democratically elected prime minister and blow up the very symbol and centre of our democracy!

The Environics poll interviewed 500 Canadian Muslims and 2,045 members of the general population between Nov. 30 and Jan. 5 and is said to be accurate within 4.4 percentage points with regard to the Muslim respondents and 2.2 points with the larger sample group 19 times out of 20.

So, let's err on the side of caution here. Let's subtract the margin of error -- 4.4% -- from 12%. That comes to 7.6%, so let's say, just to be really non-alarmist, we round that down to 7%. That still means 49,000 Canadian Muslims believe conducting a terrorist attack on their own country -- Canada -- is justified.

Is it just me, or does this not strike anyone else as the opposite of "negligible?"

Isn't this significant news?

Considering this poll was published on the same day it was learned al-Qaida -- the Islamic terrorist organization behind the 9/11 attacks -- was urging its followers to target all oilfields, including Canada's, should wake complacent Canadians up.

"We should strike petroleum interests in all areas which supply the United States and not only in the Middle East, because the target is to stop its imports or decrease it by all means," it states.

That threat was made on an al-Qaida online magazine called Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Holy War) and was discovered by a U.S. non-profit group that monitors militant websites called Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE).

In other words, the Environics poll indicates anywhere between 49,000 to 84,000 Muslim Canadians likely would view attacks on our oilsands development justifiable, and if that's the case, it's safe to assume some portion of those tens of thousands of people might be prone to carrying out such an attack.

We already know calls to martyrdom and jihad have been made from Canadian mosques, including one in B.C. and the one in Ontario the 18 alleged wanna-be beheaders attended. It's safe to assume there are more.

But, hey, this is Canada, where in the interest of political correctness and fear of offending, the lead on these kinds of stories gets buried and our heads remain planted where there is no illumination and therefore, no truth.

That wilful blindness will likely only end the day innocent Canadians get buried instead of just leads by those who justify terror on their fellow citizens and country.

Education

2007-02-19T12:38:00.001-05:00

Sliding into an abyss
By MICHAEL COREN

Sometimes we in the media merely play a game, making little ripples at the side of the water rather than diving right in to make an almighty splash.

In other words, we run around the edge of various problems and debates but are afraid to shine light on the authentic dilemmas of our age.

Whether it's politics, economics, culture or morality, the culture, society and various pundits always assume that things are getting better -- that we're making progress and that what we have and what is to come is superior to what was.

Problem is, it's mostly nonsense.

If anything, North American society is slipping into the abyss as the years go by.

Yet if any of us point to the past and argue that just half a century ago the world was more civilized, gentle, kind and moral we are dismissed --at best -- as nostalgic cranks. Facts, however, are more significant than abuse.

A few examples: Those much-despised 1950s were, we are told, oppressive, confining and prudish. Yet since then the teenage suicide in North America has increased by 5,000%, which is a figure so extraordinary that some of you probably think it a misprint. No, five times one thousand. The allegedly dark days of half-a-century ago seldom saw young Canadians and Americans try to, and often succeed, in killing themselves. Not now.

In 1958 a broad cross-section of school principals was asked what were the five most challenging problems they faced in dealing with students. The answers were as follows: Not doing homework; not respecting property, such as throwing books; leaving lights and/or doors and windows open; throwing spitballs in class; running in the halls.

In 1988 the same question was put to a similar group of teachers. This time the answers were a little different: Children having abortions; young people infected with AIDS; incidents of rape; widespread use of soft and increasingly hard drugs; a fear of murders and guns and knives in class.

We were told in the 1960s that the almost universal availability of the contraceptive pill and condoms would liberate women, increase marital happiness and lead to sexual fulfillment. In fact there has been a steady increase in so-called unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce and the use of antidepressants.

Rather than empowering women, contraceptives have had the opposite effect and are used by men to have sexual intercourse without responsibility.

Every serious survey reveals that young girls today feel far more pressured to reluctantly agree to sex than their mothers and grandmothers did 20 and 40 years ago.

More children are raised by single parents now than was thought remotely possible by even the most pessimistic analysts 35 years ago. And those children fortunate enough to have both parents in the home see their fathers -- and especially their mothers -- substantially less often than was the norm in the '50s and '60s.

In schools we spend more money than ever before but genuine literacy levels have declined to such an extent that university teachers now complain that student essays are indecipherable. We abolished uniforms so that children could express their individuality and they dress in identical baggy pants and baseball caps.

The great writer G.K. Chesterton referred to the democracy of the dead. Listen to the past a little, it's amazing the wisdom and common sense you might hear.

Rex Murphy on Global Warming part 2

2007-02-15T13:34:00.000-05:00

A great green bucket Jan. 18, 2007
Politics in Canada is becoming something of a St. Patrick's day miracle.
Every party wants you to believe it's green.
Stéphane Dion is evidently quite convinced that if the Liberal Party can sell itself as the Green Party, he can take Harper in the next election.
Of course, there already is a Green Party, which is one hitch in Mr. Dion's objective.
There's also the small problem that the Liberals were the government for almost a decade and a half, during which the Liberals may have done good things, but, on the environment, all it amounted to was talking a great game or having for a brief period, and it was an improvement, Rick Mercer talk for them.
On Kyoto, the Liberals, having signed on, actually performed much worse than the ecological great Satan George Bush who did not sign on. Being upstaged environmentally by president George W. Texas Oil Bush will not win you a tofu medal at the next meeting of the Sierra Club. Which may explain the urgency of some of Mr. Dion's recent claims that in the war against global warming, not only can Canada pull back on megatonnes of emissions but make megatonnes of money doing so.
This sounds like a very technical assessment of our green dilemma. And in the case of the Liberals, quite properly, raises the question why, with all this painless gain, it wasn't done before. Mr. Dion seems convinced, though we've been slackers up to now, we can still reach the Kyoto that are targets on time for 2012.
Outside of shutting down Alberta, fierce and swift regulations on the auto industry and half the population suddenly discovering the virtues of walking to work, how is that going to happen? Mr. Dion's plus is that he looks sincere when he makes such claims and most likely really is. But then a long while ago Jean Chrétien really looked sincere when he promised to abolish the GST. Liberal promises have more variables than even the weather.
Stephen Harper has gone green too. He parked Rona Ambrose and sent the Tory star John Baird out to refashion the Conservatives as newly-awake to the menacing of looming climate change. Mr. Baird promptly went on a walking tour of devastated Stanley Park in Vancouver. He was on another one just today. Good clips for the TV news.
The problem is Mr. Baird%

Rex Murphy on Global Warming

2007-02-15T13:31:00.001-05:00

An inconvenient truth Feb. 1, 2007
Video (Runs 4:07)
Global warming is the biggest issue I can remember for quite a while.
Probably not since Y2K has there been the prospect of a crisis that has seized the attention of the entire world.
In the great Y2K alarms, you will remember there were all sorts of hideous scenarios... a great crash of all the world's computer systems, planes falling out of the sky at midnight as the millennium turned, security nightmares. Nothing happened, of course, except billions upon billions of dollars spent to avert a non-catastrophe.
The clock ticked over into a new millennium. The day after Y2K was very much like the day before Y2K.
But it was pretty big while it was going on, and a whole lot of very educated, scientific people kept telling us we were in for global chaos and turmoil.
I don't think global warming is another Y2K. Although it does share some of its wild properties. What it shares is a veritable industry of catastrophic prophecies and apocalyptic alarms, great gloomy portraits of the world's weather a hundred years from now.
Its loudest advocates possess a strident and quite impossible certitude about an immensely complex future outcome. Probabilities are argued as certainties. Disagreements are labeled as propelled by sinister oil interests. Science is made a handmaiden of world scale advocacy.
Beneath the noise, some things are absolutely clear. The earth is warming. It has been since the last ice age. No arguments there. Mankind has to some degree accelerated what we'll call the natural warming since the ice age.
I'm actually with Al Gore on this, although it's only fair to note that Al Gore is no more an authority on the process or the science than, say, Stephen Harper. The debate over global warming is not about the warming, but the projections of what that warming might mean, how radically it might affect parts of the planet.
It's also about what some nations, including Canada, are willing to do to slow it down. Well, what can we do, Canada? We can offer symbolic action, and, let's be clear, nothing more. Canada could shut down tomorrow completely, and if the projections of Mr. Gore are correct, it would have no meaningful impact on global warming. We're too small a country. We're not emitting CO2 gases in sufficient volume that our contribution, if it stopped, would tip the scales in any significant manner. But symbolically, if Canada were to cut its emissions drastically by choice, it might act as a signal to other bigger nations — the U.S., China, India — to give consideration to doing 0the same.
So the question for us is really, is the moral weight of our example worth the immediate, real costs to our economy and lifestyles? Will you drive 30 per cent less, buy 30 per cent less, approve putting a brake on the oilsands, offshore oil, the auto-making industry? In hard terms, will we use less energy, pay more for fuel, live less excessively, fly less often right now, just to show the world that we Canadians are willing to back up what we say about global warming by what we do?
This is not just a question for our politicians. It's a question for us all. Do we believe our moral leadership is worth the personal and public cost of providing that leadership? The answer to that question may be an inconvenient truth. But that's what the global warming debate for us Canadians is all about. For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.

Climate Debate

2007-02-13T10:18:00.000-05:00

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Tuesday » February 13 » 2007

The climate change debate

National Post
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Canadians are very aware of climate change, but I would challenge anyone to ask those same Canadians exactly what they know about "climate change" and the science behind it. Some basic questions, such as what percentage of CO2 emissions are natural? Which countries did not sign Kyoto? Of the countries that did sign, why do they not have any restraints on their CO2 emissions? How did the global climate cycle itself between ice ages and warm periods, before man? Why is it that some pro-warming researchers are not willing to allow other researchers to review their work?
Do people realize that the catastrophic climate predictions we hear about are merely the most extreme and unlikely examples of hundreds of possible different forecasts? Are people aware of the difficulty in determining and correlating temperatures and CO2 levels back thousands of years?
Anthropogenic global warming is at present a hypothesis, an unproven theory. Not only are we not being told the other side of the debate, but the media often completely ignore the fact that there is even another side to the debate. Instead, we are led to believe that it is a proven, undeniable fact and that the only debate is about how soon and how much we should spend on alleviating man-made emissions.
The cart has been put ahead of the horse. At present, we are trying to determine policy and spending priorities that will have huge impacts on our lifestyle and our economy, based on an unproven hypothesis. There is no prudence in acting before we have a more clear understanding of the issue.
Would you consider amputation a prudent treatment for a sore leg just in case it turns out to be cancer? Limited funds and resources used to meet our Kyoto requirements could be better used to fight more acute and immediate problems both here and abroad.
Tom McAuley, Winnipeg.
© National Post 2007

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks

Dion's Kyoto problem

2007-02-13T10:16:00.001-05:00

Stephane Dion's Kyoto problem

National Post
Monday, February 05, 2007
Stephane Dion, the Liberal leader, is in full-fledged denial of the obvious.
Last summer, he admitted to National Post columnist John Ivison that if he became prime minister, Canada would remain part of the Kyoto treaty through to when it runs out in 2012, but that it would never meet its emission-reduction targets. Specifically, Mr. Dion told Mr. Ivison: "In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto but I will say to the world I don't think I will make it." However, now that Mr. Dion wants to convince voters he is Captain Kyoto - the most environmentally committed politician in the country's history - he is claiming that he meant something completely different, and that he can still reach Canada's Kyoto targets providing he becomes prime minister in 2007.
For years, the Liberals -- who signed Kyoto in 1997 and ratified it in 2002 -- struggled with how to reach Canada's mandated target of a 6% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (not pollution) below 1990 levels. They never settled on a plan. Meanwhile, they watched as emissions rose to nearly 30% above 1990 levels.
Internally, many in the Liberal government admitted this country would never meet its Kyoto commitments. But publicly, no minister ever conceded that fact. They all clung to the charade that somewhere over the next hill or around the next corner lies a new technology that would enable Canada to dramatically reduce emissions without cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs and devastating the economy.
So Mr. Dion's admission of last summer was a stunner, somuch so that Mr. Ivison checked his tape of their conversation against the tape made by Mr. Dion's staff to make certain he had heard the new Liberal chief correctly. He had.
However, since becoming leader two months ago, Mr. Dion has invested somuch of his public image in his unwavering belief in the science of climate change, and in Kyoto as a necessary step to reversing global warming, that he cannot afford tohave voters thinking that just seven short months ago he was prepared to admit Kyoto was a bust. So on Thursday, in a letter to the editor, Mr. Dion claimed Mr. Ivison had misinterpreted his words. Mr. Dion now maintains that he did not mean Canada would fall short of its Kyoto goals. Rather, he claims he meant that Canada would not be able to meet its targets in 2008 if he did not become prime minister before that time. (Of course, even if he doesn't become PM till 2008 or thereafter, Canada would still meet its Kyoto target, we are told --just not until 2012.)
All of this serves to remind us of Bill Clinton's response under oath that the answer to a question asked by federal investigators depended "on what the meaning of 'is' is." Mr. Dion's meaning last summer was clear. There was no ambiguity. He is running from that confession now merely to save the cornerstone of his strategy for the next federal election.
Just how far Mr. Dion is prepared to go to capture the "green" sentiment of voters may have also been revealed, inadvertently, on Thursday by Ontario Liberal MP Mark Holland, the party's natural resources critic. Speaking on the nationally syndicated radio talk show Adler Online, Mr. Holland told host Charles Adler that the Liberals were prepared to place severe restrictions on the development of Alberta's oil sands in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas released in the mining process. "We're going to say [that] you cannot exploit that resource," Mr. Holland admitted, "[that you cannot] go in there and pump it out as fast as you can to give it to the Americans and sell out our national interests and blow apart our emissions targets."
Talk about a "hidden agenda." Mr. Holland's remarks revived the twin spectres of the Liberals' National Energy Program of the 1980s and their vehement anti- Americanism of the past decade, in one swoop. Meanwhile, Mr. Dion's denial of an obvious admission showed his party still has trouble giving voters the straight goods. All of this should give voters plenty of food for thought in the next election.
---------

The folly of Kyoto

2007-02-13T10:12:00.001-05:00

The folly of Kyoto

National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal MP from Quebec, has a private member's bill proceeding through the House of Commons that has the backing of all three opposition parties. If it passes, as appears likely, the resultant Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act would require Ottawa to honour Canada's Kyoto commitments and reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third over just the next five years.
Working Canadians and taxpayers had better hope Mr. Rodriguez's legislation fails, because there are only two ways to achieve his goal by 2012, both unpalatable. Either the federal government could force a radical change in Canadians' lifestyles -- restricting automobile use, limiting electrical consumption and shutting down industries employing hundreds of thousands of workers, thereby sending our economy into a tailspin -- or it could send tens of billions of tax dollars abroad to buy "carbon credits" from developing and underdeveloped nations.
Mr. Rodriguez, his Liberal caucus mates and environmentalists are reassuring Canadians that the emissions targets imposed by the new bill could be achieved with very little pain for ordinary Canadians. But that is a pipe dream. There is no magic new technology on the horizon that would enable a nation of 32 million to cut hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide output in five short years -- no hydrogen cars, no emissions-free smelters, no solar-powered 18- wheelers. In order to reach our Kyoto targets at this late date, Canada would have to shutter all its coal-fired power plants, plus all its auto plants and Alberta's oilsands. In the late 1990s, the Liberals' own economic forecasts projected 450,000 lost jobs from such reductions.
Mr. Rodriguez's bill is naive in the extreme. It would consign us all to freezing together in the unemployed darkness. And despite all this sacrifice, it wouldn't even do any good against global warming.
The Kyoto accords were more about symbolism than substance. None of the large developing nations -- China, India, Indonesia or Brazil -- is covered by its strictures. Not only do they not have to scale back their emissions under Kyoto, they are not even required to hold them constant. Their emissions may grow without penalty.
Russia and the former Soviet bloc states, which are covered by Kyoto, have since been exempted from its emission targets. Which means the only countries to which the reductions apply are Western industrial nations. And even if they all managed to cripple their economies to meet their limits, their actions would serve to delay the warming expected in the next century by only four years.
The other option is for Ottawa to buy emissions credits from other countries, notably Russia. (Russia has unused emissions room because since 1990, Kyoto's baseline, a lot of the country's old, dirty Soviet-era power and manufacturing plants have been closed.) This, though, is just a feel-good accounting trick whose only purpose would be allowing Canada to assert technical bragging rights about meeting its Kyoto targets -- it wouldn't result in preventing a single molecule of actual carbon dioxide from being emitted.
Canada has already spend about $1-billion buying up Russia's unused emissions room. To meet Mr. Rodriguez's targets, it would have to spend another $20-billion to $60-billion. As well as being a complete waste of money from the point of view of Canadian taxpayers, consider where the cash would be going: the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin -- which is helping to protect Iran's nuclear program at the UN, turning Chechnya into scorched earth, bullying its European neighbours and rolling back domestic civil liberties to the Cazarist era -- would become Canada's biggest foreign aid recipient, larger than all others combined.
We have a question: If it were so easy to cut Canada's carbon dioxide output by nearly 35% -- the reduction needed to honour our Kyoto commitments -- why didn't the Liberals bring forward legislation when they were in government that obliged them to do so? The answer: Because it can't be done except by devastating the national economy.
The Liberals were in charge of the Kyoto file for over eight years. During that time, our greenhouse gas emissions went from 12% above 1990 levels to more than 30% above. From 1998 onward, the Liberals spent over $6-billion on environmental initiatives. But as former environment commissioner Johanne Gelinas said in her final report last fall, much of that money could not be accounted for, and none of the spending produced any measurable improvement in Canada's emissions. The Liberals -- including then-environment minister Stephane Dion -- could never figure out a way to reduce emissions, or even slow their growth.
Now for crass political gain, the opposition parties seem set to saddle the Tories with Pablo Rodriguez's pie-in-the-sky bill, and perhaps start a recession in the process. When the next election comes, voters should remember who set Canada down this road.
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A carbon trader who lost faith

2007-02-13T10:07:00.001-05:00

A carbon trader who lost her faith
Pioneer warns Canada to avoid Europe's mistakes

Nathan Vanderklippe
Financial Post
Saturday, January 27, 2007
VANCOUVER - For more than a decade, Aldyen Donnelly has worked with the companies environmentalists love to hate. They are the corporations often accused in the court of public opinion as the villains of climate change: power suppliers and petroleum producers like Trans Alt aCorp., Ontario Power Generation and Trans Canada Pipelines Ltd.
Since 1996, she has advised 14 of them, each among Canada's top 20 producers of greenhouse gases. It may seem an odd fit for a dedicated environmentalist and ardent believer in global warming to draw her salary from the very emitters who are just as likely to deny that science. But the standard definition of "environmentalist" hardly fits Ms. Donnelly, who has carefully scrubbed the word "green" from her vocabulary in her bid to reform her clients.
She has argued instead that whittling down emissions ahead of coming greenhouse caps is an issue of risk management, and every bit as important as hedging against bad weather.
In so doing, she has helped lay some of the legal and theoretical foundations that will guide Canada's industry as it responds to the mandatory emissions targets Ottawa is drafting. And she has helped to devise a message that some companies --Trans Alta Corp. in particular --now use as a guiding principle. "Our underpinning strategy is we believe it's better to establish your bank of compliance instruments early, rather than wait for the rules to be put in place and everything goes nuts and the price goes wild," said Don Wharton, the company's director of sustainable development.
It's not a belief shared by all of Ms. Donnelly's clients -- some of whom have preferred to wait until they have actual targets to work toward.
But her work in establishing the principle of emissions as economic risk has earned her a reputation as a "pioneer" and a "maverick" whose unflinching commitment to her beliefs is nonetheless seen by some colleagues as narrow-minded arrogance.
She is nonetheless an unapologetic contrarian, and today she is preaching another disputed view: that the emissions trading markets she once saw as the glittering hope for companies in need of greenhouse reduction credits are bunk.
"They're expecting us to exchange Canadian dollars for Zellers coupons," she said.
She says markets such as the European Union's emission trading scheme, which in 2006 saw ?17.8-billion ($27.3- billion) in trades, are primed to crash -- their currency in trade, carbon credits, nearly useless because the market has been oversupplied with allocations by politicians wary of harming industry with deep emissions cuts.
And that conclusion, reached from years of watching the market, could help shape Canada's policy because, according to insider, "she's consistently had the ear of senior political people and, as far as I'm aware, she continues to have the ear of some people in the PMO."
A life-time Vancouverite, Ms. Donnelly, 52, began her work in drafting the history of emissions trading in Canada in 1994 when she took a contract to consult for West coast Energy, which is now owned by Duke Energy Corp.
Worried about the possibility of government-imposed emissions guidelines, many corporations had begun to conduct greenhouse gas inventories, and Ms. Donnelly soon began to participate in weekly conference calls with others in the industry who were trying to prod their superiors into cutting emissions.
"All this was lower management conspiring against their bosses," she said.
As their ideas began to coalesce, they realized they were duplicating each other's work. The solution: form a coalition of companies that, in the marketplace, were fierce enemies but had common needs when it came to responding to emissions pressure. Gemco, the greenhouse emissions management consortium, was born on April 14, 1996, with Ms. Donnelly as its president.
The members soon determined the best way forward was to buy credits from other companies who could meet their compliance obligations more cheaply. In other words, it might cost a power producer $35 per tonne of emissions saved to convert a coal-fired power plant to natural gas. If someone else could reduce emissions at a cost of $5 a tonne, the power producer could simply pay for that reduction, then sign a contract giving it credit for the lowered emissions, all at a far lower price.
But given there was no Canadian precedent for this, how exactly would it work? They decided the only way to figure that out was to do it. Ms. Donnelly settled on a wallboard plant in Surrey, B.C., that was drawing part of its energy from methane captured at a nearby landfill. She found an engineer who could double the plant's use of methane, thereby reducing much of the gas released into the atmosphere, and she began to draft the contract.
That document -- which guaranteed credit for the buying companies and imposed penalties if the wallboard plant did not follow through -- was the first of its kind signed in Canada. It became a template used by industry in similar deals, and led to other firsts.
"I did the first agriculture [carbon trading] deal in the world and I did the first carbon dioxide capture and injection to enhance oil recovery [for emissions purposes] in the world," said Ms. Donnelly.
By 2003, Gemco and its members had become the world's third-largest buyer of carbon credits. To date, carbon trading projects Ms. Donnelly has worked on have led to an estimated 50 megatonnes of greenhouse gas reductions.
But Ms. Donnelly has grown disillusioned with those markets, and today counsels the companies she works with -- a list that has dwindled to New Brunswick Power, Nova Scotia Power and Trans Canada Energy, as many companies take what they have learned from Gemco and go it alone -- to avoid international carbon exchanges completely.
And, she said, as Canada draws closer to establishing its own emission restrictions, Ottawa can avoid the mistakes made by Europe -- whose carbon market has been volatile, based in part on over-allocation of credits to emitters -- by refusing to develop a market here.
Companies desperate to meet compliance targets will develop a carbon exchange on their own, she said, just as they did with the futures markets that allow industry to offset other types of risk.
"I'm shifting my recommendations dramatically," she said. "I'm very close to saying that in Canada the government should absolutely not participate in any way in the construction of any infrastructure to support a market system. Just regulate."
Many in Canada -- especially those who work with international carbon markets -- say as those exchanges get past their growing pains, they will become mature trades that this country should attempt to replicate. But Ms. Donnelly, with the acidity that has made her both influential and controversial, disagrees.
"We don't need government to issue certificates or run a registry. Every time someone from a major exchange tells me we need that I feel like tearing my hair out," she said. "If Canada makes the same mistakes in our design that Europe and the U.S. made ? it's a disaster."
nvanderklippe@nationalpost.com
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Duplicitous or duped? Dion disaster

2007-02-13T10:05:00.000-05:00

Duplicitous or duped?
Dion champions what would be an economic disaster

John Ivison in Ottawa
National Post
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Yesterday's column on the Liberal's environment strategy drew a riposte from the party's leader, Stephane Dion, who has written a letter to the National Post clarifying his position.
He said the key part of the comment he gave me in an interview last summer -- "In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don't think I willmake it" --is "in 2008."
He claims that the Conservative government's dismantling of the Liberal plan and the subsequent year of "inaction" means that if he Fdoes not become prime minister this year, the Liberals would find it hard to meet the target of reducing carbon emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012.
"If we continue along the path of inaction the Conservative government has set out for us for even one more year, through 2007, it will make it very difficult for a future Liberal government to meet our 2012 commitments."
The contention that the Liberals could still meet the Kyoto targets if Mr. Dion becomes prime minister this year is important since it could become the key battleground in the next federal election. After the Conservatives' Damascan conversion on the environment, the government has brought back many of the Liberals' programs; is close to releasing a plan to regulate large final emitters; and has said it is in favour of a carbon trading market in Canada. It is likely that by the time an election rolls around, the only significant difference between the Conservative and Liberal environment plans will be the latter's commitment to meeting Canada's Kyoto commitment.
Yet anyone who has checked out Canada's greenhouse gas inventory -- and we must presume Mr. Dion has --knows that living up to Kyoto would be economically ruinous for this country.
Aldyen Donnelly is a B.C.- based emissions management consultant to large final emitters who believes that Canada should take action on greenhouse gas reductions in as aggressive a manner as the economy can tolerate, without reference to Kyoto.
"Under the Kyoto protocol, even if Canadians agreed to send at least $10-billion offshore to buy 'hot air' credits, it would still mean that every Canadian man, woman, child, building and industrial plant would have to consume at least 20% less energy
than they do today, starting next January. Then every time we have a baby, accept a new immigrant, build a new home or buy a new hybrid car, we would have to cut back energy consumption further to fit this new addition under our hard national cap.
"The only way industry can do its 'fair share' under the Kyoto cap is to shut down at least 20% of existing manufacturing capacity and jobs over the next 36 months," she said. Even if a new government closed all of Ontario's coal-fired power stations, shut down all oilsands activity in Alberta and slapped a moratorium on new development, it would address less than one-quarter of Canada's current "Kyoto gap."
Is Mr. Dion prepared to let the Canadian public in on this reality check, or is he deliberately misleading an electorate that polls suggest is in favour of Kyoto, even though two in three acknowledge they don't know anything about it?
The Liberal leader is not alone in taking advantage of the public's ignorance. Nathan Cullen, the NDP environment critic, said at a news conference this week that his party believes Canada is duty bound to meet its Kyoto targets and that doing so will benefit the country.
"We believe in creating the type of economy that allows us to achieve our Kyoto target and will create jobs and wealth for Canadians. It's a false debate to consider jobs versus the environment -- a debate I believe is long since over," he said.
In the long term, there may be some truth in the argument that Canada could prosper by adopting new technology that replaces a greenhouse gas emitting energy supply with a zero emissions energy supply. But the problem is the Kyoto deadline. Ms. Donnelly estimates it would cost $80-billion in new capital spending projects (including building retrofits, manufacturing plant upgrades and redesigning vehicle and engine production lines) to achieve the transformation Kyoto compliance would require.
"The problem is that even if we had the skilled labour and cash in place to start construction on all $80-billion in capital projects today, most of the new clean energy supply would not be delivering energy product to Canadian consumers before 2013," she said.
The Liberals issued a news release yesterday accusing Stephen Harper of being a climate change denier, accompanied by a number of the Prime Minister's own quotes. Many suggest that he was -- and likely still is -- unconvinced about the science of global warming. Yet with one quote, he hit the nail on the head: "As economic policy, the Kyoto accord is a disaster."
Either Mr. Dion knows this and is being duplicitous for political gain or, worse, he doesn't and has been duped by the environmental lobby. Neither explanation inspires much confidence in him as a future prime minister.
- - -
KYOTO
6% The Liberal government under Jean Chretien committed Canada to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 6%below 1990 levels by 2012.
35% The Conservative government said in December that Canada's emissions have grown so rapidly since the Kyoto commitment was made that the country is now 35% above its target for 2012.
$10-billion The Liberals have suggested spending $10-billion on "credits" from other countries that have excess room under their Kyoto targets.
20% Assuming that $10- billion was spent, emissions management consultant Aldyen Donnelly suggests that in order to meet the 2012 deadline, every Canadian resident, building and industrial plant would have to consume at least 20%less energy than they do today, starting next January.
$80-billion Ms. Donnelly also suggests it would cost $80-billion in new capital spending to create a "clean" energy supply that would allow Canada to comply with Kyoto targets over the long term.
Ran with factbox "Kyoto" which has been appended to the end of this story.
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The green fervour

2007-02-12T12:08:00.001-05:00

The green fervour
Is environmentalism the new religion?

Joseph Brean
National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.
What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern e nviron-mentalism.
This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is, just that — in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms — the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.
Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier. He calls himself green. But he understands the unjustified faith that arises from the psychological need tomake predictions.
“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.
Formerly of University College London, Dr. Orrell is best known among scientists for arguing that the failures of weather forecasting are not due to chaotic effects — as in the butterfly that causes the hurricane — but to errors of modelling. He sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls “extremely vague,” and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more predictable than the weather.“Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2,” he writes in Apollo’s Arrow . And so scientists use theoretical concepts like “flux adjustments” to make the models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy.”
In explaining such an arcane topic for a general audience, he found himself returning again and again to religious metaphors to explain our faith in predictions, referring to the “weather gods” and the “images of almost biblical wrath” in the literature. He sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein. He said his own physics education felt like an “indoctrination” into the use of models, and that scientists in his field, “like priests... feel they are answering a higher calling.”
“If you go back to the oracles of ancient Greece, prediction has always been one function of religion,” he said. “This role is coveted, and so there’s not very much work done at questioning the prediction, because it’s almost as if you were going to the priest and saying, ‘Look, I’m not sure about the Second Coming of Christ.’ ”
He is not the first to make this link. Forty years ago, shortly after Rachel Carson launched modern environmentalism by publishing Silent Spring, leading to the first Earth Day in 1970, a Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote a seminal essay called “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”
“By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls], Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,” he wrote in a 1967 issue of . “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” It was a prescient claim. In a 2003 speech in San Francisco, best-selling author Michael Crichton was among the first to explicitly close the circle, calling modern environmentalism “the religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional JudeoChristian beliefs andmyths.”
Today, the popularity of British author James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis — that the Earth itself functions as a living organism — confirms the return of a sort of idolatrous animism, a religion of nature. The recent IPCC report, and a week’s worth of turgid headlines, did not create this faith, but certainly made it more evident.
It can be felt in the frisson of piety that comes with lighting an energy-saving light bulb, a modern votive candle.
It is there in the pious propaganda of media outlets like the, Toronto Star, which on Jan. 28 made the completely implausible claim that, “The debate about greenhouse gas emissions appears to be over.”
It can be seen in the public ritual of cycling to work, in the veneer of saintliness on David Suzuki and Al Gore (the rush for tickets to the former vice-president’s upcoming appearance crashed the server at the University of Toronto this week), in the high-profile conversion (honest or craven) of GeorgeW. Bush, and in the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage.Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture.
John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos: “Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing ... The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon ... [and] provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.”
Like the tithe in Judaism and Christianity, the religiosity of green is seen in the suspiciously precise mathematics that allow companies such as Bullfrog Power or Offsetters to sell the supposed neutralization of the harmful emissions from household heating, air travel or transportation to a concert.
It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto, which, even if the scientific skeptics are completely discounted, has been a divisive force for environmentalists.
What was once called salvation — a nebulous state of grace — is now known as sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition. There is even a hymn, When the North Pole Melts, by James G. Titus, a scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is not exactly How Great Thou Art, but serves a similar purpose.
Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists, which failed to bring them to heel but instead inspired potential martyrs. Of course, as religions tend to do, environmentalists commit persecution of their own, which has created heretics out of mere skeptics.
All of this might be fine if religions had a history of rational scientific inquiry and peaceful, tolerant implementation of their beliefs. As it is, however, many religions, environmentalism included, continue to struggle with the curse of literalism, and the resultant extremism.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I think all this is wrapped up in our belief that we can predict the future,” said Dr. Orrell. “What we need is more of a sense that we’re out of our depth, and that’s more likely to promote a lasting change in behaviour.”
Projections are useful to “provoke ideas and aid thinking about the future,” but as he writes in the book, “they should not be taken literally.”
The “fundamental danger of deterministic, objective science [is that] like a corny, overformulaic film, it imagines and presents the world as a predictable object. It has no sense of the mystery, magic, or surprise of life.”
The solution, he thinks, is to adopt what the University of Toronto’s Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a “prospective mind” — an intellectual stance that is “proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by surprise.”
In short, if we are to be good, future problem solvers, we must not be blinded by prophecy.
“I think [this stance] opens up the possibility for a more emotional and therefore more effective response,” Dr. Orrell said. “There’s a sense in which uncertainty is actually scarier and more likely to make us act than if you have bureaucrats saying, ‘Well, it’s going to get warmer by about three degrees, and we know what’s going to happen.’”
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Global Warming,not scientific fact

2007-02-12T09:10:00.000-05:00

Global warming is a theory, not scientific factBy PETER WORTHINGTON
Last week — the day the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its gloom and doom report on greenhouse gases — Larry King Live had a bunch of experts hashing over what it all means.
Of six panelists, the one who made the most sense (I’m tempted to say made the only sense) was Richard Lindzen, a professor of “atmospsheric science” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lindzen looks a bit like how professors are depicted in cartoons — rimless glasses, a bushy beard and a bit unworldly. On TV, he is soft-spoken, courteous but fearless in challenging those who parrot conclusions no one can be certain about.
One woman, a TV meteorologist, insisted “the science is really solid” that man-made emissions cause the global warming that so agitates the IPCC and has Americans fretting about scrapping their SUVs.
Prof. Lindzen calmly replied he couldn’t dispute her assertion “because she never says what science she is talking about.” That’s one of the problems with the alleged danger of global warming, supposedly caused by excessive carbon dioxide being churned into the atmosphere by fossil fuels, cars and, judging from a recent report, the “emissions” from cattle.
Rarely mentioned is the global warming threat is not anchored in scientific fact or research, it is a hypothesis, a theory, that has yet to be proven.
Yet unlike most scientific theories, it is politically incorrect (and in cases politically prohibited) to question its validity or demand deeper research.
The IPCC report is based on writings of some 2,500 scientists (few of them climatologists, and many geneticists, environmentalists, etc.), and their findings are compressed into a “Summary for Policymakers” which is a political document, not a scientific one, compiled by UN spinmeisters.
This year’s report is the fourth since IPCC was founded in 1988. The 2001 report said it was “likely” global warming was man-made from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while this year’s report upgrades “likely” to “very likely.” And that seems to have even President George Bush retreating and promising to do something (one isn’t sure what), and commentators coming on side with global warming hysteria.
In Canada, Stephen Harper apparently feels his chance for a majority in the next election, hinge on his bending to the global warming/Kyoto gang, despite no evidence justifying the money it’s going to cost.
To dispassionate observers, the Kyoto protocols aimed at reducing emissions are an embarrassment to Canada, which already is 35% (and growing) over what it agreed to. Countries like India and China, horrible offenders, are excluded leading many to think Kyoto is more a wealth distributing ploy rather than an aid to the planet.
Talk of “consensus” in science is nonsense. Consensus is not truth, nor proof, it is compromise. In science, everything should be tested and becomes either true or false, or undecided.
Whether Earth is round or flat is not a matter of “consensus.” Ask Galileo. Consensus at Salem in 1692 was that witches took over childrens’ bodies.
Prof. Lindzen is a genuine scientist, ever probing and questioning. He cites scientists who’ve been fired, denied post on panels, or whose research has been rejected not for merit, but because they challenge the prevailing UN view that global warming is man-induced, and not a cyclical occurrence of nature. As for Canadians (and PM Harper), the Calgary-based website friendsofscience.org is more instructive than the IPCC.
In the 1970s, global cooling was the boogie man. In the late 1960s we were warned the world’s supply of oil was running out. Also the world could no longer supply enough food for rising populations. Hysteria and nonsense.
Complex science
Predicting climate change is more than computerized models — and far more complex than predicting the weather change — which is 50% wrong at best. Just witness no warning of the tornadoes that ambushed Florida last week.
Lastly, why the excessive fear of carbon dioxide, essential for agriculture and plant life? CO2 is not pollution. And it’s man-made pollution that threatens the environment, and planet. As for global warming, if indeed it is more than a cyclical event, surely more food will be produced and more people will have a more comfortable life.
//

Comman sense global warming solutions

2007-02-12T08:44:00.000-05:00

Jumping on the green bandwagonBy ROB GRANATSTEIN
The day before November’s municipal election, Gord Perks sat across from me at a Roncesvalles diner and started talking about the environment.
It seemed like a strange spot for someone on the verge of being elected to deal with everything from pot holes to planning to the TTC, to put on his last big push.
But the candidate for Parkdale-High Park, who has been immersed in the environment since 1987 and wears his NDP colours proudly, said locally is the place where the attack on climate change really begins.
Sure, all the big talk about Kyoto and the battles among the federal Liberals, Tories, NDP and Greens about how Canada is going to radically change its ways is an important part of this hot-button issue.
But at some point, it has to go beyond simply demanding better from the oil sands, shutting down coal-fired hydro plants and hoping cows stop farting and burping. None of these polluters can or will change overnight.
A giant part of easing off the greenhouse gas pedal will come down to what local governments do and the choices you make.
So, are you are in or out?
If you dare, tape your ankles and make the leap on to the green, hybrid bandwagon. Perks got on board early and he isn’t about to leave. We asked him to walk us through the best ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Here are his four suggestions:
n Green up your home. Get an energy audit done by a company like Greensaver, retrofit the place with a more energy-efficient furnace, add insulation. The Tories have reinstated the rebate program — finally figuring out they goofed the first time — to help with the costs.
“You can really cut your energy bill and save the planet at the same time,” Perks said.
Think about your transportation. Do you drive your car to get a bag of milk? Do you live close to where you work? Cut the number of miles you travel. See if you can shift modes from your car to cycling or walking or public transit. Look at what you’re driving. Can it be more energy efficient? Are you willing to dump your SUV for a hybrid?
Watch your water usage. “The city of Toronto uses more electricity to pump water than all the street lights, the entire transit system and lighting all of the city-owned buildings combined,” Perks said.
Get the most efficient toilets, faucets, shower heads and dishwashers, use a rain barrel instead of city water to water your lawn.
Buy locally. Perks says the average meal eaten by a Canadian travels 2,000 km to get to their plate. Shipping the food uses a lot of fossil fuels. Ask yourself if there’s a way to replace the foreign food with Ontario-grown produce, or even plant something in your yard. To do his part, Perks is re-examining whether sucking back some of Juan Valdez’s finest offerings from South America is all that smart, although we all know that kicking a coffee addiction is a hard thing to do.
The city has been doing a number of good things, everything from using Toronto Hydro to push conservation, to air conditioning buildings using deep lake water cooling through its large stake in Enwave, to greening the TTC fleet and city vehicles.
In the last 15 years the city has cut its own greenhouse gas emissions by 40%.
“That’s fantastic,” Perks said. “What we haven’t done is help people in the general community cut their emissions. That has to be our next step.”
In March, the city is expected to roll out its green plan. At that point it will start to look at the tools that can be used to make Torontonians greener.
This is where we all start to get the climate-uncontrolled sweats. How much will it cost us? What will be mandated? Will new powers in the City of Toronto Act be used to attack us? These are the typical questions.
It’s also where we decide how serious we, personally, are about climate change. Are we willing to pay to be green? Things like higher gas prices, higher water costs, enforcing water restrictions, new efficiency standards for new construction and the dreaded tolls?
It’s all on the table under Mayor David Miller’s watch. Whatever his plans, these must be region-wide. Any new Toronto-only fees or obstacles will continue to hurt a city that can’t afford any more weaknesses.
Feel free to jump off the bandwagon at any time.
Editor’s note: Starting Tuesday, you will notice some changes in our Comment section.
No longer will our editorials be anonymous. Instead, our finest columnists will bring their points of view to our pages in the editorial spot. We feel you deserve more than an anonymous corporate stance because times have changed. Most newspapers aren’t owned by a proprietor who wants to push his or her political stripe.
This piece — to be called the “POV”, for point of view — will still have the classic Sun flair, fight and opinion we’re known for, plus a byline.
We also hope to bring you more points of view, more debates, and really get people talking. We’ll debate Toronto issues, national issues, East versus West points of view.
Let us know what you think.
And that’s the next change. We have a new email address. Write us at torsun.editor@sunmedia.ca.
//

Chic Enviromentalists

2007-02-12T08:38:00.000-05:00

Greens aren’t always goodBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Global warming and the Kyoto accord are the crack cocaine of trendy causes for opportunistic politicians and chic environmentalists.
Since fighting man-made global warming involves “saving the planet,” or so they tell us, it is the King Kong of all environmental crusades.
Of course, the fact we have been warned in the past by this crowd that life as we know it was about to end over everything from “the population bomb” to “global cooling,” and that we survived, is now ignored.
Too many environmentalists know only one way of talking about these issues — hysterically — which has led to disaster in the past.
In this context, the history of the pesticide DDT is instructive.
DDT was rightly banned in the developed world a generation ago, specifically because of its misuse by modern agri-business in order to increase crop yields.
But it was then wrongly denied to the third world, despite the fact that properly-used, DDT was a life-saver.
As a result, millions of innocent people died or suffered life-altering illnesses due to malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
For the chilling story of what really happened when DDT was banned, which environmentalists have always boasted about as a great victory, read James Lovelock’s latest book, The Revenge of Gaia. In it, this brilliant scientist who is also the grandfather of the modern “green” movement, condemns ignorant, urban environmentalists, whom, he says, hysterically campaigned to ban all DDT use, with catastrophic results.
Ironically, Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which first enabled the measurement of pesticides and other man-made pollutants in the atmosphere and which led to the birth of modern environmentalism.
Lovelock’s discovery also resulted in the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, warning of the dangers of pesticide use — the holy bible of the greens.
But as Lovelock angrily recounts in his book, “the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other chlorinated insecticides was a selfish, ill-informed act driven by affluent radicals in the first world. The inhabitants of tropical countries have paid a high price in death and illness as a result ...”
Lovelock is also an expert on global warming who believes the world is facing imminent catastrophe.
Because of that, he has again broken ranks with the greens, whom he accuses of hysterically campaigning against nuclear power, which, he argues, is mankind’s last, best hope.
Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power doesn’t emit greenhouse gases.
As for the wind, solar and tidal power so beloved by the greens, Lovelock says it’s hopelessly naïve to think they’ll be ready in time at the capacities we need.
He compares the greens to clueless passengers flying on an airplane over the Atlantic who, having discovered that it is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, tell the pilot to turn the engines off, thinking that will solve the problem.
“We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing,” Lovelock warns. “We need the soft landing of a powered descent.”
Such straight talk — coming from one of the world’s leading environmentalists and climate change experts — will of course be lost on the braying jackasses in our House of Commons — on all sides — who are playing silly, partisan games on this issue, urged on by naive environmentalists playing fast and loose with reality.
Inevitably, our politicians will screw up Canada’s response to global warming which should lie outside of Kyoto — a farcical, money-sucking disaster — in the strict conservation of fossil fuels here in Canada, burning them as cleanly as possible and looking at every alternative, including nuclear power.
But it will never happen.
Remember, these are the same folks who can’t fix the long and often deadly wait times in our medicare system, despite years of promising to do so.
Now they’re going to “fix” the climate? God help us.

Politics first, science second

2007-02-08T14:32:00.001-05:00

Politics first, science second

Terence Corcoran
Financial Post
Saturday, January 27, 2007
More Columns By This Writer

If you've been lifting intellectual weights and taking extra runs around the science track to build mental stamina for next Friday's release of the much-hyped 1,600-page science report on climate change, you can now take it easy. There will be no report. You will not need to know about or read any science, because there will be no science. Instead, we are going to get a few ginned-up pages of generalized political scaremongering.
The advance billing for the report has been immense and spectacular. It's the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, five years in the making and jam-packed with scientific, technical, social and economic research into climate change.
According to the usual sources, this latest official United Nations' science project, billions of dollars in the making, is the "smoking gun" that leaves no doubt that humans are the cause of a major wave of climate warming that is set to engulf the world over the next 100 years.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said Jerry Mahlman, a U.S. government scientist
and long-time proponent of climate change theory. "The evidence ... is compelling."
The University of Victoria's Andrew Weaver, official Canadian government climate modeller --and the CBC's go-to scientist for suggestive but unproven links between bad weather and climate change --blew himself right out the galaxy over the Fourth Assessment Report. "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles."
Somebody else said the report to be released in Paris on Friday contained an "explosion of new data."
All of this, however, is just the usual stage-managed showmanship that surrounds all climate science. First of all, what we are going to get on Friday is not the smoking gun, but the smoke without the gun, an explosion of data without the data, an intergalactic blast that never gets off the ground, the proof without the evidence.
Despite all the advance promotion, the full 1,600-page report will remain in quarantine, embargoed and locked up in secrecy for another two months. While the science remains shrouded in secrecy and subject to leaks and speculation, the IPCC will stage a major event, webcast to a world that's been whipped into a frenzy of anticipation. Live on the Web, officials will produce a brief 12-page document called the "Summary for Policymakers." Everything else, including the official summary of the science in the assessment report, will be kept under wraps.
Here's the official IPCC release plan: Next week in Paris, behind closed doors, the IPCC will give final approval to the 1,600-page report. At the end of the sessions on Friday, the panel will release the brief "Summary for Policymakers." Then, for the next two months, the IPCC will subject the 1,600 pages of heavy science to "the final stages of review and revision to be carried out in a balanced way." This will take two months, with the final report to be released in May.
What do they review and balance? The words in the IPCC process document are not encouraging. "Changes ... made after acceptance by the working group or the panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the 'Summary for Policymakers' or the overview chapter."
Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistics expert who blew the whistle on the IPCC's junk-science creation -- the 1,000-year-old climate record, the infamous hockey stick -- reads those words to mean the IPCC will go through the science to get the science to back up the summary. "IPCC insiders should not be allowed to change a comma of the [final] report after Feb. 2," he says.
We have, therefore, an extraordinary operating scheme in which brief sensational summary statements are produced, while the basis for the summary is kept confidential so they can get the science to correspond to the summary.
Will the government of Canada make any attempt, on behalf of Canadians, to get the IPCC to release the final report immediately? More likely, given current trends in Ottawa, the Tories have every intention of using the summary for their own political purposes.
These policymakers' summaries have a troubled history. One was once altered at the last minute to change wording that had already been approved by scientists. The summary release format also makes it clear that climate is a political issue first and a science issue second.
Another U.S. official says next week's summary will be an "iconic statement" rather than a sound science document. No surprise there. The policymakers' summary of the last report in 2001 highlighted the greatest climate icon of all, the 1,000-year hockey-stick graph. There it sits on page 3, the first graph, allegedly proof that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.
Today, the IPCC says the 1,000-year graph, the focal point of the February, 2001, summary, was a very minor part of the climate-science effort. The hockey stick, they say, played no big scientific role. But it played a major political role as part of the IPCC's campaign, which will be the sole purpose of next Friday's over-hyped event.
© National Post 2007

Simple truth about Global Warming

2007-02-07T15:50:00.000-05:00

February 7, 2007
Simple truth about warmingBy LICIA CORBELLA
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
-- Leo Tolstoy
(1826-1910)
Clearly, Tolstoy -- the great Russian novelist -- wasn't writing about man-made global warming, since he predated this relatively recent hysteria. Nevertheless, the quote certainly applies to the global warming debate -- or should I say the climate change consensus?
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary released last Friday inflates the language of doom even as it deflates its predictions of temperature and sea level increases from previous reports.
The IPCC Climate Change 2007 report predicts world temperatures will possibly rise 1.8C to 4C (3.25 to 7.2F) from 1990 levels to the year 2100 and that sea levels might rise 28 to 43 cm (11 to 17 inches).
Just six years ago, however, the picture looked much bleaker.
The 2001 IPCC report predicted that from 1990 to 2100 temperatures would rise 1.4C to 5.8C causing sea levels to rise by .09 to .88 metres (3.5 to 34.6 inches or 9 to 88 cm).
In other words, in just six years, predictions about temperature increases have plummeted by one-third and predictions about sea-level increases at the high end have been cut in half!
At that rate, by my calculations, we'll just have to wait for two more reports and the IPCC will be predicting no measurable increases at all!
Incidentally, many climate scientists have been saying just that -- wait until 2025, when it's expected the sun's output may wane, leading to global cooling.
Another measurement has had to be slashed by one-third as well.
In 2001, the UN body said the global net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming with radiative forcing of 2.43 watts per square metre.
Oops. Now they're saying it's 1.6 watts per square metre.
Shouldn't someone at least be blushing? Shouldn't they apologize for getting all of this so wrong?
If a large automobile executive got his predictions wrong by up to 50%, he'd be fired. The IPCC, however, continues to fly around at great cost to the UN and the environment and they stay on board this great gig as long as they continue to tout the party line -- that Earth is going to hell, only it's going to be even hotter.
What's most troubling about all of this is the 21-page, much-hyped summary is not referenced at all.
The science that supposedly backs all of these predictions is nowhere to be found and won't be released until April and May.
This is problematic on many fronts, but as past IPCC reports have shown, the summary is not written by the scientists whose names appear on the cover, it's written by politicians and bureaucrats.
Indeed, some of those scientists after the fact have complained their work has been grossly misrepresented.
In 2001, two scientists complained publicly their work was misrepresented by those who wrote the summary, including MIT physicist Richard Lindzen.
In June 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, past-president of the National Academy of Sciences and president emeritus of Rockefeller University, wrote with regard to the 1995 IPCC report: "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."
He continued: "This report is not what it appears to be -- it is not the version approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page."
In other words, past IPCC reports have proven to be fraudulent and yet, to paraphrase Tolstoy, they have been woven into the public policy fabric of our lives.

Wind Power

2007-02-06T08:25:00.000-05:00

Hot air in Essex County wind powerJeff SanfordCanadian Business Online,
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February 5, 2007
You've got to feel bad for Dwight Duncan the Ontario Minister of Energy. Here he is he trying to keep the lights on in the province of Ontario and all of a sudden the constituents in his home region of Essex County are turning off on him over wind energy. Everyone is aware, of course, that Ontario faces a precarious energy situation. Electrical generation capacity is falling short of the province's needs — we're just one really hot summer from serious blackouts according to those in the know — and so a scramble has ensued to get new electrical generation online.
To that end, the Ontario government set up the Ontario Power Authority to oversee the implementation of new electrical generation capacity in the province. One of the first acts of the new organization (which by many accounts was rapidly created and staffed) was to promote the construction of wind-generated power through a promise to pay 11 cents/kMh for electricity supplied to the grid that came from a wind turbine (that's a premium on a typical wholesale rate of 8 cents/kWh).
At the time the subsidy sounded like a great idea. WhatÂ¹s better than electricity generated from the wind? It's renewable, there are no CO2 emissions and the wind turbines themselves can even become a bit of a tourist attraction, as is the case in Port Burwell where locals suggest they've seen new visitors to the area now that a wind farm has been installed near their town.
But is the story on wind really so breezy? Not even close, says John Lee, a retired engineer living in Kingsville, Ontario (a town 45 minutes outside of Windsor). John's father had a long career at Ontario Hydro and Lee himself has a PhD in electrical engineering, so he's no neophyte when it comes to talk about energy. Normally a reserved fellow, Lee has felt the need to step out publicly and fight against the 18 wind-farm proposals that have touched down in Essex since the standing offer by OPA to offer 11 cents/kWh went into effect. Lee began taking an interest in the issue when he heard of a proposal that would see over 100 wind turbines dropped into Lake Erie near Point Pelee National Park, a globally recognized migratory flyway for all kinds of birds and butterflies.
He put his existing knowledge together with a little research and has now come to the same conclusion as Dr. David Suzuki: Wind farms have a place in Ontario's energy mix, but it's a small role, and the turbines need to be placed where the pollution from wind farms isn't a threat to humans and animals. One key point that needs to be understood, says Lee, is that the practicality of wind power is generally overstated in the public conscious. Wind power, of course, is only available when the wind blows, which means that when the wind isn't blowing you'd have to switch back to fossil fuel generated electricity anyway to keep the lights on — and that means wind power can't be built out to replace our fossil fuel base load.
In fact, countries in Europe that have installed wind power as base load find they end up buying power on the spot market when the wind isn't blowing and then selling their wind power at a loss when the wind is blowing (but air conditioners aren't being used as intensely). Denmark is often considered a leader in wind energy but according to Lee it ends up selling 84% of its power at a loss. "European countries that have put in a lot of wind power end up subsidizing their neighbors," says Lee. "Wind power has not yet enabled the closure of a single fossil-fueled generating station anywhere in the world."
The German energy agency recently suggested that increasing the amount of wind energy in that country would increase the cost of electricity to consumers almost fourfold and that a reduction in greenhouse gases could be achieved more cheaply by installing filters and condensers on existing fossil-fuel plants. According to Lee, it's often been suggested that the theoretical maximum for the amount of base load that can be derived from wind power is 15%, but even that seems to be a stretch. A more likely percentage seems to be 3% or 5%, says Lee.
But beyond unreliable supply is the problem of pollution. Don't be fooled: While the idea of wind-generated electricity is as pastoral as can be, wind farms, designed to generate industrial amounts of electricity, are themselves industrial installations. And like any other form of electrical generation on an industrial scale they give off pollution. In the case of wind farms it's in the form of noise or vibration. In Ontario wind turbines have been placed within 300 metres of homes (which would be against the law in many other jurisdictions) and some of those people who have allowed wind turbines that close are now complaining about the noise (which developers told them would be non-existent).
As well, concerns have been raised about the emission of low frequency vibrations from wind turbines. The diameter of the circle formed by the arms of the average industrial-sized turbine is longer than a jetliner. European studies have found the steady pulses emitted by the beating blades can be felt up to a kilometre away and cause headaches, depression and anxiety in humans. Hunters in the U.S. claim that prey migrates away from wind turbines and some farmers have suggested turbines disrupt their livestock. "Farmers have seen their property values affected," says Lee. "And we're building these things much closer to homes in Ontario than they allow in Europe." No wonder the list of countries that have stopped building land-based and near-shore farms (or that have begun shutting down existing farms) includes Norway, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
And no wonder Lee has become an anti-wind activist these days. He is a presence at many of the meetings held by developers to explain their projects to locals. Lee is offended that some of the developers are using young kids to make these presentations. "They've done this in other jurisdictions. I think they think it makes them less threatening." But he is most critical of the way the Ontario government has handled the file right from the beginning. Ontario's Bill 51 streamlined the process for wind farms by making the environmental approval process less onerous. That fact, coupled with the subsidy on offer, has created a gold rush of sorts in Essex County, says Lee; there are now reports that used European turbines are flooding into the province as opportunities overseas are shut down.
Alberta recently surprised wind farms developers in that province when the Alberta Electric System Operator, which overseas and operates the electrical market and distribution system, slapped a cap of 900 MW of wind-generated capacity on the province's system and put a potential $6 billion in investment on hold. According to Lee, the number of turbines that could be supported by the Ontario network — 500 to 1,250 — is quite close to the cap imposed by Alberta, but is far less than the number going up in Ontario.
"I wish wind power worked," says Lee. "In theory it's a good idea. But this is too much for an area the size of Essex County. If all of these go through we'll have more wind turbines in one county than Alberta does in the whole province." As of this writing the proposals in Essex County continue to go forward and the impression among locals is growing that they're paying the price for a government desperate to get any sort of electrical generation up and operating in a province headed toward an energy crunch.
It's no secret the McGuinty government made a huge deal about its promise to shut down coal generation in Ontario. It's also no secret that many large companies such as Brookfield Asset Management (formerly Brascan) have moved into energy generation (including wind) in a big way. It also appears that the OPA was set up in a scramble and was desperate to find solutions to the electrical generation problem.
Have subsidies, market pressures, inattention and desperation resulted in an unsustainable boom in a technology that is not been fully understood by the government? Has Essex County been sold up the river in a bid to help the provincial Liberals who are desperate to keep their promise on power?
"How can you not get that impression?" asks Lee. Indeed.templatedata\content\article\data\2007\02\20070205_163048_5260
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Laughing at global warming

2007-02-05T12:49:00.001-05:00

Laughing at global warming
I know, it's terrible. But with things getting so stupid on Parliament Hill, how can anyone help it?By Lorrie Goldstein
I'm sorry. I know global warming is a serious subject, particularly with the release of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But at some point in many big stories, mass hysteria takes over and the subject, no matter how serious, "jumps the shark" as they say on TV.
For me, that moment happened last week while reading a story in the Globe and Mail and coming across this hilarious nugget.
"As Conservative MPs emerged from their weekly caucus meeting in Ottawa, reporters asked whether they believe that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global warming. Most refused to answer the question directly."
Good gawd! Has it come to this? Are not just global warming "deniers," as Stephane Dion calls them, but mere global warming "refusers to answer the question directly" to be hunted down, as we once did witches?
Just for fun, let's imagine I was one of those MPs, confronted by the media mob.
Media mob: "Mr. Goldstein, do you believe that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global warming?"
Me: "I beg your pardon?"
Media mob: "You heard the question, do you believe it?"
Me: "You're not serious."
Media mob: "You better believe we are."
Me (Sigh): "Okay, get your tapes rolling. Ready? Here we go ... You ask me if I believe increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global warming. I will go even further. I will state categorically that greenhouse gases cause global warming. If greenhouse gases did not cause global warming, we would all be dead, having frozen to death. The reason we have not, is called the 'greenhouse effect'. If any of you kept your Grade 8 science textbooks, look it up.
"Now, I presume that what you would have asked me, if any of you knew what you were talking about, is whether I believe man-made greenhouse gas emissions caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, and by deliberate deforestation, are causing a significant increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, and an attendant increase in the earth's temperature, that cannot be explained by natural causes.
"The answer is I do not know. I am not a scientist. But I accept the IPCC's conclusion that the earth is warming and that it is "very likely" -- at least a 90% certainty -- that human activity is the cause.
"However, I am also aware, as a layman, that there is a great deal of debate within the scientific community on how quickly this is happening, on how dramatically it will impact on the world's climate and on what we should do about it, which is where I come in as a policy maker.
"I trust scientists to continue their dispassionate investigations of these issues, employing the professional scepticism you people think is a dirty word, but is in fact a fundamental part of what is known as the 'scientific method'.
"Again, if any of you still have your Grade 8 science textbooks, look it up.
"Finally, responsible scientists are not the people screaming in our ears that we're all going to die from the weather in a few years, that the evil western nations and all of us living in them who caused this must be punished, and that anyone who disagrees with them is a climate change 'denier,' the implication being that they are little better than someone who denies the Holocaust -- an absurd, unjust and morally revolting comparison.
Won't be intimidated
"This is where science has been hijacked by radical ideology and media hype and I will not let it -- or you -- intimidate me into making rash statements or decisions about an issue that is so important, not only to my constituents and their descendants, but to all of us who live on Earth.
"One final thing. Please, look up 'carbon dioxide' in your Grade 8 science textbooks, so that you will understand how essential it is to all life on Earth. Then, look up 'carbon-based life forms' and try to find one. This will not be as hard as it sounds. Trust me. And now, ladies and gentlemen of the media, kindly GET THE !@?!@$ OUT OF MY WAY!!!!!"
Media mob: "Burn the witch! Burn the witch!!"

INCO's History

2007-02-05T08:03:00.001-05:00

Inco Limited
Incorporated: 1916 as International Nickel Co. of Canada, Ltd.NAIC:212234 Copper Ore and Nickel Ore Mining; 212221 Gold OreSIC: 1021 Copper Ores; 1061 Ferroalloy Ores Except Vanadium; 1041 Gold Ores; 1099 Metal Ores Nec; 2869 Industrial Organic Chemicals Nec; 3339 Primary Nonferrous Metals Nec; 3356 Nonferrous Rolling &; 3357 Nonferrous Wiredrawing &; 3366 Copper Foundries; 6719 Holding Companies Nec
Inco Limited is one of the world's top producers of nickel. It operates Canada's largest mining and processing operation in Sudbury, Ontario, and runs other mines in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. It has interests in refineries in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, and sales and operations in over 40 countries worldwide. Overall Inco provides about 25 percent of the nickel used globally. The company also produces cobalt, copper, precious metals, and specialty nickel products.
Nickel was first isolated as an element in the middle of the 18th century, but not until the following century did it come into demand as a coin metal. Up to around 1890, coining remained the metal's only use, and most of the world's nickel was mined by Le Nickel, a Rothschild company, on the island of New Caledonia. At that time, however, it was determined that steel made from an iron-nickel alloy could be rolled into exceptionally hard plates, called armor plate, for warships, tanks, and other military vehicles, and the resulting surge in demand spurred a worldwide search for nickel deposits. The world's largest nickel deposit ever discovered was in Ontario's Sudbury Basin; before long, one of the area's big copper mining companies, Canadian Copper, began shipping quantities of nickel to a U.S. refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey, the Orford Copper Company. Orford had devised the most economical process for refining nickel, and its alliance with Canadian Copper proved an unbeatable combination. Orford dominated the U.S. nickel business, supplying much of the metal needed by the growing steel industry, and managed to make inroads into the European market as well.
The U.S. steel industry did not feel comfortable relying on a single Canadian source for one of its essential materials; so in 1902 Charles Schwab of U.S. Steel and a group of other steelmen used the financial backing of J.P. Morgan to take control of and merge Orford and Canadian Copper. The new company was called International Nickel, nicknamed Inco, and was based in New York. From the first, Inco was able to control a majority of the U.S. nickel market, and had increased its share to 70 percent by 1913. Its large-scale operations in the Sudbury Basin allowed the company to eliminate competition through price wars and sheer staying power. According to Fortune magazine in May 1957, Inco had maintained its control of the U.S. market without interruption for nearly 40 years.
As the world's leading nickel producer, Inco enjoyed an enormous increase in business during World War I, when the need for armor-plate drove up steel sales. This good fortune soon changed, when the 1921 world disarmament agreements killed the munitions market and Inco was left with a huge backlog of nickel. Its record 1921 profit of US$2 million slipped to a US$1.2 million loss the following year, and the Sudbury mines were shut down for over six months. The shock of this setback stayed with the company for many years in the form of a conservative management policy and a determination to avoid large inventories. In 1922, Robert Crooks Stanley began a 30-year tenure as president--and later chairman--of Inco, intent upon building new markets in fields other than munitions. Stanley created a vigorous research and development department to find new peacetime uses for nickel. So effective were the Inco engineers that many of the innovations in nickel metallurgy over the next 50 years can be traced to their efforts. In effect, Inco became the research department for the entire nickel industry, sharing its findings with customer and competitor alike. Of course, for many years Inco had few of the latter.
By the late 1920s, Stanley brought Inco sales back up to their wartime peak, much of the peacetime addition coming from the automobile industry. Inco's first major postwar investment was a US$3 million rolling mill in Huntington, West Virginia, designed to produce Monel metal, a widely used copper-nickel alloy. At the same time, Stanley effectively blocked the growth of competition from such newcomers as British America Nickel, which in 1923 made a serious bid for the U.S. market. Inco promptly lowered its price from 34 to 25 cents per pound, driving British America to bankruptcy a year later. When no one purchased the fallen company's assets, a little-known firm, Anglo-Canadian Mining & Refining, bought them very cheaply. Anglo-Canadian was actually a corporation owned by Inco, which simply took what it could use from British America's refinery and sold the rest for scrap.
A more serious competitor was handled in a different manner. Mond Nickel Company had been operating in the Sudbury Basin since just after the turn of the century, shipping its nickel to Europe to compete with France's Le Nickel and Inco's European offices. Mond, the creation of Ludwig Mond, the British chemist who founded Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), owned half of the best nickel deposits in Sudbury, in an area known as the Frood. The other owner of these deposits was Inco. In 1928, Inco decided it would be wiser to join forces rather than fight over the world's largest nickel mine. Mond and Inco were then merged at the end of that year to form International Nickel Co. of Canada, Ltd., still nicknamed Inco. Mond remained a U.K. subsidiary of Inco, handling both European and Asian customers. By moving its incorporation to a foreign country, Inco was better able to deflect inevitable and periodic attempts by the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute the company for antitrust violations. The 1929 appearance of a small competitor called Falconbridge Nickel Mines Ltd., another European supplier, was only tolerated to avoid the impression of absolute monopoly.
The Great Depression caused Inco temporary losses for the second time in its history, but the growing number of industrial uses for nickel soon pulled sales back up to a healthy level. By this time, Inco had become a major producer of copper and platinum as well as nickel, thanks to Sudbury Basin's rich supply of minerals. The company was now the sixth largest copper producer in the world and the largest supplier of platinum, a metal whose unusual properties had found many industrial applications; however, it was in nickel that Inco held unchallenged power as the source of 90 percent of the noncommunist world's supply. Inco's metal was needed by all of the world's arms makers and for the production of super-hard steel for a variety of uses, from armorplate to exhaust valves on aircraft engines to gun recoil systems.
In a move that stirred up plenty of controversy, Inco became the nickel supplier to both sides of the approaching World War II, which included signing a long-term contract with Germany's I.G. Farben in the mid-1930s. In antitrust action ten years later, the Department of Justice charged that Inco's agreement with Farben was part of an effort to form a worldwide nickel cartel, and that in the process it had supplied Germany with a stockpile of nickel critical to its imminent war plans. The antitrust action was settled in 1948 when Inco signed a consent decree, agreeing only that it would sell nickel in the United States at fair prices; its worldwide monopoly, however, was beyond the reach of the U.S. Department of Justice.
World War II taxed Inco's capacity and strained its relationship with the U.S. armed forces. Still mindful of its near collapse after World War I, Inco refused to stockpile the inventory desired by the armed forces, instead committing only to the timely delivery of critical metal. As an insurance policy, the U.S. government financed the creation of Nicaro Nickel Company in 1942, a Cuban venture under the direction of the Freeport Sulphur Company. Although Nicaro managed to produce some nickel, it never really got off the ground and was mothballed soon after the war. Its decline may have been hastened by Inco's price cuts on nickel oxides, Nicaro's specialty. The full extent of Inco's nickel monopoly was further suggested by the fact that, aside from the case of nickel oxide, its nickel price never varied between 1928 and 1946--an indication of complete freedom from the normal pressures of competition. At the war's end, Inco's assets were valued at about US$135 million, sales stood at US$148 million, and the company showed a very healthy net income of about US$30 million.
Inco's hesitation to expand its nickel production helped it to avoid a serious postwar slump, but it also left the company unprepared for what soon followed. In the booming economy of the 1950s nickel assumed new importance, finding applications in stainless steel, home appliances, automobiles, jet engines, and atomic power plants. When the Korean War added the usual backlog of orders for armorplate, Inco faced a severe and growing nickel shortage. The U.S. government made the situation more difficult by adding nickel to its list of stockpiled metals critical to national defense, a contract Inco was naturally called upon to fulfill.
Indeed, Inco and the U.S. Department of Commerce together allocated nickel to customers across the country. Yet this nickel shortage had two long-term consequences for Inco. First, it made a rise in prices inevitable--prices increased by 60 percent between 1946 and 1950 alone. Second, a host of new competitors entered the nickel market, encouraged by the acute shortage, rising prices, and the U.S. government's willingness to finance alternative suppliers of the important metal. Inco's share of the free-world market, which was estimated at 85 percent as late as 1950, soon began a decline to what would eventually mirror its 1990s level of 34 percent.
Once assured the boom in nickel was permanent, Inco increased production and began to search for new deposits. After several years of exploration, a major find was made in northern Manitoba in 1956, a field it christened "Thompson" after company Chairman John F. Thompson, successor to Robert Stanley. Thompson was the most significant new deposit of nickel found since the discovery of Sudbury in the 1880s. After Inco spent about US$175 million building mines, smelters, refineries, a town to house its employees, and a railroad to reach the town, the site added about 30 percent to the company's 1956 sales of US$445 million. Inco remained extremely profitable despite its new competitors and still carried no long-term debt. In the recession of 1958, sales dropped to US$322 million but a strike by the Mill, Mine and Smelter Workers Union kept inventories low and prevented a loss for the year.
After the 1958 recession, sales of nickel took off once again. Inco's research engineers continued to provide a new generation of customers with ingenious uses for nickel, as in the rapidly growing electronics and aerospace industries where the use of stainless steel was just beginning to mushroom. Under the leadership of new Chairman Harry S. Wingate, Inco's sales hit US$572 million in 1965, and its net income remained a remarkably high US$136 million. The Thompson field had grown into a thriving town and its deposits proved to be every bit as rich as hoped.
Nickel sales were given yet another boost by the Vietnam War, in which the United States employed a vast array of sophisticated weaponry, the bulk of which required nickel-hardened steel. Responding to the bull market, Inco launched a comprehensive refurbishment and expansion program eventually costing more than US$1 billion. For the first time in its history, Inco borrowed money and chose to continue concentrating on the mining of high-grade, relatively expensive nickel at a time when many competitors had come up with inexpensive, readily available nickel oxides and ferronickels.
The impact of these decisions was felt when a devastating strike by 17,000 Sudbury workers in 1969-70 was followed by the sharp recession of 1971; nickel sales dropped by 25 percent and Inco's stock fell by 50 percent in a matter of months. The company did not show a loss for the year, but it was thoroughly shaken by the low sales and a mounting debt burden. Wingate retired and his successor, L. Edward Grubb, moved to curtail the expansion program then just coming on line. Grubb cut production back to 80 percent of capacity and reduced labor where possible. To protect Inco against the further erosion of sales by ferronickel competitors, he spent another US$750 million to exploit the company's own ferronickel sources in Guatemala and Indonesia, where nickel was extracted from laterite ore by means of a refining process using petroleum.
In 1974, Inco made its first and only major acquisition, paying US$224 million for ESB Inc., a leading manufacturer of large storage batteries using nickel. Inco believed ESB's sales would help balance cyclical downturns in nickel, and that demand for batteries would increase in a world growing short of oil. Inco's share of the world's nickel sales had slipped below 50 percent by this time. Except in 1974, a boom year for commodities, the nickel market was generally soft for the rest of the decade. More worrisome, the soaring price of oil made Inco's huge investments in laterite nickel practically a dead loss, as the cost of refining the ore with petroleum rendered the product too expensive to sell.
In 1976 International Nickel Co. of Canada, Ltd. officially changed its name to Inco Limited. A looming problem for the newly named company was Inco's US$850 million debt burden, which grew less manageable as interest rates reached a peak in the early 1980s. Additionally, Inco's new battery subsidiary was floundering, and in the severe recession of 1981 Inco found itself in deep trouble. Forced to write off its Guatemalan investment, sales began a steep slide; the company reported a disastrous year-end loss of US$470 million, its first since 1932. In the following three years, Inco's sales fell another US$500 million, as the recession and corporate debt proved an almost fatal combination.
Inco, however, had one asset that remained invulnerable: it still owned the world's richest nickel fields. Under CEO Donald J. Phillips, Inco wrote off its ill-fated battery venture for $245 million, almost halved its workforce, closed all excess production facilities, and sat tight, waiting for the severely depressed price of nickel to recover. New techniques allowed the extraction of ore in far bigger chunks than previously possible, and the reduced staff performed the smelting and refining tasks with improved methods. A rebound in the nickel market in 1987 brought the boost Inco needed: an increase in market share to nearly 35 percent and a year-end profit of US$125 million.
When nickel prices reached an all-time high in 1988, Inco's worldwide shipments of 495 million pounds of nickel (its highest level in 14 years) sent profits soaring to US$735 million and a stunning US$753 million in 1989.
As a reward for his efforts in raising productivity, Phillips was made chairman and CEO of Inco. His first task was to decide what to do with US$1 billion in retained earnings. Mindful of the poor results of past efforts at diversification, Phillips put some into further production refinements; however, the bulk was used for a $10 per share special cash dividend as part of a controversial recapitalization and shareholders' rights package. Taking cues from its U.S. neighbors, Inco's "poison pill" plan was the first of its kind in Canada. Spurring heated debate from all sides, Quebec's pension fund management group, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, filed suit on behalf of its 3.2 million Inco shares to legally overturn shareholders' December 1988 approval of the poison pill.
As the 1990s dawned, environmental issues became an increasingly expensive concern for Inco. The company faced an $80,000 fine for a sulphur trioxide leak from its Copper Cliff refinery in April 1987 and also faced repeated requests to regulate the sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere by its smelting operations in Sudbury. Responding to what Maclean's called "the largest single source of sulphur dioxide pollution on the continent," Inco launched a series of abatement programs (with a price tag of over $500 million) to substantially lower emissions by 1994. To meet this goal, Inco planned to implement new magnetic separators to extract sulphur from ore and replace natural-gas burning furnaces with oxygen flash furnaces, which used oxygen rather than fossil fuels, eliminating toxic emissions altogether. Additionally, the new processes would significantly lower energy costs and boost efficiency.
In 1991, Michael Sopko, an Inco employee since 1964, was named president while Phillips retained the titles of CEO and chairman. Though annual net sales for 1991 fell to just under US$3 billion, net earnings plunged from 1990's US$441 million to US$83 million. In 1992, Sopko replaced the retiring Phillips as chairman and CEO, and Scott M. Hand assumed the presidency. The changing of the guard, however, had little effect on the continued downward trend of nickel prices, sluggish demand, and increased competition from Russian exports--all of which contributed to a year-end loss of US$18 million on net sales of US$2.56 billion. In response, Inco slashed executive salaries, decreased capital expenditures by $50 million, and closed its Ontario and Manitoba facilities for several weeks to cut production by 40 million pounds. Next Inco sold its 62 percent stake in TVX Gold Inc. for $371 million in 1993, as nickel prices plunged to their lowest level since 1987. Finishing 1993 with sales of only US$2.13 billion, the company had managed to post a profit of US$28 million rather than another loss.
Although earnings were not spectacular, they were nonetheless encouraging. The following year, Inco continued to struggle, announcing plans to prune upper management, eliminate 1,000 union jobs, and fund expansion at the company's low-cost Soroako mine in Indonesia--just as 4,900 laborers announced their intention to strike. Narrowly averting the strike, Inco took its employee relations in a different direction, funding more research into automated mining, with which the company had increasing success. The company also increased financing for the research and development of scores of new nickel applications and products. Nickel alloys, foam, foil, and powders, as well as nickel coating on fibers, papers, cloths, and even gold, were providing excellent results.
In 1996 the company bought a 25 percent stake in what was reputed to be the richest nickel discovery in 30 years. This was a tract known as Voisey's Bay in northern Labrador. The find belonged to a small Canadian mining concern, Diamond Fields. Its operatives had discovered the nickel deposits by accident in 1993. Diamond Fields was on the verge of selling a stake in the area to another Canadian mining firm, Falconbridge, when Inco stepped in with a bigger offer. The deal was worth about C$4.5 billion, financed by a complex strategy that created a special category of Inco stock. It was deemed a high price for the relatively unexplored Voisey's Bay, but Inco expected great things from the area.
However, plans to develop Voisey's Bay were being hindered. The mine could not be dug until an environmental impact study was completed, and local government insisted that metal mined in the area also be refined there, and not shipped elsewhere. Negotiations over these issues with government and tribal groups dragged on for years. Meanwhile, competition from nickel suppliers in Russia, Australia, and Cuba cut into Inco's profits. Bad weather forced the company's Indonesian mine to shut down for part of 1997, and a strike in Sudbury further chipped away at Inco's profits. In addition, the company was burdened with about US$1.5 billion in debt.
Inco looked for innovative ways to get the most out of its business. It continued to investigate high-tech mining, investing in a joint-venture Mining Automation Program in 1996. New equipment allowed miners to operate machinery by remote control from the surface. Though development of so-called telemining was expensive and not always smooth, the company stood to gain a lot in saved labor costs. To go into deep pits, some miners spent as much as two hours out of each eight-hour shift commuting in trains or elevators. Automation would ostensibly eliminate much of this lost time. The company also formed a new marketing group, called Inco Special Products, to exploit some more specialized niches. It formed the new division in 2000 to market nickel foams, powders, oxides, particles, and fibers. These were used in batteries, auto parts, and consumer electronics. Inco hoped to reach sales of $200 million from the new division within the next five years.
Inco then pledged to develop a nickel-cobalt mine in the French dependency of New Caledonia in 2001. The plant was expected to yield some 54,000 tons of nickel annually, and 5,400 tons of cobalt. The cost to develop the mine was estimated at about $1.4 billion. The company's Voisey's Bay property was still embattled by the fall of 2001, though negotiations with provincial governments continued. Inco was unable to start building a pilot smelting plant in the area until it guaranteed that it would also build a permanent plant. By 2001 costs for developing the mine were estimated at US$1.25 billion, with another US$500 million to build the pilot smelter. The economic downturn of 2001 made the company's plans all the more variable. Production was hoped to begin by 2005.
Principal Subsidiaries
Inco Special Products; Inco United States, Inc.; Novamet Specialty Products Corp. (U.S.A.); International Metals Reclamation Company, Inc. (U.S.A.); Exploraciones Y Explotaciones (Guatemala; 70%); Compagnie des Mines de Xere (France; 85%); Goro Nickel SA (New Caledonia); Jinco Nonferrous Metals Co., Ltd. (China; 65%); Ingold Holdins Indonesia, Inc. (Canada); Voisey's Bay Nickel Company Limited.
Principal Divisions
Ontario Division; Clydach Refinery (UK); Acton Refinery (UK); Manitoba Division; PT International Nickel (Indonesia); Inco TNC Limited (Japan).
Principal Competitors
Norilsk Nickel; Falconbridge Limited.
Further Reading
Arnott, Sheila, "Inco Shapes Its Labor-Relations Climate," Northern Miner, September 5, 1988, p. 6.
Ball, Matthew, "Equity Tailored to Suit the Strategy," Corporate Finance, October 1996, pp. 18-20.
------, "Inco Keeps It Pure with Special Stock," Corporate Finance, December 1996, p. 50.
Cook, Peter, "More Eye-Popping Facts About Poison Pills," Globe and Mail, October 20, 1988, p. B2.
Donham, Parker Barss, "Newfoundland's 'Untamed Dog' Takes on Inco, Canadian Dimension, May 2000, p. 10.
Gilbert, Ray, "Sudbury, Home to One of the World's Premier Mining Companies," Northern Miner, October 15, 1990, p. B19.
Heinzl, Mark, "Inco Moves to Take Miners Out of Mining, "Wall Street Journal, July 6, 1994, p. B6.
Hutchinson, Brian, "A Plugged Nickel," Canadian Business, April 24, 1998, pp. 43-47.
"Inco Forms New Division to Market Specialty Products," Purchasing, January 13, 2000, p. B32.
"Inco Plans $1.4 Billion Nickel-Cobalt Deal," Project Finance, May 2001, p. 13.
"Inco Reviews Female Policy After Human Rights Ruling," Northern Miner, March 14, 1988, p. 6.
"Inco's Focus Shifts from Voisey's Bay," Sulphur, May 2000, p. 10.
"Inco to Expand Indonesian Operation," Northern Miner, November 21, 1994, p. 1.
"Inco to Sell Stake in TVX Gold Unit to Underwriters for $289.4 Million," Wall Street Journal, June 29, 1993, p. B1.
"Inco to Spend $26.9 Million on Mine Project," Northern Miner, November 16, 1987, p. A1.
Lamont, Lansing, "Inco: A Giant Learns How to Compete," Fortune, January 1975.
Lamphier, Gary, "Voisey Secures Inco's Future," Globe and Mail, June 9, 1995, p. B1.
McClearn, Matthew, "Bots Way Down in the Mine," Canadian Business, August 20, 2001, pp. 44-47.
McInnes, Craig, "Court Fines Inco $80,000 Over Acid Cloud Incident," Globe and Mail, January 10, 1989, p. A1.
Mehr, Martin, "Inco Tries to Clean Up the Air and Its Image," Marketing, March 27, 1989, pp. B1, B6.
Melnbardis, Caroline, "Canada's First Poison Pill Is Leaving a Very Bitter Taste ...," Financial Times of Canada, October 24, 1988, pp. 27, 30.
Newman, Peter C., "Canada's Largest Investor Goes to War," Maclean's, November 7, 1988, p. 50.
Reier, Sharon, "The Treasure of Voisey Bay," Financial World, July 18, 1995, p. 28.
"Report on Corporate Finance: Inco's Move Started Wheels Turning in Canadian Boardrooms," Globe and Mail, December 12, 1988, p. B17.
"Retooling Mother Inco," Northern Miner Magazine, April 1990, pp. 41-45.
Robinson, Allan, "Inco Expects Another Good Year After Seeing 5th Record Quarter," Globe and Mail, April 20, 1989, p. B11.
------, "Inco, Falconbridge Betting Nickel Price Will Keep Shining," Globe and Mail, November 21, 1988, p. B1.
------, "Inco Slashes Production," Globe and Mail, October 6, 1992, p. B1.
------, "Product R & D Pays Off for Inco," Globe and Mail, September 8, 1992, p. B13.
Shortell, Ann, and Caroline Melnbardis, "Code Name Monticello: Inco Devised One of the Most Potent Poison Pills in North America," Financial Times of Canada, December 19, 1988, pp. 1, 14-16.
"The Squeeze on Nickel," Fortune, November 1950.
Stackhouse, John, "Inco Bets on Indonesia," Globe and Mail, May 19, 1994, p. B1.
Tintor, Nicholas, "Inco Exposure to Gold Increased with New Firm," Northern Miner, August 17, 1987, pp. 1-2.
Walmsley, Anne, "An Acid Test," Maclean's, September 17, 1990, p. 62.
Zehr, Leonard, and Jacquie McNish, "Inco Plans $1.05-Billion Dividend in Recapitalization," Globe and Mail, October 4, 1988, p. B1.
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cbc resists diversity

2007-02-02T12:17:00.000-05:00

CBC resists real diversityBy JOSEPH QUESNEL
If I see one more re-run of the documentary Bowling for Columbine on CBC Television, I will explode.
It's not the first time our nation's public broadcaster gave a soapbox to the filmmaker Michael Moore and his leftist views -- CBC has broadcast the questionable anti-gun documentary a few times.
I just wish CBC would give some equal time to its critics.
I am sure it is popular with the latte-drinking, American-loathing crowd in Toronto or other urban centres. Perhaps CBC was able to cut a broadcasting deal with Moore.
What bothers me is that it seems the only documentaries getting airtime are ones that advance left-wing agendas. Going through a list of the most popular documentaries available, I can only find titles that focus on issues fashionable among the urban left. Fahrenheit 9/11. An Inconvenient Truth. Fast Food Nation.
Winnipeg recently saw the airing of Wal-Town at the NFB Cinematheque. This gem focuses on the "evils" of Wal-Mart, while ignoring the jobs the company brings, not to mention low prices for lower-income people.
The annoying thing is that CBC can do something about this.
CBC, under its own journalistic standards, is obligated to seek out dissenting views. Judging from documentaries featured on The Passionate Eye and Fifth Estate, perhaps they interpreted dissent as meaning a range from outright hatred of George Bush to mild dislike.
It would just be nice to see more investigative filmmaking that took on topics sacred to the left getting airtime.
At present, a Quebec-based documentary called L'illusion tranquille is showing in movie houses in La Belle Province. The film argues Quebec's highly interventionist and union-dominated economy is not sustainable and is headed for crisis.
The film faced resistance. A producer said when she presented her proposal to the National Film Board, she had her Power Point presentation interrupted by an NFB official who said he did not like what she was saying.
In another recent case, an Ottawa theatre cancelled the showing of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, an award-winning documentary, after a single e-mailed complaint from an academic who admitted she never actually saw the film. The movie's crime was depicting real-life footage of radical Islamists.
Months ago, I fired off an e-mail to the CBC's ombudsman asking why I am seeing so many documentaries tilted to the left. I even offered to provide a list of high-quality conservative documentaries. I have received no answer.
I am not arguing that the CBC or the government should completely bear the responsibility for conservative films. That would be very un-conservative. I am saying that CBC and the NFB must play fair and present other points of view.
It is also a problem of what is getting produced. It is fair to say that people who go into journalism or filmmaking, especially at the CBC and NFB, are not very conservative. Conservative people tend to go into lucrative fields, like business and law. Barry Cooper and Lydia Miljan in Hidden Agendas: How Journalists influence the News presented data showing a prevalence of left-wing views in the media, especially at CBC.
More conservative and traditional-minded Canadians need to enter journalism, especially at public broadcasters. The CBC talks a lot about diversity, but ignores conservative diversity.
It it also time Canada's conservative organizations and foundations step up to the plate and put their money where their mind is.
Regardless, something needs to change.

Can't fix global warming

2007-01-25T15:31:00.001-05:00

Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth
By Robert J. SamuelsonWednesday, July 5, 2006; A13
"Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but -- regardless of whether it is or isn't -- we won't do much about it. We will (I am sure) argue ferociously over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed. Little will be done. . . . Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.''
-- This column, July 1997
Well, so it has. In three decades of columns, I've never quoted myself at length, but here it's necessary. Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. Let me explain.
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).
The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent -- and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables" (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.
Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.
Since 1800 there's been modest global warming. I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villains; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent rise may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.
I draw two conclusions -- one political, one practical.
No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.
Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and -- if they impose costs -- are undesirable. (Note: on national security grounds, I favor taxing oil, but the global warming effect would be trivial.) The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. I once received an e-mail from an engineer. Thorium, he said. I had never heard of thorium. It is, he argued, a nuclear fuel that is more plentiful and safer than uranium without waste disposal problems. It's an exit from the global warming trap. After reading many articles, I gave up trying to decide whether he is correct. But his larger point is correct: Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it. Perhaps some system could purge the atmosphere of surplus greenhouse gases?
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Readers turn green

2007-01-25T14:15:00.000-05:00

Readers turn greenBy GREG WESTON
In an effort to stimulate debate on global warming, we recently asked readers to take the 200-megatonne challenge: How exactly should Canada reduce Canadian-made greenhouse gas emissions that are helping to heat up the planet, the recent sub-human winter deep freeze notwithstanding?
To help readers find 200 million tonnes a year in greenhouse gas reductions -- Canada's target under the Kyoto protocol -- we provided a list of some of the biggest Canadian emitters, from the belching smokestacks of the country's coal-fired electrical generating plants to the tailpipes of farting farm animals.
The point of the piece was ultimately to illustrate the hard choices confronting scientists and legislators in trying to clear the air on global warming.
As always, our readers came up with some illuminating ideas, from putting the screws to industry and consumers to keeping our heads in the clouds and ignoring the whole issue. Here are some of the responses we received.
First prize for the most elaborate submission came from Michael Ash of Grand Bend, Ont., who sent us a detailed spreadsheet of possible emission reductions in different sectors. His suggestions included a 30% cut in home heating through more efficient technologies; a 26% cut in emissions from the oil and gas sector, including the oil sands ("Let the energy sector bear its fair share of the burden; they can afford it"); and burning garbage to produce energy.
Anne Wilkings suggests a potential path to eco-salvation which, coincidentally, suddenly seems to be in big favour with the current Conservative government: Go nuke. As she notes, Canada could cut man-made greenhouse emissions by almost a third by building nuclear reactors to replace oil, gas and coal in electrical generation, and for heating and processing the Alberta oil sands.
Ray Temmerman of Winnipeg suggests replacing payroll taxes with increased government levies on non-renewable energy. "We might pay, say, $5 a litre for gasoline ... but we would exercise our choice as consumers, from driving our Humvee to work to walking. Depending on the choices we made, we might have more or less money overall in our pockets at the end of the year -- but the choice would have been ours."
Lane Myers of Kingston, N.S., says all those opinion polls showing public concern for the environment should instead be asking how much Canadians would be willing to sacrifice to help save Mother Earth. "I recently visited Toronto and was amazed to see how many four-wheel-drive SUVs people own in a city that hardly has any snow ... How many (people) would willingly move to car pools or public transit?"
Gary Cooper of Peterborough suggests cutting fuel consumption of garbage trucks by piling our household trash with a neighbour's for pick-up (reducing stops and starts by half), and by crushing cans and plastic bottles before pitching them in the recycling box.
Al Roffey recommends concentrating more on energy demand than supply, saying conservation would go a long way to reducing Canada's contribution to global warming -- specifically, throwing the switch on unnecessary lighting and other wasted electricity consumption; and obeying speed limits for all cars and trucks.
On the flip side of the global warming issue, we got plenty of missives from readers who think the controversy over greenhouse gasses is all a lot of Kyoto hokum.
Brian in Ottawa writes: "I think you could have added that even if Canada met its Kyoto targets (for reducing greenhouse gas emissions), the odds are significant that it would have no effect on global average temperatures ... I often wonder if 20 years from now, global warming will be seen in the same light as the 1970s belief in the coming ice age, and the Y2K scare."
Finally, Derek Holmedal, a western farmer, wants to set straight "another dumb easterner" (that would be me) on the science of farting cattle warming the Earth. Seems we may have been making a big stink about the wrong end of the right animal.
Forget farmyard flatulence, he says. The big gas bags are burping bovines, stupid. Phew.

Pay as you learn

2007-01-24T09:55:00.001-05:00

Is it 'pay-as-you-learn'?By CHRISTINA BLIZZARD
I suspect if I added up all the cash I'd spent on tutors in the countless years I had youngsters in the public school system, I could probably have paid for one of them to go to some posh private school.
Tutors aren't cheap. But I quickly learned in navigating the public school system they are almost essential under certain circumstances, whether it's helping a good student get better marks to make it into the university of their choice, or whether it's a six year old struggling to learn to read.
That's why the issue of the York Region board of education charging for after-school tutoring touched a nerve with me. Make that several nerves. In fact, it makes me downright twitchy.
On the positive side, the school board's plan does make tutoring affordable. Extra help for students doesn't come cheap and the $190 for 16 hours of after-school tuition is a bargain basement rate.
It raises two issues, however. First, whatever happened to all those wonderful teachers who stayed behind for an extra hour to offer help for free? During the divisive battle under the Harris Tories over extra-curricular help, the teacher unions told us that a teacher's day doesn't end at 3.30. They often stay much later helping students and preparing for class. That seems to have changed. Now they're charging for the extra time.
There are some, I am sure, who will applaud this program. If it is run under the auspices of the school board, you can be sure it meets the curriculum and that the tutor is accredited by the College of Teachers.
I don't subscribe to that view. I often found the public school system captive of psycho-babble or hidebound by trendy educational ideologies. It didn't matter whether it was whole language or new math, the system was prone to the vagaries of every off-the-wall idea that whistled through. And it's a system that has left countless kids illiterate in its wake.
A tutor who is not captive to these whims is often able to use common sense and unconventional teaching skills to open up a child's mind. And if the students are struggling with these teachers from 9 a.m. to 3.30 p.m., why is an extra hour of help from the same people going to give them the push they need?
For sure, it may simply be that the student needs one-on-one help. It's tough to give attention to a struggling child when you have 25 other children demanding your attention. But this smacks of two-tier education. Not that we don't have that with private schools, of course. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Taxpayers in this province pay $13 billion for public education. For that kind of dough, parents should be able to demand that their kids learn to read and write without them having to pay a tutor.
In the York board, kids in grades 7 and 8 get help for free, while kids in the lower grades have to pay.
Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said the Liberal government has invested millions into additional help for schools to identify and help children who are struggling. The York program, she said, is simply a service that is available to parents if they want it.
"They are not paying for public education, they are paying for an additional service.
"The public education that is being provided is free -- it's supported by ministry dollars, by tax dollars," she said.
Children who are identified as in need of help will still get it without having to pay, she said.
"They are offering an additional service to parents who chose to put their children in that service. That is not a service that is identified as necessary by the teachers. That's the parents making a choice," Wynne said.
Fair enough. What I can't figure out is in a province that prides itself on its public education system, why it is that so many private tutors and private tutoring companies are flourishing? And fair enough, if you want a tutor to nudge your child's marks from the 80s to the 90s in order to get into the right university, it should be on your dime.
But the right of every child, regardless of their parents' financial resources, to a basic grasp of reading, writing and mathematics is surely fundamental in a civilized society. It shouldn't be pay-as-you-go.
//

Problem with Kyoto

2007-01-23T14:45:00.001-05:00

The problem with KyotoBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Having had a chance to do some research into the Kyoto accord, I have a question for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.
Why do you support a bizarre United Nations treaty that is mainly concerned with transferring billions of dollars from the First World (i.e. us) to the Third World over a period of decades, without any guarantees this will lower the man-made greenhouse gas emissions you say are the main cause of global warming?
Start delving into the Kyoto accord and you'll quickly discover it has very little to do with sensible things like practising meaningful energy conservation here in Canada, or reducing our heavy reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal.
And plenty to do with having "Annex I" countries (like us) ship big bags full of our money to undeveloped and underdeveloped nations who may, or may not, use said funds to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions.
Whatever they do, Kyoto contains no provisions to compel those nations to live up to their word when Canadians and others, either as taxpayers or consumers, bankroll projects abroad to reduce greenhouse gases.
In terms of emission targets, Kyoto rewards notorious polluters like Russia and other former Eastern bloc nations (can you say "Chernobyl"?) for the fact their already inefficient economies collapsed in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell apart.
And it punishes "Annex I" countries, like Canada, for having allegedly disproportionately contributed to the global warming crisis -- long before anyone knew it was a crisis.
While underdeveloped nations under Kyoto have room to emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than we do, the treaty's solution is to allow us and other "Annex I" countries to purchase and trade "emission credits" from them and each other.
This means, in effect, paying a surtax for generations to other countries for the right to continue emitting greenhouse gases in our own country, above what would otherwise be the acceptable levels set by Kyoto. That's what buying "hot air" from, say, Russia, actually means.
The theory is that since global warming is a global problem, it doesn't matter which countries emit greenhouse gases as long as total emissions go down, which is all well and good, except that Kyoto contains no provisions to ensure emissions go down.
And here's a question just for the Liberals and former PM Jean Chretien, who signed and ratified Kyoto.
How, exactly, did we end up in a big, cold northern country agreeing to the impossible task of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 (under the Liberals they went up 30%) while Australia, another first-world nation, which doesn't have our cold weather extremes, is allowed to increase its emissions by 8%. That is, if it had ever signed Kyoto, which it didn't.
All this is not to mention the inconvenient truth that the last time the UN got involved in an international agreement involving billions of dollars for the alleged global good, it was the oil-for-food program in Iraq. And we all know what a corrupt mess that became.
Then there's the fact some of Kyoto's strongest supporters say its present greenhouse gas emission targets would have to be strengthened by a factor of 12 to do any good.
And that some of the most radical climate change scientists in the world say that in order to meet the threat posed by global warming, we need to invest massively in nuclear power (which doesn't produce greenhouse gases, but does produce nuclear waste).
As I recall, none of this was ever mentioned in those "take the one tonne challenge" ads the Liberals paid for with our money before they were tossed from power.
As for Harper, why do you now support a treaty which you surely must know is a mess and why are you ready to have (shudder) NDP leader Jack Layton make things even worse? Other than getting yourself re-elected, that is.
//

Global Warming

2007-01-23T14:41:00.000-05:00

Debunking hot hysteria
Political agendas, massive misinformation fuelling climate debateBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Here are some things you probably haven't heard in all the recent hysteria being spouted about global warming by too many politicians, media and environmental activists. To keep this controversy in perspective:
1. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has experienced many protracted periods of global warming and cooling that had nothing to do with human beings because we weren't yet alive.
Glaciers melted and ice ages locked the Earth in their grip long before we existed.
Scientists say there have been near-extinctions of life on Earth five times because of climate change and other factors, the last one occurring about 65 million years ago.
FOREST FIRES
None of them had anything to do with post-industrial man putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. Erupting volcanoes unleash huge amounts of greenhouse gas. So do forest fires and decomposing plant life.
2. Claims by some environmental activists and media that this year's mild winter or hurricane Katrina were caused by man-made global warming are simply irresponsible.
Serious researchers stress that while climate change obviously affects weather, no single weather episode can be blamed solely or conclusively on global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists know that if they start to make this claim, they'll be asked how, since they can't predict the weather two weeks from now, they can predict it decades or centuries into the future.
In fact, predicting climate change and forecasting weather are different issues. Unfortunately, too many politicians, environmental activists and media who often have a political agenda to ram through the Kyoto accord, are deliberately blurring this important distinction.
This is understandable because the UN treaty is highly controversial.
Many Kyoto critics charge it is more concerned with transferring wealth from the First World to the Third World than seriously reducing man-made greenhouse gases.
3. While there is widespread agreement the world is going through a sustained period of warming, from the 1940s to the 1970s we experienced a period of global cooling, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. Back then, Time, Newsweek and others ran stories predicting a possible new ice age. Oops.
Many scientists believe this cooling period was partially the result of post-industrial man injecting pollutants into the air. These pollutants reflect the sun's rays back into space, unlike greenhouse gases which trap heat.
Ironically, as we continue to clean up these pollutants, as we should, some think this will contribute to global warming.
4. The real debate on global warming is about whether man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing it to happen at an accelerated rate that risks, over time, cataclysmic climate change. Most climate change scientists believe this. A minority don't or argue the man-made effect is not significant. Serious researchers do not hysterically shout down as "global warming deniers" anyone who disagrees with them.
Rather, they argue, there is very strong evidence -- many say it's conclusive -- based on both scientific observation and computer modelling that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing a rapid increase in global warming that cannot be explained by any natural causes.
They say it is prudent to err on the side of caution and reduce these emissions now because of the possible catastrophic climate changes that may result over the coming decades and centuries.
5. One can be skeptical about all this, and Kyoto, and still agree with the argument it makes sense to conserve non-renewable fossil fuels like oil and coal and reduce our reliance on them. But the Cassandras, who claim that every time there's a hurricane, tsunami or heat wave, the direct and sole cause is man-made global warming, usually have a political agenda or don't know what they're talking about, or both.
By the way, without greenhouse gases like water vapour and carbon dioxide, we'd all freeze to death.
//

Greenhouse gases

2007-01-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

Cut the bull
Tough calls are ahead if Canada is to have any hope of reducing annual greenhouse gas emissions by 200 megatonnesBy GREG WESTON
Among the many reasons to cut the bull on global warming, it turns out a staggering 24 million tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions are coming from the exhaust pipes of Canadian cattle and other farting farm animals.
In the overall ecological scheme of things, that means farmyard flatulence is contributing as much to heating the planet as half of all the regular passenger cars on Canadian roads today.
Exactly how one coaxes Bessie into a raspberry reduction to help save the Earth is a problem we are happy to leave to Canada's enthusiastic new environment minister, John Baird (although we do hope there will be pictures).
Of course, so-called "enteric fermentation" in farm animals is only a small part of Canada's contribution to global warming -- less than 3%, to be exact -- and one of literally dozens of sources of homemade greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately for Baird, the preponderance of polluters does not mean there are easy choices.
Shutting down the country's coal-fired electrical generating plants would solve a big part of the environmental problem. The trick is how to do it without leaving thousands of Canadians either shivering in the dark or with sky-high electrical bills.
Since cutting greenhouse gases is all about tough choices, how would you do it?
Following is a list of the biggest Canadian contributors to global warming, with the annual amount of greenhouse gas emissions from each in brackets, measured in millions of tonnes, compiled from Environment Canada and other sources.
WORST OFFENDERS
For the sake of a challenge, what would you do to cut 200 million tonnes a year, roughly the reduction that would be required to meet Canada's commitment under the Kyoto protocol by 2012?
- Power generation (130): The worst single offenders are the country's coal-fired electrical generating stations. More than half of the total greenhouse gas emissions of the power sector could be eliminated by shutting down the four largest Ontario coal generators (30), and the five worst belchers in Alberta (41).
- Oil and gas industry (133): Greenhouse emissions from the booming Alberta oil sands operations (34) alone are equal to those given off by the entire natural gas industry (34); more than half the pollution from crude oil production (50); and almost twice the emission levels of the entire petroleum refining industry (18).
- Oil and gas exports to the U.S (46): Over the past 15 years, most of the rapid growth in Canadian petroleum production -- and greenhouse gas emissions from it -- has gone south of the border.
- Ordinary passenger cars (50): For all the bad press the automobile industry gets in the greenhouse gas debate, total emissions from regular family clunkers have actually declined over time, primarily with improved fuel efficiency.
- SUVs and family vans (44): Since 1990, the North American addiction to four-wheel-drive gas guzzlers and mini-vans has accounted for 55% of the total increase in greenhouse emissions from the entire transportation sector.
- Transport trucks (45): Heavy-duty diesel trucks, buses and industrial vehicles have been responsible for most of the remaining 45% increase in transportation emissions over the past 15 years.
- Domestic aircraft (8). While jet fuel may be expensive and not at all good for the environment, grounding all the planes in the country would not reduce greenhouse emissions by even half the filth output of the Nanticoke coal generating station.
- Mining and manufacturing (139): Among Canada's great industrial earth-warmers, the biggest emitters are the chemical industries (22); mining (18); steel mills (15); aluminum and other smelting (13); cement (11); and pulp and paper (9).
- Home heating (43): The cost of a warm bed in our Canadian climate is about 5.5% of the country's annual greenhouse gas emissions, pumped into the air from our home heating systems.
- Office and institutional heating (38): Keeping office workers from freezing at their desks, and patients from dying of exposure in the hospital waiting rooms, produces greenhouse emissions that have increased 25% since 1990.
- Waste disposal (29): Emissions from rotting garbage and other landfill not only stinks, but is also helping to heat the planet.
- Agriculture (55): This brings us back to the substantial greenhouse gas production from farting cattle et al (24), something called "manure management" (8), and other barnyard stuff you really don't want to know.
Remember: Your challenge is to cut 200 megatonnes. No bull.

Kyoto Crimes

2007-01-23T14:35:00.001-05:00

More Kyoto crimes
China, set to build 562 new coal plants, is exempt from the rulesBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Where is the political party in Canada that will take us out of the Kyoto accord, since the deal is an impending economic disaster for us?
When the Liberals under Jean Chretien signed the Kyoto accord in 1998 and, more important, ratified it in 2002, they committed Canadian taxpayers and consumers, without consultation, to one of the most radical programs for reducing greenhouse gases on Earth, with no idea of how to achieve it.
Canada, the world's ninth-largest emitter of man-made greenhouse gases (2.1% of all emissions in 2000), faces cuts no other major industrialized (and northern) country agreed to -- 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 -- which the Grits had already missed by 35% when they were tossed from power a year ago.
By contrast, the U.S., the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases (20.6%), refused to ratify Kyoto because of concerns about the harm it would do to its economy.
China, the second-largest emitter (14.8%) and India, fourth-largest (5.5%), don't have to cut emissions because Kyoto classifies them as "developing" countries.
Russia, the third-largest emitter. (5.7%) has lots of room to emit more greenhouse gases and sell carbon or "hot air" credits to other countries -- like us -- solely because its economy collapsed in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Australia, the world's largest per capita producer of man-made carbon dioxide emissions because of its reliance on coal, would be able to increase emissions by 8% above its 1990 levels, if it ratified Kyoto, which it hasn't, fearing major job losses.
While the nations of the European Union (14% of all global emissions) accepted Kyoto reduction targets of 8%, they insisted on being treated as a collective in order to benefit from the collapse of the East German economy after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The news for Canadian taxpayers and consumers only gets worse. Even if we were to meet our Kyoto targets for 2012, which would have a huge negative impact on our economy because we're now 35% behind, it won't matter.
China, India and the U.S. -- none of them restricted by Kyoto -- are planning to build more than 850 new coal-fired energy plants over the next few years. China alone is planning 562. (Burning coal emits more greenhouse gas, linked to global warming, than oil or natural gas, the world's two other major fossil fuels.)
Two years ago, the respected Christian Science Monitor (CSM) did an in-depth analysis of the implications of this planned coal-fired plant construction in China, India and the U.S. It estimated these 850 plants will put five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Kyoto is designed to remove, even if every other country, including Canada, miraculously hits its Kyoto target.
Even if new plant construction was limited to only those with a start date, it would still mean putting over twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as Kyoto, fully implemented, would remove.
Kyoto's defenders argue developing countries like China won't be exempt from emission targets forever, but first need to be shown that the developed world, which has put the lion's share of man-made greenhouse gases into the atmosphere up to the present (85%) are serious.
On that, China, has a point.
But the problem is it opposes any global say over its energy policy, which it considers purely a domestic issue. Plus, sometime after 2015, the developing world is expected to produce more than 50% of all global greenhouse gases.
MINIMIZE JOB LOSSES
Sorry, but I'm interested in Canada reducing its own greenhouse gas (and smog) emissions through technology paid for and developed by Canadians, to minimize job losses here as we do it.
I'm not interested in buying "hot air" from Russia, or convincing China to "go green" by throwing my money at it for various "carbon sink" projects.
I suspect most Canadians would feel that way, if any party -- including Stephen Harper's ruling Conservatives -- honestly told them what Kyoto really says.
//

Climate Change

2007-01-22T13:45:00.001-05:00

Endless billions haven't eased Natives'woes

2005-12-19T18:36:00.000-05:00

Endless billions haven't eased Natives'woes
By Ted Byfield

Canada has just finished celebrating what might be called Native Week.

For three consecutive days in the week just ended, Native affairs were in the news, and all of it was bad.

For instance, one chapter in a federal report called How Ottawa Spends was devoted to Natives.

It disclosed:

# That despite decades of expanded social and economic assistance programs, Natives are as likely as ever to live in substandard housing, suffer from chronic diseases, and remain gravely under-educated.

# That while Natives make up only 3% of the national population, they account for 20% of the prison population and this percentage constantly rises.

# That Natives are three times more likely to suffer from spousal abuse, six times more likely to get tuberculosis, and up to eight times more likely to commit suicide,

Meanwhile, the Canadian Taxpayers Association said that the funding for Native programs has doubled in 12 years from $3.3 billion to $6.6 billion.

How this money is spent varies from one band to the next.

It's particularly high in a band such as the Samson near Edmonton, where 80% of the residents are on welfare, and 85% are unemployed.

This in the province with the hottest economy in the country.

Of course, what happens to this money, says Auditor General Sheila Fraser, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs doesn't actually know.

It simply turns the money over to the chiefs and band councils, and what they do with it is up to them.

It is not subject to departmental audit and she isn't allowed to inquire into it either.

And in a further celebration of Native Week, Ottawa announced that an extra $4 billion is being paid out in compensation claims for Natives abused in Indian schools, mostly back in the '60s.

Some $800 million of this was for "victims of serious physical, sexual or psychological abuse."

Sexual abuse no doubt occurred -- in three cases out of every 100, I believe.

But what is "physical abuse?"

That was spanking, no doubt, in which case almost the entire population of Canada was "physically abused" back in those dreadful days of oppression.

Where's our compensation package?

And what is "psychological abuse?"

Some teacher bawled them out maybe? That should be worth $10,000 or $20,000.

The other four-fifths -- $3.2 billion -- was for others forms of "abuse," such as teaching them English instead of Native languages, for instance, depriving them of Native folklore, failing to preserve the oral tradition of "the elders." (The elders, as far as I could ever figure, were a group of University of Lethbridge anthropologists).

Anyway, all this sort of "abuse" plainly required compensation.

We also discovered last week that one Saskatchewan resident in seven is now Native, and by 2050 one person in four will be Native.

The total population of the province has scarcely changed in 40 years, but the Native proportion is steadily rising.

So the wise guy who once suggested "they should give Saskatchewan back to the Natives" seems to be getting his way.

All of which brings to mind what was known as "the notorious white paper" of the 1960s, in which the government formally proposed dismantling the reserve system and making the aim of federal Native policy assimilation into the white community.

But this was the era a New Canada was coming into being.

The word "multiculturalism" was likewise on the way in, and along with it a new appreciation of Native culture. The white paper was denounced and withdrawn, and instead we resolved to retain the reserve system, and "adequately" fund it.

So now, four decades later, how is it doing?

Take a look. It's a first class disaster whose chief victims are the Natives themselves.

And the reason is an indisputable and elementary fact of human nature.

If you persuade people they are deserving of help simply because of who they are and where they were born, you will destroy them.

One of the facts that emerged last week in a letter to the editor was: If you take a hard-working diligent Native who lives in the city, and send him to live on a reserve, in six months he'll have likely fallen into lethargy and substance abuse.

I think we should take another look at that "white paper."

Climate Change

2005-12-19T18:34:00.000-05:00

November 30, 2005
Global scam
By LICIA CORBELLA

About 10,000 delegates from 189 countries have have flown in at great expense and distance to gather in Montreal to attend a UN conference on climate change.

Out of all of those people, you'd think a large contingent would be made up of scientists who specialize in climate change, right? Wrong.

Indeed, many of the world's top climatologists who live right here in Canada, have not even bothered to take a short train ride to attend the meeting. Why?

Well, let's ask Dr. Tim Patterson, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences (paleoclimatology) at Carleton University in Ottawa and a world-renowned expert in the field.

"I can't be bothered," he replied from his university office. "It's just a waste of time.

"The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body) is primarily a political operation and the scientists have pretty much been cut out of it. Nobody at that meeting in Montreal wants to hear scientific fact; they want to make posters and make uninformed proclamations and policy based on untruths," said Patterson.

Harsh words to be sure. But, Patterson gets even more blunt.

"If we knew what we know now about climate science 10 years ago there would be no Kyoto," he said of the Protocol that calls on signatories to cut back on CO2 emissions.

Canada, for instance would have to ground every plane, train and automobile, as well as shut down all of our manufacturing plants and we still would not meet our Kyoto commitments.

At the opening of the UN meeting, running until Dec. 9, Canada's environment minister and the meeting's chair, Stephane Dion, said climate change "is the worst threat the world is facing from an environmental perspective. ... It's putting at risk our relationship with the planet."

That kind of comment is simply uninformed, unscientific hot air, says Patterson, who defines himself as a "real" environmentalist, rather than one of those poster-makers.

He says it's tragic to watch all of this money and effort being wasted on a non-issue when the money could be better spent fighting air and water pollution, the degrading of the environment, urban sprawl and a whole host of other much more pressing problems, rather than combatting the relatively benign CO2.

"In 10 years from now people will wonder why did we waste all of our time and money on that. As a colleague of mine said, Kyoto is a house of cards and it's going to start collapsing in upon itself."

Patterson then goes on at length explaining sunspot cycles, celestial forcing, solar forcing and carbon cycling among other phenomena that affect our climate -- all backed up by dozens of real scientific papers and facts unlike the pseudoscience that feeds Kyoto.

While our federal government has already declared CO2 to be a toxic substance, Patterson says the biggest greenhouse gas by far -- at 98% -- is water vapour.

"The IPCC says CO2 is the keystone greenhouse gas, but that's simply not true," said Patterson.

"If you look at the various records the temperature goes up and then CO2 follows usually after about 800 years.

"The reason for that is biological productivity picks up when it gets warmer and then CO2, which is all part of biological productivity, starts to go up along with it."

What's more, the polar ice caps, he says, are getting thicker. And some 400-million years ago, when CO2 levels were 16 times higher than they are today, the world was covered in ice.

"It was a lot warmer five to 6,000 years ago," added Patterson, "than it is today. Climate is cyclical.

"If you look at it, most of the warming since we came out of the last little ice age happened prior to the Second World War and most of the CO2 emissions happened after the Second World War when we suddenly went into temperature decline that lasted until the 1980s."

In 10 years, when Kyoto gets dropped like a rapidly cooled potato, will any of these self-aggrandizing phonies be held to account for the billions of dollars wasted?

Don't count on it. They'll have moved on to the next phony cause. Global cooling perhaps!

Climate Change

2005-12-19T18:27:00.000-05:00

Dr. Tim Ball, Historical Climatologist
On the real danger for Canada, global cooling

In Brief:

Tim Ball has an extensive science background in climatology, especially experience in water resources and areas of sustainable development, pollution prevention, environmental regulations and the impact of government policy on business and economics. He is a regular contributing writer for Country Guide magazine and a researcher/author of numerous papers on climate, long range weather patterns, impacts of climate change on sustainable agriculture, ecosystems, historical climatology, air quality, untapped energy resources, silting and flooding problems. After a long academic career at the University of Winnipeg, he moved to Victoria in 1996. He has a B.A. from the University of Winnipeg, an M.A. from the University of Manitoba and a PH.D. (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England. He was interviewed before his speech to the Frontier Centre on November 5, 2004.

Frontier Centre: We are all familiar with the modern theory that the world’s climate is getting warmer. Is it?

Tim Ball: Yes, it warmed from 1680 up to 1940, but since 1940 it’s been cooling down. The evidence for warming is because of distorted records. The satellite data, for example, shows cooling.

FC: Could you summarize the evidence that suggests the world is cooling slightly, not warming up?

TB: Yes, since 1940 and from 1940 until 1980, even the surface record shows cooling. The argument is that there has been warming since then but, in fact, almost all of that is due to what is called the “urban heat island” effect – that is, that the weather stations are around the edge of cities and the cities expanded out and distorted the record. When you look at rural stations – if you look at the Antarctic, for example – the South Pole shows cooling since 1957 and the satellite data which has been up since 1978 shows a slight cooling trend as well.

FC: If the world were warming up, would that be good or bad for Canada?

TB: It would be good, because even Environment Canada acknowledges that you would have better agricultural conditions, a longer frost-free season. Some people express concern about it being drier, particularly on the Prairies but the evidence says that droughts are not related to temperature. They are related to sun-spot cycles – solar cycles. So, over all it would be better for Canada and it would also reduce, by the way, the amount of fossil fuels you burn because you wouldn’t have to heat homes to the extent that we do.

FC: It has been said that a simple one degree drop in the world’s average climate would jeopardize much of Canada’s agricultural output. Is that so, and why?

TB: I am not sure that one degree is a simple drop but with a drop of one degree, which we saw in 1992 and again this last year, you could see the effects on agriculture. We are very close in many parts of the Prairies and across Canada to not getting crops. In 1992 there was the same problem and the studies show that if you drop Manitoba’s average annual temperature by half a degree you eliminate half the crops, sunflowers, and some of the other cash crops that they are now growing. So, yes, it would have a devastating effect. The main reason, of course, is that Canada is right at the northern limits of agriculture.

FC: If, as you fear, we are in a cycle of cooling, how catastrophic might the economic consequences be for us?

TB: I don’t like to look at things in terms of catastrophes, that is the thing the global warming people are playing. What we need to do is prepare for that and, unfortunately, we are preparing for warming. It becomes a problem if you haven’t prepared for it. You get sideswiped, and the fact that the federal government has forced all of the government departments into preparing for warming is foolish to me. If you are prepared for warming and it cools, you are in trouble. If you prepare for cooling and it warms, you really haven’t lost anything. Ironically, I like to tease some of the extremist environmentalists and say, well, if it cools and we haven’t prepared for it, and it is rapid, the only hope we have got is genetic modification, to create plants that are very quickly adapted to that new condition.

FC: A corollary of the popular theory of global warming is that its cause is human activity. But aren’t changes in the climate a product of cosmic forces beyond our influence, i.e., the sun?

TB: Yes, when David Anderson or the federal government says we are going to stop climate change, it is the most ludicrous statement in the history of the world. The climate changes all the time and dramatically. All you have to do is sit here in Manitoba and imagine that just 20,000 years ago, which in the Earth’s history is nothing, you would have been sitting under about 1,000 meters of ice. In fact, 20,000 years ago there was an ice sheet covering Canada that is larger than the current Antarctic ice sheet. All that ice melted in less than 5,000 years and we are not even sure where all the heat energy and the causes of that melting that occurred came from. So to suggest that the fractional amounts of CO² that humans are putting up has any influence on global climate is really quite ludicrous.

FC: How advanced is our ability to understand weather patterns at all, least of all to predict changes in them? Do we have the tools to model climates?

TB: We don’t have the tools. If you look at Environment Canada’s website right now they do 0–3 months, 3–6 months forecasts. Click up any of their own analyses of their previous forecasts using computer models for a smaller area and you will see that in 90% of the country they are less than 50% accurate. In other words, it is less than chance, yet these are the same people who quite blindly with a computer model tell you that it is going to be warmer a hundred years from now. The fact is that the computer models don’t work. The fact is that we don’t understand even a fraction of the mechanisms of climate and so for anybody to tell you that they can forecast climate is wrong. In fact, one of the hopes for the forecasters and all of these people, is that chaos theory is right and climate really isn’t predictable at all.

FC: In layman’s language, can you describe the role played by water vapour in determining atmospheric conditions?

TB: Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas. This is part of the difficulty with the public and the media in understanding that 95% of greenhouse gases are water vapour. The public understand it, in that if you get a fall evening or spring evening and the sky is clear the heat will escape and the temperature will drop and you get frost. If there is a cloud cover, the heat is trapped by water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the temperature stays quite warm. If you go to In Salah in southern Algeria, they recorded at one point a daytime or noon high of 52 degrees Celsius – by midnight that night it was -3.6 degree Celsius. That’s a 56-degree drop in temperature in about 12 hours. That was caused because there is no, or very little, water vapour in the atmosphere and it is a demonstration of water vapour as the most important greenhouse gas.

FC: What is your opinion of the scientific underpinnings of the Kyoto Accord?

TB: There are none. One of the most distressing things that is argued for Kyoto, is they are saying, ”What’s going to stop pollution?” It has nothing to do with pollution and even if the full Kyoto Accord was implemented you would not be able to measure scientifically the effect that that would have. In other words, it is completely immeasurable scientifically. So, it is a policy based on ideology and economics and politics and has nothing to do with science. Proof of that, by the way, is that Russian President Putin, who agreed to sign the Kyoto Accord, said exactly that. He said, I am signing this not because the science is there but because Europe has put pressure on us to sign it.

FC: Well, you have said that Kyoto is really an extension of the ongoing trade war between Europe and the United States. Can you explain that?

TB: Farmers know, but most urban people don’t know, that there is a huge trade war going on globally between the U.S. and Europe. You see it in the farm subsidies and all of the other things. In the trade wars Europe saw an opportunity – they think that the trade imbalance is in favour of North America because it has low energy costs – so they thought if they could put a carbon tax onto North America then they could level that trade playing field with regard to production of products and also in terms of market sales. Europeans, of course, have also agreed to the Kyoto Accord but because they are very involved in nuclear and other things, it will have only a very minimal effect on their economy, whereas, for North America it would be quite devastating.

FC: What do you think of the idea of carbon taxes? Should we deliberately make energy more expensive in a cold country like Canada?

TB: Well, it just undermines our economy. McKitrick and Essex wrote their book The Gathering Storm. Here’s an economist and a climatologist getting together and analyzing the scientific detail and the impact. I think they estimate the cost at something like $3 trillion dollars over the next ten years. The difficulty with it is that I as a scientist could create all kinds of scares. There is no difficulty, you know asteroids are going to hit. The problem is, as politicians and as people, we have got to set priorities. If you are being scared to death with things that are not real because people have their own political agenda, then you are not making the right decisions and you are not going in the right direction.

FC: Your view on windmills?

TB: They are not hot air but there is certainly a lot of blowing in the wind. They only function between a certain range of wind speed. Below a certain wind speed they don’t operate; above a certain wind speed they have to shut down. They make an enormous amount of noise; in fact, there are studies in Europe now showing that some of the low harmonics actually cause problems in the body for people living near them. There is also the irony that the Greens in Germany are trying to shut the windmills down because they are killing birds by the millions. There is one windmill in California that is in a mountain pass that has killed condors and eagles and all sorts of other species that have been designated as “at risk.” The problem is, of course, that the wind mills are put where the wind blows and that’s where the birds fly particularly during migration. The other thing is that wind doesn’t blow all the time and if you have a wind generation system you have to almost 100% backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and so it simply doesn’t work.

FC: How could so many scientists be on the man-made global warming bandwagon? Are their views derived more from political science than hard science?

TB: Well, their views are from political science, their views are also a function of where you go to get the funding and who provides the funding. But also, the majority of the scientists who are on the Kyoto and global warming bandwagon know nothing about the science. David Suzuki is a perfect example. He has said publicly that he would be happy to debate genetic modification with anybody, because that is his area of expertise. Well, I could say the same thing to him, that he doesn’t know anything about global warming or climate change and so I will debate it with him and so you have this problem. The other problem is that so many of the scientists who are quoted as being on side with global warming are actually doing studies on the impact of global warming and climate changes and their studies then are listed as evidence for support of it. They are not, they are just starting with the assumption that global warming is going to occur, and what effect that would have. That is not support or proof at all.

FC: Are public funds for research that confounds the conventional wisdom impossible to obtain? Do scientists have to form their conclusions in advance to suit the zeitgeist?

TB: This is a part of the problem, You have the scientific problem about global warming and, as Richard Lindzen said, the consensus was reached before the research had even begun. But the other side of it is that if you are getting money to prove a certain point, then you are going to try desperately to prove that point. The whole point about scientific research is you have a hypothesis but you must be prepared to accept what is called the null hypothesis. That is that your hypothesis isn’t true, that something else is true. That’s true science. But what is happening now is that you set out to prove the science and there is a temptation to jiggle the data to make that happen and it is really a very unhealthy scientific environment in which to operate.

FC: Why is the famous “hockey stick” graph wrong?

TB: The ”hockey stick” graph was draw by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes in a paper published in 1998. It is referred to as the ”hockey stick” because the handle of the graph reflects temperature being essentially unchanged for a 1,000 years and the blade is a sudden up- turn in the 20th century. It is wrong because Michael Mann fixed the data. I can’t describe it any other way. Two Canadian tried to reproduce the results using the same data and the same methods but got completely different records. So that whole study, which has been the basis of the United Nations report and is the basis of the government of Canada’s argument, shows there is clear evidence of the human signal in climate change. It is based on completely wrong science.

FC: What’s going to happen with Canada and Kyoto? We have signed on.

TB: Unfortunately, we spent an awful lot of money already but most of it has been spent on propaganda. It hasn’t been spent on the scientific investigation of the problem. I hope what will happen, and some of the signals we are hearing out of Ottawa, is that Minister Dion is saying that we are going to get more climate experts involved. I was personally involved in this. David Anderson was going around saying that he had consulted the climate experts. Well eight of us, tops in the world and in Canada, went to Ottawa to have a press conference and said, ”Look, not one of us was consulted.” Of course, we know why we weren’t consulted, because we weren’t going along with his political agenda and so we were excluded. This is very unhealthy and I think that Dion and Martin recognize that and at least will listen to the other side. Now how they act on that, of course, is another question. But I think that, once they realize the science is wrong and the threat to the economy in terms of cost, they will come to their senses and they will do what Russia is going to do and what Japan has already said they are doing. They will ratify but they won’t implement.

FC: The politically correct version of climate change theory is taught in our schools, particularly the greenhouse gas version which blames human activity and excess materialism for warming. How do we depoliticize these topics in our schools?

TB: The simple answer is that you have got to have the climate change and global warming issue taught in the science part of the curriculum as well as the social sciences. The fact that it is totally restricted to the social science curriculum puts a terrible bias on it. So I think we need to get it over into the science side and help the students understand the science of it. Then the political discussion can be based on something that is real and factual, rather than emotion and threats and fear. I always tell people you need a very good BS detector. The minute that people start saying it is going to threaten our children and our grandchildren, don’t listen to them anymore, they are now playing the emotional card. Yes, we need to care about our children and our grandchildren but you don’t care about them by scaring people into wrong policy.

FC: You are a distinguished climatologist who moved from Winnipeg to Victoria. Is there something you know that we don’t here in Winnipeg?

TB: Well, no. Actually, I always joke about the hard sell of being a climatologist that chose to live in Winnipeg. Winnipeg was very good to me but I was born in England and I missed the ocean. One of the things that people don’t realize is that where we are born is sort of imprinted on us. For example, one of the reasons that animals can “home” is because of the magnetic field which they can detect and even we as humans have magnetite in our brains and I think we are a function of the sorts of environments in which we are born and we have a tendency to want to go back to those. I certain missed the ocean being born in England but, as I said, Winnipeg was very good to me and I really enjoyed living here.

Natives:Throwing Good Money After Bad

2005-11-19T12:52:00.000-05:00

Throwing Good Money After Bad

Once again the federal government is throwing more good money after bad, rather than fixing the problem. As indicated in the federal budget, the government will provide $295 million over 5 years for native reserve housing.

The money will pay for 6,400 new houses and renovate 1,500 existing homes. But money isn’t the problem. Over the past decade, taxpayers have spent $3.8 billion on housing for 97,500 native households.

So if money isn’t the problem, what is?

The Department of Indian Affairs and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) transfer money directly to native band councils. From there it is up to the chief and council to determine who gets a new house or repairs. There is a fundamental problem in this relationship. The three main players – Indian Affairs, CMHC and native bands – cannot agree on their roles and responsibilities. To make matters worse, according to Department of Indian Affairs internal audits, some native governments fail to account properly for existing responsibilities and funding.

One of the responsibilities of band councils, for example, is to ensure any new housing meets National Building Code standards. The auditor general, in a recent report, notes that bands often have no competent way to ensure new housing meets codes, which may explain the high percentage of houses in desperate need of repair.

Land on a native reserve is held in trust by the Crown and is controlled collectively by the native band council, not by individuals. As a result, native Canadians living on reserves do not own their houses in fee simple. This leads to a lack of desire on the part of native Canadians to maintain, repair or renovate their houses.

Developing workable systems of private property rights on native reserves is required. This will empower individual native Canadians and facilitate market transactions necessary to attain widespread prosperity on native reserves. Private property rights that are stable and transferable are the foundation for wealth creation the world over and communally held property that produces wealth is the very rare exception, not the rule.

That said, the federal government isn’t likely to implement a system of private property ownership on native reserves anytime soon.

As a step toward securing individual private property for native Canadians, the use of certificates of possession should be better utilized. Certificates of possession, outlined in the Indian Act, do not take the form of fee simple ownership. However, the land held under a certificate of possession can be subdivided, left to an heir or sold to another person having a right to reside on that reserve. Canadian courts will settle disputes and enforce the rights generated by these certificates.

To achieve this, a holder of a certificate of possession transfers the certificate to the band as collateral. The band then signs a ministerial guarantee with CMHC in which it agrees to assume the mortgage in the event of a default. Once the mortgage is paid off, the certificate is transferred back to the individual. The process of paying for ones house promotes pride of ownership which results in individuals maintaining, repairing and renovating their property, thus saving taxpayers millions of dollars.

To end the merry-go-round of spending on housing for native reserves as perpetuated in this year’s budget, workable systems of private property need to be established and maintained. Through the establishment of private property on reserves, pride and prosperity will be recognized.

--30--

For further information contact:
Tanis Fiss, Director, Centre for Aboriginal Policy Change
Ph: 1-403-263-1202

Feds plan to make West foot bill for Kyoto fiasco

2005-11-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

November 7, 2005

Bull's-eye on our backs
Feds plan to make West foot bill for Kyoto fiasco
By Ezra Levant

While the nation's eyes were on AdScam, federal Environment Minister Stephane Dion quietly made an announcement about the Kyoto Protocol.

Quebec, he promised, will only have to bear 7% of Canada's pain to implement the pact.

Quebec makes up 24% of Canada's population, but it is guaranteed 33% of the seats on the Supreme Court. Quebec receives 45% of Canada's equalization payments. Fully 62% of the Liberal MPs from Quebec are cabinet ministers or parliamentary secretaries. The Canadian prime minister has come from Quebec for 96% of the last 37 years and 100% of the last 12 years.

But when it comes to lifting the load, well that's another story. That's why Dion announced -- in Quebec and in French of course -- that Alberta and Saskatchewan would be picking up most of the tab on Kyoto.

Dion aide Brigitte Caron, expanded on the theme. "The minister wants to demonstrate that no-one wants to demand more from Quebec (than of other provinces)." Well, he demonstrated that -- by painting a bull's-eye on the back of each Albertan and Saskatchewanian.

What's ironic is Quebec has been one of the loudest voices for the Kyoto Protocol. Its premier, Jean Charest, was once a pro-Kyoto federal environment minister. The Bloc Quebecois has been one of the biggest pro-Kyoto tub-thumpers in Parliament.

Yet, when it comes to implementing Kyoto, they expect the burdens to be borne by others -- others who oppose Kyoto. It's the same logic of most green activists: They demand lower use of fuels, but squawk when the price of gas goes up. They want to be environmental, but at someone else's expense. Scratch that: They don't even want to be environmental -- they just want to be environmentally self-righteous.

This, by the way, is the second part of the National Energy Program two-step. The first part is the desire to grab the West's oil wealth; the second is the means.

The first part was also articulated in French, in Quebec, by a Liberal cabinet minister. In August, Quebec's senior Liberal, Jean Lapierre, announced the intention to "even things out" with Alberta.

"The federal government has the duty to be a real partner (to Quebec), especially since as a government we benefit from the West's wealth," Lapierre told the Sherbrooke Tribune. "So we have to redistribute the wealth. After all, the good fortune of the West could become a disaster for the East."

That's the desire -- the envy. If you need more convincing, ask the federal Liberal campaign co-chair in Quebec: Marc Lalonde, Trudeau's energy minister from the NEP days.

The means to achieve this desire is the Kyoto Protocol. When listening to Liberal denials that they plan to bring in another NEP, it's best to listen as one would to, say, Bill Clinton. Look at the precise choice of words.

When Clinton claimed he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky", he pretended he was telling the truth, because he didn't consider what he and Lewinsky did to be "sexual relations".

When today's Liberals say they would never bring in the National Energy Program again, they make the same mental reservation. They'll bring in a National Environmental Program that has the same effect. But it will be about Kyoto, they'll say. Totally different, they'll say. They weren't lying, they'll say.

In August, Lapierre explained the desire: Take the West's money. Last week, Dion explained the plan: Make Alberta pay for Kyoto. Anyone still think they don't mean it?

Levant is Publisher of the Western Standard

Clear out the bullies

2005-11-19T12:33:00.000-05:00

November 16, 2005

Clear out the bullies
By CHRISTINA BLIZZARD

How ironic that, at the beginning of a week set aside to fight bullying, a horrific story emerges of a young teen who has allegedly been brutalized at her school for as long as 18 months before she finally told a teacher who called in police.

And much as we may all be shocked by such allegations, anyone who has a child in an inner city Toronto school knows that there is an undercurrent of violence in many of them that needs to be addressed. Forget all those namby-pamby, anti-bullying programs. What these thugs need isn't a group hug and a round of Kumbaya. Many schools need a full-time cop.

Frankly, I'm getting just a bit tired of the politically correct wall you run into any time you dare suggest we get tough on the hoodlums who terrorize our schools.

First, there was the Safe Schools Act brought in by the previous Tory government. That is now under review. Why? Because some parents complained it was "racist," in that it disproportionately targeted black youths. Another criticism is that it arbitrarily expelled youngsters and left them on the streets with no place to go. The first point is a pretty sweeping condemnation of teachers and school principals, since they are the ones enforcing the law. I don't think for a moment teachers are, as a profession, racist. And there are programs for expelled students to go to. If they are full, then the government needs to get more up and running.

The allegations in this case make it crystal clear: Victims need protection -- not the bullies. You need to get the perpetrators of violence out of the schools. It may be a hard lesson. But here's a handy guide to avoid expulsion: Behave yourself. Don't threaten other students. Don't fight. Keep your fists to yourself. Don't use abusive or profane language. Don't assault your teachers or other students. Don't bring guns or knives to school. While we're at it, parents might try to enforce these rules, instead of excusing their little darlings. Apparently, they're not, "bad," they're just "misunderstood." Or so they'd have you believe. Well, follow my rules and I guarantee you won't be expelled.

At the other end of the scale, on Monday two teacher unions held one of the more self-serving news conferences I have attended recently. The Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA) and Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) hauled out a study showing an estimated 30% of teachers have been bullied by parents or guardians, 24% of teachers have been bullied by school administrators and 15% of teachers have been bullied by other colleagues. The unions want legislation to outlaw psychological bullying in the workplace.

Well, here's an idea. When a group of adult employees who belong to some of the strongest unions in the province can't handle a few nasty words from a co-worker or a parent, then it isn't a new law you need. It's a spine.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing but sympathy for the average teacher. In some schools in this city, they have to deal with weapons and violence on a daily basis.

But this week, the biggest news story was about awful allegations of a child who has been terrorized in a school for a year and a half. Yet the biggest concern these union bosses have is psychological abuse? Give me a break.

Kids learn from example. One of the unions, OECTA, was involved in an incident almost three years ago when then-Tory Education Minister Elizabeth Witmer had water poured over her by union members at a convention.

Okay, the union apologized. The College of Teachers resolved it through a "dispute resolution," process rather than through a disciplinary hearing. But when teachers set that kind of example, how do you expect to control schools?

Meanwhile, the real victims are the kids who daren't go to school because they fear violence. Every child has the right to an education in peace and security. We've already lost control of our streets to a violent element. Let's not let our schools go the same way. We need cops in them -- now.

Saddam got $1.8B in UN scandal

2005-10-29T07:58:00.000-04:00

October 27, 2005
Saddam got $1.8B in UN scandal

UNITED NATIONS (CP) - Investigators of the UN oil-for-food program issued a final report Thursday that accused more than 2,200 companies, and some politicians, of colluding with Saddam Hussein's regime to bilk the operation of $1.8 billion US.

The 623-page document was a scathing indictment that exposed the global scope of a scam that allegedly involved such name-brand companies as DaimlerChrysler and Siemens AG, as well as a former French UN ambassador, a firebrand British politician and the president of Italy's Lombardi region.

The report meticulously detailed how the $64 billion program became a cash cow for Saddam and more than half the companies participating in oil-for-food. It blamed shoddy UN management and the world's most powerful countries for allowing it to go on for years.

"The corruption of the program by Saddam would not nearly have been so pervasive if there had been diligent management by the United Nations and its agencies," said Paul Volcker, a former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman who led the investigation.

Volcker and many countries said the report underscored the urgent need to reform the United Nations. His earlier reports have already led to criminal inquiries and indictments in the United States, France, and Switzerland.

The investigators found that companies and individuals from 66 countries paid illegal kickbacks using a variety of methods, and those paying illegal oil surcharges were from 40 countries.

Canadian firms appeared to have played a minor role: a handful were mentioned but actual amounts cited totalled about $130,000.

Most of the contracts went to Russian and French companies and individuals, who were rewarded for their governments' outspoken opposition to the sanctions.

The oil-for-food program, which ran from 1996-2003, allowed Iraq to sell oil provided most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods. It was launched to help the Iraqi people cope with UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

But Saddam, who could choose the buyers of Iraqi oil and the sellers of humanitarian goods, corrupted the program by awarding contracts to - and getting kickbacks from - favoured buyers.

Volcker's $38 million investigation had earlier faulted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, his Canadian deputy Louise Frechette, and the Security Council for tolerating corruption and doing little to stop Saddam's manipulations.

The final report says there were two main ways they did it: through kickbacks paid for humanitarian contracts for spare parts, trucks, medical equipment and other supplies; and surcharges for oil contracts. Most of the illicit income - more than $1.5 billion - came from the humanitarian contracts.

The contracts of two Calgary-based companies were listed as having involved "after-sales service fees" - kickbacks - to Iraq.

The report said $15,272 in such fees was paid in a contract with Kvaerner Process Systems, which supplied electrical and oil equipment and spare parts; and $115,786 was paid in a deal involving Maloney Industries Inc., a supplier of well-potential testing skids.

Simmons Drilling (Overseas) Ltd., was listed as having faced a requirement to pay so-called "inland transportation fees" but no specific information was available on any payment.

The report said there was no response from Kvaerner when queried. Maloney and Simmons denied making payments to Iraq in violation of the program, the report said.

A call to Kvaerner Thursday was not returned immediately. Maloney Industries was purchased by Hanover Compressor Company in 2000.

Hanover complied fully with requests for information during the investigation, said Rick Goins, a Hanover spokesman in Houston. "The conclusion is the available evidence does not reflect that Maloney financed a kickback payment or Maloney's officers or employees were aware of or agreed to a kickback payment," he said.

The report emphasized the identification of a company's contract as having been the subject of an illicit payment "does not necessarily mean that such company - as opposed to an agent or secondary purchaser with an interest in the transaction - made, authorized, or knew about an illicit payment."

Several other Canadian companies were mentioned as having had contracts with Iraq, but there was no indication they paid any kickbacks or surcharges.

Among other companies that paid surcharges were South Korea's Daewoo International and three subsidiaries of Siemens AG of Germany, as well as the Brussels, Belgium-based Volvo Construction Equipment.

On the oil side, contractors listed included Texas-based Bayoil and Coastal Corp., Russian oil giant Gazprom, and Lukoil Asia Pacific, a subsidiary of the Russian company Lukoil.

The founder and former chairman of Coastal, Texas oil tycoon Oscar Wyatt, pleaded not guilty Thursday in New York to charges that he conspired to pay several million dollars in illegal kickbacks to Saddam's regime to win contracts through the program.

Volcker's report referred to Wyatt as a "longtime and loyal oil customer of Iraq," the lone exception to an Iraqi ban on selling oil to American companies.

Among individuals, investigators found that Jean-Bernard Merrimee, France's former UN ambassador, received $165,725 in commissions from oil allocations awarded to him by the Iraqi regime. He is now under investigation in France but has denied wrongdoing.

Other so-called "political beneficiaries" included British legislator George Galloway; Roberto Formigoni, the president of the Lombardi region in Italy; and Rev. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a priest who once worked as an assistant to the Vatican secretary of state and became an activist for lifting Iraqi sanctions.

Formigoni, in a statement, said he received "neither a drop of oil, nor a single cent." Galloway also denied the allegations, saying "I've never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have."

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who heads Russia's Liberal Democratic party, and Alexander Voloshin, who at the time was chief of staff in the administration of Russia's president, were also named. Both have denied wrongdoing.

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On the Net: http://www.iic-offp.org/

Bailing out Grits

2005-10-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

Bailing out Grits
By Neil Waugh

Alberta Premier Ralph Klein was back on his game in Fort McMurray last week.

It was just in the nick of time, especially after Prime Minister Paul Martin gave United States President George W. Bush what amounted to a crank call over the softwood lumber dispute.

Martin's constitutionally challenged Natural Resources Minister Bill Graham was over in China sounding like he's threatening to sell Alberta oil to the Chinese to spite the Americans. How he plans on doing that, goofy Graham never explains. But the premier felt it wise to remind the Ottawa Liberals of how the country is supposed to work nonetheless.

"Our government team knows that Alberta controls its own destiny," Klein told his Fort Mac fundraiser. "We are not going to squander this opportunity." Then he brought the hammer down. "We will not let Ottawa snatch that opportunity away from us, by an unfair raid on the energy sector or the wealth it generates," Klein spat.

Sure, Ralph's looking real bad on the Tyson Foods strike, clearly the victim of bad advice and B-team cabinet ministers. But there's no doubt where his heart lies when it comes to redistributing Alberta's windfall oil and gas billions.

He told the chamber of commerce suits, the opposition socialists and eggheads just whose side he's on: the folks he calls "severely normal" Albertans.

"I make no apologies for returning a portion of Alberta's windfall revenues back to Albertans," Klein said.

He talked about how "all of Alberta benefits" when the money is in our pockets. Then he took a well-needed shot at the "special interests" who have placed themselves on an intellectual plateau above us.

"Albertans are smart enough to know what to do with their money and don't need government to tell them how to spend it," the premier blasted.

Welcome back, Ralph. It's been a while.

Considering that Alberta just bailed Canada out of a big one and saved Martin's economic butt, you'd think Ottawa would be a little more grateful.

"Canadian exports back on track," boomed the Toronto-Dominion Bank's latest economic commentary. But don't congratulate the parts of Canada that votes for Paul Martin for saving our economic bacon.

"As expected, surging energy prices proved the cornerstone of the export growth," TD economist Eric Lascelles said.

Even though natural gas exports went down in volume, prices rose an incredible 13%.

Alberta's cow patch, now that the U.S. border is open again to live cattle, also made Martin's bottom line a lot blacker.

"Canada's sickly pallor on the trade front seems to be in the rear-view mirror," Lascelles whooped.

Thanks to Albertans.

But there are dangerous folk plotting against the province's fossil fuel-based economy. Especially with the big United Nations climate change conference in late November in Montreal, where the preposterous prime minister will once again pretend to be the savior of the world.

"Top Alberta air polluters revealed," screamed the Canadian Environmental Law Association press release. (I've never heard of them either.) The outfit fingered what it called the "dirty dozen" polluters which it claimed are causing "cancer, respiratory illnesses, reproductive harm, developmental harm and hormone disruption."

But breathe easy, it turns out the Alberta horror show isn't what it seems. The dirty dozen includes: Syncrude, the Sundance, Sheerness, Battle River, Genesee, Keephills and Wabamun power plants, Suncor, the Scotford upgrader and the Waterton, Kaybob and Ram River gas plants.

They are all operating within strict emissions guidelines. Yikes, that's the industrial heartland of Alberta.

And if this sinister environmental law group had its way, they would shut us down.

But there's one Ottawa Liberal who finally seems to get it. Federal Environment Minister Stephane Dion has a confession to make.

"The fact is," Dion told a climate change meeting in Montreal recently, "the fossil fuel industry is here to stay for a long time. It's too large a part of the global economy to be realistically eliminated from the world's energy mix in our foreseeable future."

Yup, he really said it.

Canada US Relations

2005-10-16T13:12:00.000-04:00

October 16, 2005

No snoozing for Senator
Head of Security and Defence Committee isn't afraid to speak out on big issues
By Licia Corbella

Senator Colin Kenny walked into the Sun building carrying a briefcase over his right shoulder and a small airline pillow under his left arm.

He didn't wait for the wisecracks to come.

"I know this looks funny and plays into the negative senatorial stereotype of people asleep on the job," he said with a laugh.

"But this is for my left elbow, not my head," he added, referring to a recent operation he had to repair the loss of feeling throughout his left forearm.

"A kind flight attendant at Air Canada insisted I take it."

The irony of Kenny walking around with his own pillow is that he's undoubtedly the most vital, wise and hard working senator on Parliament Hill.

And to add to the irony, he's a Liberal.

However, unlike most Liberal politicians in Canada, Kenny is not afraid to break ranks and speak out against his own party and its policies.

Kenny, chair of the Senate's Standing Committee on National Security and Defence, released a report last month that is a stinging indictment of the incompetence, mismanagement and neglect the Liberal government has inflicted upon Canada's Armed Forces over the past 12 years.

The report's title -- Wounded: Canada's Military and the Legacy of Neglect, Canada's Disappearing Options for Defending the Nation at Home and Abroad -- pretty much sums up Canada's inability to protect itself from either attacks or natural disasters.

But it was what Kenny had to say about Canada's relationship with our only neighbour that was just as important as his lengthy report and should be heeded.

Kenny referred to a speech made by Frank McKenna, Canada's Ambassador to the U.S., in which McKenna criticized the U.S. government system as "dysfunctional" because it has checks and balances in its political system.

Curious, eh?

In Canada we have a prime minister who gets to appoint every member of the Supreme Court, the Senate, the head of the Armed Forces, the national police force, the ethics commissioner, the head of every government agency and corporation and McKenna says the U.S. system is dysfunctional?

What's more, in September, McKenna also told a Washington-based Canadian journalist that Canada's "energy file" could be "an important card" for government to use as leverage to push the U.S. administration to see things Canada's way in other trade disputes, particularly softwood lumber.

"The whole American file frustrates me no end," said Kenny.

"Can you imagine what would happen if the American ambassador had said something like that in Canada?" asked Kenny.

"We'd all be pulling our hair out.

"Getting the American file right should be file No. 1 for Canada. A trade war is not on," he added.

According to Andre Lemay, spokesperson for the federal government's International Trade ministry, in 2004 Canada exported $348 billion to the U.S.

In turn, the U.S. exported $209 billion to Canada. In other words Canada has a whopping $139 billion trade surplus.

"One out of every three Canadian jobs is directly or indirectly related to trade with the United States," said Lemay.

Fully 84.5% of Canada's exports go to the U.S.

Basically, Canada needs the U.S. more than it need us, though Americans would suffer greatly as well if we entered into an all-out trade war.

Canada imports more goods from the U.S. than all 25 countries of the European Union combined.

In 2003, U.S. exports to the province of Ontario alone were worth more than U.S. exports to Japan.

Lemay added that Canada does more trade with Home Depot's head office in Atlanta than it does with all of France.

So, yes, both countries would be hurt if we got into an all-out trade battle but Canada would be left knocked out and bloody, while the U.S. would suffer a black eye and some bruised ribs by comparison.

"The suggestion of linking one trade issue with another makes zero sense," continued Kenny.

"It doesn't make any sense economically when you consider the balance of trade and it doesn't make any sense in terms of how divisive it would be in Canada," he said.

"Are we really going to trade oil for lumber? I don't think so. Can you imagine how that would turn one Canadian against another?" Kenny asked.

What Kenny didn't say was that Prime Minister Paul Martin took part in some trade "linkage" himself, insinuating to a U.S. audience at the Economic Club of New York on Oct. 6, that Canada just might decide to sell its oil and gas and "exploit" Asian markets rather than sell to the U.S.

Indeed, a few days after that speech, he sent acting Natural Resources Minister John McCallum on a trade mission to China to find new markets for our energy.

Martin's audacity is immense.

As Alberta Premier Ralph Klein said recently: "I don't care if (Martin) wants to sell and promote our oil. But it's not his to sell."

Exactly.

Instead of meddling where he doesn't belong, Martin should focus on doing his job.

This past Friday, Martin finally called President George W. Bush to talk about softwood lumber.

That's a whopping 64 days after the final appeal panel on NAFTA ruled that the U.S. owes Canada $5 billion in unlawful tariffs charged to our lumber industry.

Sixty four days!

The man is a coward.

Senator Kenny may be the one walking around with a pillow, but unfortunately it's our prime minister who's asleep at the helm.

School Yards No Fun

2005-10-15T16:26:00.000-04:00

October 13, 2005

Thrill is gone
By MICHAEL PLATT

I've been hanging around playgrounds. No, not like that -- there's no need to call the police, or keep your children locked indoors.

Maybe what I should say is we've been hanging around playgrounds.

You see, I have my own little girl, so my presence among the slides and swings is perfectly legitimate. Like any dad, I'm a slave to my wee one's thrill-seeking demands.

I push, slide and climb, both to make her happy, and to ensure she's safe.

I've found myself wedged inside playground tubes too tiny to comfortably fit a dachshund, and I've smacked my head on steel bars, while helping her onto slides designed for kids and circus contortionists. I hardly even notice the park gravel anymore, as it trickles into my shoes.

It's all in a day's work for a dad. And my daughter loves playgrounds, or at least the swings. The sheer rush of being a 26-lb. pendulum leaves her giggling and wanting more.

No ride makes her day like a good old-fashioned swing-set, and it's the same story for a lot of kids. Swings are the place to be, while the rest of the playground -- a spaghetti of wood, plastic and old rubber tires -- is usually neglected.

The basic swing, the only ride left over from my childhood (and the childhood of anyone raised before basic safety gave way to parenting paranoia) is now the most popular playground attraction.

It wasn't the case back then: swings were fun, but not like the skyscraper-high monkey bars, or slides that required a serious hike to the top, before shooting you back to the ground so fast your stomach felt a full second behind.

I don't have the heart to tell the truth to my daughter, even if she was old enough to understand.

She can't read, so it's safe to print it here. Modern playgrounds are boring.

Seriously -- they're tedious.

Since my playground knowledge contains a gap of about 20 years, can someone please explain what happened to all the good rides?

At what point, between 1985 and 2005, did someone step in and take the fun equipment away, replacing it with safe-and-dreary designs capable of thrilling no one, except over-protective mothers?

I miss things like merry-go-rounds; those spinning platforms kids would whip into a near-blur, before jumping on, clinging to the bars for dear life. We'd hang off the edge, face-down, playing "dropped-it/picked-it-up" with a twig or popsicle stick. Falling off meant nasty, dirt-filled scrapes, and every child had the scars to prove it.

Monkey bars were works of art: There were rocket ships, airplanes, chuckwagons and abstract towers. They were high, cold and dangerous -- and there was no better place to play tag. If you fell, you returned with a cast, or an angry bruise, ready to climb again.

The slides were impossibly tall, and built to ensure the ladder was only one route to the top. Scaling the actual slide, or the metal scaffolding, was far more daring. Especially in winter, when the steel was coated with ice.

As well as slides, there were fireman's poles, which took strong nerves and stronger ankles -- the landings were hard.

The old parks also had horses. Most hung like swings, but one rare type was the pre-motorized equivalent of a mechanical bull.

Long and low, with a row of seats, such horses would buck wildly, as six kids fought to hang on.

And there were see-saws. Nothing like the feeble plastic designs found on today's parks, these were massive planks of wood, rising six feet in the air.

Woe be the child whose partner jumped off, leaving the weighted end to crash down.

There were others, but my memories are hazy. Suffice to say, the best rides combined fear with immense fun, and kids loved them.

Today's playgrounds are low to the ground, with round edges with safety bars and soft gravel all around. It's no wonder many kids prefer to play video games at home -- broccoli gets the blood pumping faster than most modern parks.

Of course, I'll keep taking my little daughter to her swings, so she can laugh, and tell me to push harder.

And someday, when she asks me what the playgrounds were like when I was little, daddy will pretend he can't remember.

I wouldn't want to make her sad.

Oilpatch demonized

2005-10-15T08:55:00.000-04:00

October 10, 2005
Oilpatch demonized
Essential industry convenient scapegoat for politicians
By EZRA LEVANT

Last Monday, the other Calgary daily ran a large editorial cartoon attacking the oilpatch. A cigar-chomping caricature of a corporate fat cat -- standing in front of a billboard saying "BIG OIL," just in case the cigar and wine glass were too subtle -- explains economics to Calgarians.

"It's a simple case of supply and demand," says the fat-cat. "I demand a lavish lifestyle, and you supply it." The editorial message is clear: people who work for oil companies are greedy and oil prices are high because of their greed.

One might have expected such a cartoon to run in a Montreal or Toronto newspaper, for those cities are a breeding ground for anti-Alberta envy these days. But in Calgary?

The personal demonization of oil executives is stomach-turning. Who is that fat-cat supposed to be? EnCana's Gwyn Morgan, Calgary's most respected businessman? Or Talisman's Jim Buckee, whose company donates millions to Calgary community projects?

Or is it supposed to represent the industry as a whole -- the thousands of Calgarians who work directly or indirectly in the energy sector as accountants, engineers and a hundred other noble professions and trades? Or is the target the families of those workers, whose "lavish lifestyles" are paid for by having a breadwinner in the oilpatch?

There is no satisfactory answer.

What is such an opinion called? What is it called to rename someone with an unappealing name (Big Oil), make them look physically repulsive (a cigar-chomping, wine-swilling egotist) put appalling words in their mouth ("I demand a lavish lifestyle") and blame that scapegoat for troubles in our lives (high oil prices)?

It's called bigotry.

Here's a lesson about oil prices for that cartoonist. Oil prices aren't set in Calgary. They're not set by "Big Oil." They're the result of growing demand, especially in the U.S., China and India, and tight supplies because of political uncertainty in the Middle East, Venezuela and Nigeria, and the hurricane-wrecked oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. How do Calgary oil men fit into that -- other than as people pumping as much as they can to fill the shortfall?

It's unlikely Paul Martin saw that cartoon, but he'd like it if he did. Last week he went to New York, where he threatened to restrict energy exports to the U.S.

Martin hinted to New York investors, and then again on CNN, that he would use energy exports as a way to punish the U.S. for not giving in to other Canadian diplomatic demands. According to news reports, Martin said Canada could easily shift its oil exports away from the U.S. and to China and India instead.

Let's not get distracted by focusing on how Martin has frittered away an already deteriorating relationship with the U.S., from his Ballistic Missile Defence flip-flop, to his passive-aggressive approach to the softwood lumber case. This is about Martin feeling comfortable using the oilpatch -- translation: Alberta -- as a weapon in Canada-U.S. relations. Do you think for a second that he'd get away with that if he threatened to use Ontario's auto industry in the same way?

The oilpatch already has enough enemies in Ottawa. It doesn't need more in Calgary newspapers. Where are the oilpatch's advocates? Or have they taken the cartoonist's cue, and become self-loathing?

Have they bought into the demonization?

As the poet W.B. Yeats wrote 85 years ago, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

Better to consult Vikings on Kyoto

2005-10-15T08:53:00.000-04:00

October 13, 2005
Better to consult Vikings on Kyoto
By LICIA CORBELLA

Way back in the years 1000 to 1200 AD, Vikings farmed on the now frozen islands of Greenland and Iceland.

That's right, 800 to 1,000 years ago, when the Earth was sparsely populated and the internal combustion engine wasn't anywhere close to becoming even a spark of an idea, the Earth was warmer than it is today.

How can that be when we keep hearing that the earth is getting catastrophically too warm?

That's the kind of question Dr. Douglas Leahey, President of the Calgary-based group Friends of Science, is hoping more and more Canadians ask themselves -- and soon.

Yesterday, Friends of Science launched an ad campaign in vote-rich and Liberal-ruled central Ontario to bust a few global warming myths. And there are many.

The 30-second radio spots asks listeners to engage in a quick true-and-false quiz.

1) Global warming causes the violent weather worldwide.

2) The Earth is warmer today than it has been in 1,000 years.

3) Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is dangerous pollution.

"If you said 'yes' to all three then you've been misled," states the radio ad, urging those listening to ask their MP why they want to spend $10 billion on unproven global-warming theories and inviting listeners to visit the group's website: www.friendsofscience.org

Log onto that site and it's positively chock-a-block with myth-busting facts, all backed up with scientific articles and studies.

In fact, Dr. Tim Patterson, a professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, is quoted on the site saying: "If back in the mid-nineties, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary."

Dr. Timothy Ball, Canada's first climatology Ph.D states it even more forcefully. "The Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification."

Leahey said numerous other climate scientists along with himself have watched in alarm as much of the world and its media "buy in 100 percent to the notion that man's emissions of CO2 was causing rapid global warming."

"We saw billions, if not trillions of dollars being earmarked for the Kyoto protocol and we felt very concerned that science was being pushed aside by hysteria over global warming," he said at a news conference at Calgary's Chamber of Commerce.

But Leahey, Patterson and Ball don't stand alone as voices crying out in the wilderness as to the foolishness, wastefulness and ineffectiveness of Kyoto. They are joined by no less than 19,700 other scientists -- 95% of them Ph.D's -- who have signed the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition which states in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

There are many other global-warming myths being debunked, and many can be found at the Friends of Science website -- which is funded mostly by a University of Calgary trust fund.

For instance, most people keep hearing from environmental groups and media that the Earth's poles are warming. But that's just not what science indicates. Studies show that while the western Arctic is getting a little warmer due to "unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean," the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder.

The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling.

Leahey points out that the $10 billion the federal Liberals plan to squander on implementing Kyoto would be better spent on fighting pollution or hiring more doctors.

"The only thing that is certain about climate," said Leahey, "is that it will change."

It always has and always will. Science proves it. While most of the world's climate scientists now say man-made global warming is mostly just a bunch of hot air, they are hoping politicians will soon catch on.

Frankly, with the corrupt, incompetent and deceitful lot we have running this country, don't hold your breath.

A male bastion once more

2005-10-15T08:10:00.000-04:00

A male bastion once more
Women turn away after years of gains Universities try

to lure them back

LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER

Engineering schools in Ontario are grappling with a drop in female students in an alarming reversal of the trend everywhere else in universities.

Women have fallen to just 20 per cent of first-year engineering classes in Ontario, down from almost 30 per cent five years ago — just as they reach nearly 60 per cent of all university undergraduates, more than 53 per cent of medical students and nearly half of law and business classes in North America.

Worried educators blame the drop partly on engineering's outdated image — "We're not all nerdy Dilberts!" insists one female prof — but also on a daunting new Grade 12 math course believed to be scaring off many students, especially less math-cocky females.

"The new math course is killing us, because even though girls do well in math, they often don't think they're any good, so they'll decide not to take it and then don't choose engineering," said biophysicist Gillian Wu, York University's dean of science and engineering.

In a bid to halt the growing gender gap, Ontario's 15 engineering schools held an emergency summit last winter and have launched a number of rare steps this fall:

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They have changed entrance requirements this year to make them more female-friendly, by scrapping the dreaded Geometry and Discrete Math course as a compulsory requirement for engineering, and instead making it one of several options students may take, including biology, a subject girls often prefer, as well as earth science and data management.

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They have banded together to host simultaneous hands-on workshops next Saturday at campuses across the province to pitch engineering to girls and their parents as a "people profession" that helps others as much as the health professions so popular with teenaged girls.

The five-hour event, called Go Eng Girl, will try to replace the notion of engineers as "grease monkeys who just tinker with machines," says mechanical engineer Lisa Anderson, Ryerson University's full-time co-ordinator of women in engineering, "with the more up-to-date image of engineers doing everything from designing hip replacements to finding ways to reduce pollution."

Go Eng Girl workshops will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the University of Toronto and 10 other campuses. See http://www.ospe.on.ca/goenggirl to register.

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They have formed a new province-wide committee to ensure high school guidance counsellors realize engineers are not merely "math nerds with pocket-protectors who work in cubicles all day long," said engineer Marta Ecsedi, the University of Toronto's advisor on women in engineering.

"We know girls are drawn to professions they see as `caring' for others, so girls who are strong in math often veer towards health sciences," said Ecsedi, whose daughter is a mechanical engineer working on ways to relieve spinal cord pain.

Ontario's engineering schools hope to change public perceptions
"They need to understand that engineering is also a `caring profession' that works on ways to detect breast cancer earlier, or clean up contaminated soil or reduce malnutrition in the world through measures like fortifying salt."

Student Sweeny Chhabra, 19, a third-year engineering science student at the U of T, says she had been encouraged in high school to choose medicine because she was good at math.

"But I don't like the idea of working with bodies. I actually prefer to work hands-on with machines, and I'm thinking of going into biomedical engineering; maybe the field of X-rays or MRIs," she said. "Engineering is so broad."

The U of T's Ecsedi first noticed the drop in female engineers four years ago after Ontario launched its new four-year curriculum, which leaves teens less time for optional subjects than under the old five-year plan. The new Grade 12 Discrete Math course was a prerequisite for engineering, but fewer students were signing up for it because it was so intimidating, she said.

"And we know if girls have any doubts at all about their math skills, they need a nudge or they'll drop it," she said. "We're not sure they're getting that nudge.'"

While girls consistently perform every bit as well as boys on Ontario's Grade 9 math test, only 25 per cent of girls say they think they're good at math, compared to 37 per cent of boys.

Ontario is reviewing the course this fall as part of an overhaul of the new math curriculum, but in the meantime engineering faculties decided to make entrance requirements more flexible.

"We've raised the red flag about this because engineering needs to represent the full diversity of life experience — cultural and gender — to be truly creative," said Ecsedi.

Go Eng Girl activities are free (register at http://www.ospe.on.ca/goenggirl), but girls must come with a parent because it is often parents who have outdated views of engineering, say organizers.

There are even experts on "math phobia" who will speak to parents to try to dispel the myth that girls can't do math and suggest how they can encourage their daughters even if they aren't math whizzes themselves. And then there's the old raunchy image of engineers.

"Look, the old image of engineers staying up all night drinking and waking up nurses doesn't really appeal to many girls today — or many of their parents," said York University's dean Gillian Wu.

"But people don't really know much about engineering, the way they understand dentistry or teaching or business. They'll read about some fabulous new building designed by architect Daniel Libeskind — but they won't realize it's engineers who will actually build it," said Wu. "Maybe we need a prime-time TV show like `CSI' to popularize engineering."

More 'useful idiots'

2005-10-03T19:24:00.000-04:00

More 'useful idiots'
By SALIM MANSUR

Vladimir Lenin coined the apt phrase "useful idiots" to describe those living in western democracies who made common cause with his Bolshevik politics.

He understood them well, held them in contempt while exploiting their despicable naivete and self-loathing for propaganda purposes of the gulag he made of Russia, and his successors from Stalin to Gorbachev served as chief wardens.

Similarly, Mao Zedong of China had his legion of useful idiots, such as the American journalist Edgar Snow, justifying his sadism as a display of earth-shaking statesmanship.

Mao's most recent biographers, Jung Chan and Jon Halliday, in a massive tome of impeccable scholarship, have given us the inside view of a China where people were raped, starved and murdered systematically.

Mao surpassed Stalin and Hitler -- it is some record to reflect upon -- to become, in Jung Chan's words, "the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world." The number of Chinese who perished in Mao's China exceeded 70 million.

In a free society, as in nature, aberration is not uncommon. "Useful idiots" are aberrations in a democratic society, frequently seditious, and a reminder that freedom has costs free people must bear vigilantly.

The recent anti-war demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere are comprised of the useful idiots of our time, who make common cause with bloody-minded insurgents determined to derail the difficult transition of Iraq, from tyranny to freedom.

Their public representatives, such as British MP George Galloway and Michael Moore, the duplicitous American filmmaker, openly embrace "jihadist" insurgents -- the fanatical dregs of the Arab-Muslim world -- colluding with former Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein.

Galloway is on record stating: "It can be said, truly said, that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs and they are defending all the people of the world against American hegemony."

In the excuse of opposing war, these useful idiots defend mass murderers, trade in conspiracy theories and spurn democratic societies by being obsequious to despots.

At the very same time these useful idiots gathered together last month to display their wretched time-worn politics of anti-war, making fools of their apologists in the lib-left media, Jalal Talabani of the emergent Iraq was attending the annual United Nations summit in New York.

Talabani is an Iraqi Kurd, a social democrat by conviction, a lifelong opponent of Saddam and a genuine hero of freedom-loving Iraqis. He was voted president by the first freely elected Iraqi parliament.

In a column published by The Wall Street Journal on the day he appeared in New York, Talabani addressed those who continue to be skeptics about Iraq and its future.

He wrote: "Without foreign intervention, the transition in Iraq would have been from Saddam's bloodstained hands to his psychopathic offspring. Instead, thanks to American leadership, Iraqis have been given an opportunity of peaceful, participatory politics. Contrary to the new conventional wisdom, Iraq and the history of 20th-century Europe demonstrate that force of arms can implant democracy in the most arid soil."

Despite the insurgency, he said, Iraq held an open election last January, "has a democratically elected head of state, government and Parliament" and "members of the most repressed ethnic groups now hold the highest offices of state."

These came about, Talabani reminded everyone, as "a result of the courage and vision of President (George) Bush and his allies, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, leaders whose commitment of troops to enforce UN Security Council resolutions liberated Iraq."

The useful idiots embracing insurgency in Iraq want, instead, to reverse history's forward march into freedom there, and elsewhere, consistent with their record.

Toxic change targets Alberta and lets Ontario go free

2005-10-03T19:15:00.000-04:00

Feds cloud real plan
Toxic change targets Alberta and lets Ontario go free
By Ezra Levant

Carbon dioxide is a colourless, odourless, harmless gas.

Actually it's not just harmless -- it's necessary for life on Earth, as all green plants require it for photosynthesis.

But on July 16, the federal government announced its intention to classify carbon dioxide as a "toxic chemical" under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

According to the Act, a toxic chemical is defined as "an immediate or long-term harmful effect on the environment," or "a danger to the environment on which life depends" or "a danger in Canada to human life or health". To call carbon dioxide any of these things is to lie. Carbon dioxide is essential not only to plant life, but it's the gas that humans -- and animals -- exhale when we breathe.

Carbon dioxide is not a toxic chemical in science or in common sense, so what's going on? In the same official notice, the explanation was provided: It's the way Ottawa plans to get jurisdiction over the oil patch to implement their Kyoto taxes.

The Kyoto Protocol is a dead letter. Most of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases are simply exempt from the treaty, including China, India, Brazil and OPEC. The treaty itself was rigged to give Europe a mulligan -- Europe got credit for East Germany shutting down its Soviet-era factories and the U.K. moving away from coal, even though both of those changes happened in the 1980s, a decade before the treaty was signed. The few countries who signed the treaty and are bound by it -- like Japan and the U.K. -- have admitted there is no way they can meet the treaty's requirements, so they're simply not going to try.

After all, the treaty has no enforcement mechanism.

But the real point of Kyoto -- UN and European bureaucrats designing a treaty to hobble the U.S. economy -- has been moot for years, ever since the U.S. Senate voted unanimously it would not implement Kyoto if it hurt the economy.

So the treaty is in a shambles, and its chief architect, Canada's Maurice Strong, has resigned in disgrace from the UN after his company, Cordex Petroleum Inc., received $1 million from Saddam Hussein. (Maurice Strong's protege, Prime Minister Paul Martin, is also an owner of Cordex.)

The most telling thing about the July 16 notice is it doesn't apply to Ontario's massive auto industry, which is exempt. But page after page goes into detail about how Alberta will be targeted, with fines of up to $200-million per megaton of carbon dioxide.

Question: Why is carbon dioxide considered toxic, and subject to a $200-million/megaton fine when it comes from Alberta, but harmless and untaxed when it comes from Toronto?

The Kyoto Protocol isn't about fighting pollution -- carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant. It's not about stopping global warming, either -- the Kyoto Protocol's own scientific panel predicts even if every country in the world were to fully implement the treaty, it would only make 0.2C difference by the year 2100. That's less than the natural annual variation of the world's climate.

There's no scientific or diplomatic reason to proceed with this treaty. But it's not about science or diplomacy.

This is just what it looks like: An excuse to tax Alberta. Too bad Ralph Klein has retired on the job. Too bad the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is more interested in lobbying Ottawa than fighting it.

Levant is publisher of the Western Standard

Social Spending and Crime

2005-09-12T20:12:00.000-04:00

September 11, 2005

Diet cash recipients balloon
By SUE-ANN LEVY

The number of Toronto welfare recipients collecting a controversial meal ticket has grown by at least 30% since the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) launched a campaign urging them to flout the rules.

The latest provincial stats show that of the 66,723 Ontario Works cases in Toronto to the end of June, 8,353 were getting the extra $250 monthly special diet allowance.

While the number of OW cases increased a mere 1% from March to June, those who signed up for the special diet jumped 31%. Toronto's Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) cases increased less than 1% from March to June. Those collecting the diet cash, however, grew by 17%.

According to information gleaned from the city website and insiders, a family of eight (single mom and seven kids) all getting the extra diet cash -- plus other shelter, clothing and transportation extras -- will net $63,177 after taxes this year.

Heather MacVicar, the city's general manager of social services, contends the numbers have "levelled off" since June but conceded that's only based on "anecdotal" tracking.

OCAP has promoted what was once an obscure diet benefit -- on its website, at community clinics and through press events -- since its campaign commenced in February.

What's appalling is that Mayor David Miller and the province (which pays 80% of the city's welfare costs and sets the rules) seem to have turned a blind eye to OCAP's antics.

According to the province's own rules, OW and ODSP recipients are only eligible for the special diet allowance if they have a specific medical condition such as diabetes, pregnancy, cystic fibrosis, allergies, Crohn's disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer, hypertension, liver disorders and kidney disease.

Recipients must first get a doctor, registered nurse or dietitian to sign a form specifying the condition and the special foods needed. But at an OCAP event held at City Hall in July, recipients openly boasted about being entitled to the benefit even if they had no such medical condition.

Doctors at clinics like 410 Sherbourne St., an arm of St. Michael's Hospital, signed forms for patients they consider at risk of ill health due to their poverty.

One doctor said at an OCAP event last month he believes to meet his "ethical obligation" as a health care provider, he must treat poverty as a "health condition."

MacVicar said she's "certainly heard about cases like that" but she "can't really challenge" a doctor's medical opinion.

What's more, when her office tried to crack down on the eligibility requirements in July, the mayor's office intervened.

She says the province has to take action. Community and social services minister Sandra Pupatello told me a special working group is now reviewing the welfare policy and they "have to move quickly" but "it won't be as fast as they'd like."

She stressed that OCAP is not helping anyone with its campaign because it may cause the ministry to "clamp down" on those who deserve the benefit.

Provincial Conservative leader John Tory says this issue could be fixed tomorrow if the government just enforced the rules that already exist.

Tory added that this kind of open exploitation just "breeds a cynicism and disrespect" among the public for the social welfare system.

Left Wing Brain Cramp

2005-09-12T20:04:00.000-04:00

September 11, 2005

Left-wing brain cramp
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Have you noticed the simple-minded way in which this summer's outburst of guns and gang violence in Toronto has already been explained away by our liberal intelligentsia?

They've argued, ad nauseam, that this crime wave has nothing at all to do with our ridiculously lax criminal justice system.

Rather, we're assured, it has everything to do with former Ontario premier Mike Harris' cuts to welfare and social programs from 1995 to 2002 -- 2003 if you throw in Ernie Eves.

Really? Okay, if that's true, then why did Statistics Canada just finish reporting in July that the Greater Toronto Area had the lowest crime rate of any major Canadian city in 2004?

Not that I believe those figures, or that they in any way reflect the modern-day reality of Toronto. But I don't have to. It's the liberal intelligentsia -- the same folks now yelling that street crime is all Harris' fault -- who usually wave around these "crime is down" stats whenever Canadians complain about lax laws.

And since they're the ones defending those stats, they should have to account for them. So, c'mon, boys and girls. You know who you are at the Star and the Globe, along with the left-wing academics you're always quoting on this issue. Explain yourselves.

Your theory, which you all seem to have simply pulled out of your collective behinds, is that Harris' cuts to social spending and his Safe Schools Act -- which you argue contributes to violence by expelling troubled students without providing any educational alternatives -- led to this summer's violence in Toronto.

Alrighty. Then why did the Toronto area crime rate, at least according to StatsCan, drop by 8.6% last year, immediately following eight years (1995 to 2003) of Harris' so-called crime-spawning policies? Why did Ontario have the lowest overall crime rate in the country last year (with a 5% reduction) as well as in 2003? Why, in 2003, when Canada's crime rate rose by 6%, was Ontario one of only two places where it remained stable?

Based on these stats, one could more credibly argue that Harris' policies of getting tough on school thugs and pushing people to get off welfare and into the workforce lowered crime.

That said, I'm not arguing poverty doesn't affect the crime rate.

But people can't just make up two-bit theories about this summer's crime wave being Harris' fault while simultaneously ignoring crime stats they play up in any other context. All that reveals is that they didn't like Harris' policies to begin with.

Besides, don't any of these know-it-alls remember Pierre Trudeau's so-called "Just Society," in which social spending exploded as governments across Canada bought into the idea we could solve all of society's ills by throwing tax money at them?

So what happened to the crime rate during all those years -- the 1960s, 70s, 80s? Well, it also exploded (oops), rising steadily until 1991, when it peaked and then began to drop, slowly, until two years ago, when it plateaued. So, did increased social spending, far from lowering the crime rate, actually increase it?

Was it all Trudeau's fault? Or are the real reasons that crime goes up and down more complex than any one policy or person?

Some experts argue, for example, that the crime rate exploded in the '60s mainly due to demographics. That is, as the huge baby boom generation entered its teen years -- especially young males who tend to commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

The danger of the left's glib "it's all Harris' fault" rhetoric is that it will lead to hysterical demands for more indiscriminate "social spending" (just wait until the annual grants circus at Toronto City Hall this year) to "fight crime". The point is not that there should be no social spending to help combat crime. But it has to be effective , not just more of the failed policies of the past.

Sadly, in the current climate, taxpayers will have no way of knowing whether they're getting value for money, or simply being ripped off by professional grant getters and naive bureaucrats eager to grab as much public funding as possible for their pet social programs from politically correct, soft-on-crime politicians. Which these days, pretty much describes everyone in charge at City Hall, Queen's Park and Parliament Hill.

God Bless America

2005-08-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

God Bless America:

Goodness me I’ve never been a particular fan of many of the foreign and domestic policies of the United States. I’ve said this, written this, broadcast this. I’ve taken a few blows for it as well. But there is a time and a place for everything. And at this time and in this place I say just three words. God Bless America.
For leaving half-a million men on the battlefields of Africa, Asia and Europe during the Second World War, a conflict the United States could easily have sat out. For effectively forcing Japan to declare war and thus join the alliance of light against the gang of darkness. God Bless America.
For that farm-boy from Nebraska who had never even heard of Normandy or Sicily, who wanted so much to walk back from the hill but continued on, the bullets flying over and around him. For his not turning back. For his determination to do his duty and for his dedication to freedom. For his mother and for the stars and stripes flag she hung in her window. For his life, and for the fact that he gave it. God Bless America.
For being prepared to rip the country apart in a bloody spasm of civil war because, however delayed and reluctant in some quarters, the leaders and people knew that slavery was wrong. For seeing the future dawn when others could only see the enveloping night . God Bless America.
For Lincoln and Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Truman, Kennedy and Franklin, Jefferson and Adams. For Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald, Melville and Whitman. God Bless America.
For the legion of Nobel Prizes won with grace, for the medical breakthroughs celebrated with decorum, for the sporting records, the intellectual triumphs, the moral victories, the glory. For embracing yes rather than hiding behind no. God Bless America.
For the pastures and forests vibrant with green and brown lushness, for the mountains and valleys that startle and shock the world. For the cities and the towns, the highways and back roads. God Bless America.
For not taking offence at the smug disdain that comes too often from other countries. For smiling with them instead of laughing at them. For usually extending a hand of friendship to those who extend the fist of anger. God Bless America.
For jazz and pluralism, baseball and religious tolerance, burgers and equality. For inventing and pursuing an ideal that, though not always achieved, is still glorious in the making and pristine in the chasing. God Bless America.
For the billions in foreign aid, greater per capita than any other country in the world. For the food, clean water, medicine, machinery given to every continent on earth. For the Marshall Plan and Marshall Dillon, for Tom Sawyer and Tom Hanks, for New York and for the New Deal. God Bless America.
For not minding when foreigners actually show more ignorance about American culture than Americans ever do about theirs. For in fact being more polite and sensitive when abroad than many other peoples but merely smiling when described as ugly. God Bless America.
For inviting Irish, Jew, Italian, Pole, German, Hispanic, black, Asian, man and woman, all and every into the highest levels of government. For being the first nation in the world to treat the outsider as a guest rather than a problem. For being a melting pot rather than a melting society. God Bless America.
For allowing God and prayer and faith to enter public life and for not running scared of gratitude to the almighty for all that He has given us. For not lauding the religion of secularism whilst hypocritically lambasting the religions of the church, mosque and synagogue. God Bless America.
For your comedies and your dramas, for your movies and your novels, your sentimentality and glamour, your self-parody and self-criticism. For your splendour and for your silliness. God Bless America.
For being right more often than being wrong. For being the United States of America and for being unashamed of it. For being the nation that still leads the way in so many ways, still lights the path on so many days. For being you. For being. God Bless America.

Rights

2005-08-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

ights-worship fetish ruining our society
By MICHAEL COREN

When British police arrested a highly dangerous terrorist suspect last month, they acted with professionalism and, considering the circumstances, extreme courtesy. "Mohammed," they shouted, "Take your clothes off! Come out with your hands on your head and you will be all right."

He argued with them for some time, demanding to know why he should strip down to his underpants. When he was told the obvious -- that he was thought to be a potential suicide bomber -- he still argued and refused to move.

Eventually the police had to bring the man out by force and he was taken away. But his first response to the police was so deliciously relevant. He shouted it from the balcony. "I have rights," he screamed. "I have rights."

There we have it. Rights. Even for a man who is suspected of trying to murder innocent people and create panic and terror.

The mass of our social difficulties, the majority of our seemingly insoluble problems, arise from the fact that in the Western world (and particularly in Canada) we have engineered a rights-based society rather than a responsibility-based one.

The social contract between the governed and the government, between authority and citizenry, has become degraded and unbalanced. Instead of asking what our duty or responsibility might be in any given situation, we demand to know what are our privileges and rights.

At its most obvious there is the usual list of standard demands. The right to marry whomever you want, the right to be ordained a priest when you don't qualify, the right to claim welfare even if it isn't deserved, the right to have sex with anyone and everyone, the right to die, the right to be wrong.

The list goes on: The right to swear, the right to defy righteous authority, the right to be publicly uncouth, the right to insult a cop, the right to hide behind any excuse to escape punishment, the right to never fail, never lose, never have one's self-esteem challenged, the right to be wrong.

Instructional guides

Recently our Supreme Court was called upon to judge a man who on the Internet had been selling instructional guides on how to make bombs, break into houses and commit credit card fraud. The judges decided that he had the "right" to do this because they did not assume he had the "responsibility" to read the contents of the material before he marketed it.

Nor is this fetish of rights-worship in any way consistent. A 14-year-old girl, for example, has the right to be given the contraceptive pill by her family doctor, but that same doctor has no right to inform the parents of the girl.

The concept of responsibility is entirely removed from the equation. Individual rights, even for a child, supercede the role of family and medical responsibility.

The same applies to self-defence. We've all heard stories of people like the corner store owner who grew tired of repeated burglaries at his business, who fights back against the criminals with, say, a baseball bat.

In such cases, chances are it's the owners who will be charged. Too often, the rights of thieves outweigh the rights -- and responsibilities -- of citizens to protect their own property and livelihoods.

A mere symptom

Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms was supposed to liberate the people of this great nation. What was not noticed was that Canadians were already free. Today, the Charter appears a mere symptom of a deeper dysfunction.

To paraphrase former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, ask not what are your rights in Canada but what are your responsibilities to Canada. And ask now, before the cloud of "rights" chokes us into oblivion.

Justice

2005-08-22T20:22:00.000-04:00

I don't know which is more disturbing. That a 14-year-old would take a sawed-off shotgun to school with the intention of killing everyone there, or that he would be allowed to walk free from a halfway house only six years later.

The person responsible for the infamous school shooting at Taber, Alta., gunned down a 17-year-old student, injured another and tried to kill many more. The Taber shooting came one week after the horrific Columbine shootings in 1999.

Six years later, the school shooter (now 20 years old) tasted freedom after leaving a Toronto halfway house. Although police and the media released his name last week (while the suspect was still at large) the convicted killer enjoys anonymity once again.

Convicted of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder, he was sentenced to just three years of secure custody.

Despite the fact that the school shooter continued to have violent fantasies and the Crown argued he still posed a "significant risk" to the public, the disturbed individual was transferred to a halfway house this past March.

This week, the killer decided to regain his freedom, walking out of the halfway house. He left behind a disturbing letter saying, "I can't be caged anymore ... if they find me they will have to kill me."

Call me a cold-blooded conservative if you wish, but I had hoped that someone who commits first-degree murder would receive a sentence slightly harsher than three years. I had also hoped that a convicted killer who still harbours violent fantasies would not be given the privilege of being transferred to a halfway house where the possibility of escape is high.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. After all, it was just this summer that Winnipeggers learned that Ryan Horvath wouldn't spend a single day behind bars after driving drunk and high on drugs, leaving 24-year-old Danielle Rouire with a permanent brain injury.

And just this month we learned that the killer of Lynda Shaw had already been convicted of murder, not once, but twice. Allan Craig MacDonald killed a Nova Scotia police officer as well as a cabbie back in 1975. He got out in 1989 due to good behaviour and his new-found freedom allowed him the opportunity to rape and kill Shaw, a 21-year-old university student.

One might ask how anyone convicted of killing two people (including a police officer) could be released early from prison.

But this is Canada, and sadly, we seem to have an injustice system that lets victims down again and again.

The mother of Lynda Shaw is understandably upset that MacDonald was given the chance to kill again.

"I feel that Lynda and our family have been betrayed by a federal judicial system that put a cold-blooded murderer back on the street," declared Carol Taylor.

"Lynda was a victim of our justice system and, in particular, of a parole board that acted irresponsibly in releasing this man from prison."

It is tragic enough when someone loses a loved one in such a way.

But to know that the crime could have been prevented had the parole board used better judgment makes the tragedy that much more grievous.

Had MacDonald served his full sentence, Lynda Shaw would likely be in the prime of her life. And Lynda's mother might be enjoying some grandkids right now.

Liberalism

2005-08-21T20:13:00.000-04:00

Sun, August 21, 2005

Fear for Grit White North

Powerful Liberal ruling regime menace to freedom of ordinary Canadians

By Licia Corbella

"Any needless concentration of power is a menace to freedom."
-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

That quote was gleaned from a musty-smelling 30th Anniversary edition of a Reader's Digest Reader 1922-1952 pulled off the shelf of my in-laws' Ontario lake-side cottage.

Clearly, not enough Canadians took Eisenhower's pearl of wisdom to heart. Indeed, it appears many Americans might want to reflect upon it, too.

Eisenhower's article was first published in the October 1948 edition of Reader's Digest -- some five years before he became a two-term President of the United States in 1953 and just three years after the end of the Second World War, in which Eisenhower was supreme commander of allied troops in Europe.

Gen. Eisenhower wrote the article, entitled "An Open Letter to America's Students," in his capacity as president of Columbia University, a post he took a leave of absence from to serve as supreme commander of NATO in 1950.

Reading that comment stopped me dead in my tracks. I read it to my husband as the call of a loon reverberated over the still lake. I got goosebumps.

"I fear for Canada," said my husband. "The Prime Minister of this country -- usually elected by a minority of the electorate -- holds as much power as any dictator."

According to Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa-based watchdog agency, says Canada's prime minister has the power to appoint more than 3,000 people to positions, including to the federal and supreme court, to tribunals, agencies, key watchdog positions, the head of the RCMP, presidents of Crown Corporations, immigration and refugee board members, senators, and of course, our head of state, the Governor General.

Conacher says Martin's obvious lack of due diligence into the appointment of Quebec soft-separatist Michaelle Jean to the post of Governor General could have been avoided if the leaders of Canada's official parties were given veto power over such non-partisan appointments, something they would not take lightly.

Also, Martin, who coined the phrase "democratic deficit," only promised to implement parliamentary committees to review all federal government appointments when he believed he would win a majority government.

"Prime Minister Martin has decided to break that promise, because he doesn't have a majority and therefore wouldn't be able to control the committees that would review appointments," explained Conacher.

So, if a prime minister sticks around long enough, he can appoint as many as 3,000 cronies to positions that then serve the ruling party and not the electorate.

Former prime minister Jean Chretien appointed six of Canada's Supreme Court Justices, and Martin, with his minority government, has already appointed two and is set to appoint another Justice when John C. Major is expected to retire before the end of the year.

In other words, the entire Supreme court will consist of Liberal party appointees pushing through a Liberal agenda, even though the ruling Liberals have never won more than 41% of the popular vote.

According to Larry Gordon, executive director of Fair Vote Canada, never did Canadian voters' wishes become so distorted as during Jean Chretien's three elections.

In 1993, Chretien won just 41% of the popular vote, but he won 60% of the then-301 seats in the House of Commons.

In 1997, garnering just 38.5% of the popular vote, Chretien won 51.5% of the seats in the House, making it "the phoniest majority government in Canadian history," says Gordon.

In 2000, pulling in 40.9% of the popular vote, Chretien's Liberals took 57.5% of the seats in the House.

And yet during that time and since, the prime minister has never ruled with such impunity.

Conacher points out this restricts the freedom of ordinary Canadians.

How? Well, consider that most corporations in Canada donate to the ruling party for fear that if they don't, they won't be treated fairly when government contracts come up. That restricts freedom of conscience.

And freedom is a big word. It is linked to the functioning of our democracy and how we are represented and if we are equal.

"Even with a minority government in Canada, because all of these appointed positions are selected by the ruling party leader, we do not have a rule of law for the ruling party," said Conacher.

"It's as serious as that."

He points out how the RCMP, headed by a Liberal appointee, pretty much refused to investigate Jean Chretien's dealings in the Shawinigate scandal and other questionable taxpayer-funded deals as well as dozens of other examples of top Liberals being let off the hook by Liberal leader-appointed appointees.

Consider that both Canada's Port Authority and Transportation and Safety Board are Liberal leader-appointed hacks. How likely is it Canada Steamship Lines (Paul Martin's family-owned business -- which has been shown to violate Canadian labour and environmental laws) will be held to account by Martin appointees?

Remember how, the day before the now-disgraced George Radwanski was appointed privacy commissioner, the federal tax department officially forgave almost $540,000 he owed the government from years of not paying income taxes?

How many Canadians not connected to the Liberal party have ever received such a windfall exoneration?

My guess is none, though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

"The ruling-party members, supporters and donors, I believe very strongly, are held to a lower standard than everybody else in Canadian society by all of these agencies that are headed up by Liberal government appointees who will help cover up things and apply a different standard," said Conacher.

"That's a disaster to the rest of Canadians' freedom, because if you're not a ruling-party supporter, you may get more harsh treatment."

Rights

2005-08-21T20:00:00.000-04:00

Rights-worship fetish ruining our society

By MICHAEL COREN

When British police arrested a highly dangerous terrorist suspect last month, they acted with professionalism and, considering the circumstances, extreme courtesy. "Mohammed," they shouted, "Take your clothes off! Come out with your hands on your head and you will be all right."

He argued with them for some time, demanding to know why he should strip down to his underpants. When he was told the obvious -- that he was thought to be a potential suicide bomber -- he still argued and refused to move.

Eventually the police had to bring the man out by force and he was taken away. But his first response to the police was so deliciously relevant. He shouted it from the balcony. "I have rights," he screamed. "I have rights."

There we have it. Rights. Even for a man who is suspected of trying to murder innocent people and create panic and terror.

The mass of our social difficulties, the majority of our seemingly insoluble problems, arise from the fact that in the Western world (and particularly in Canada) we have engineered a rights-based society rather than a responsibility-based one.

The social contract between the governed and the government, between authority and citizenry, has become degraded and unbalanced. Instead of asking what our duty or responsibility might be in any given situation, we demand to know what are our privileges and rights.

At its most obvious there is the usual list of standard demands. The right to marry whomever you want, the right to be ordained a priest when you don't qualify, the right to claim welfare even if it isn't deserved, the right to have sex with anyone and everyone, the right to die, the right to be wrong.

The list goes on: The right to swear, the right to defy righteous authority, the right to be publicly uncouth, the right to insult a cop, the right to hide behind any excuse to escape punishment, the right to never fail, never lose, never have one's self-esteem challenged, the right to be wrong.

Instructional guides

Recently our Supreme Court was called upon to judge a man who on the Internet had been selling instructional guides on how to make bombs, break into houses and commit credit card fraud. The judges decided that he had the "right" to do this because they did not assume he had the "responsibility" to read the contents of the material before he marketed it.

Nor is this fetish of rights-worship in any way consistent. A 14-year-old girl, for example, has the right to be given the contraceptive pill by her family doctor, but that same doctor has no right to inform the parents of the girl.

The concept of responsibility is entirely removed from the equation. Individual rights, even for a child, supercede the role of family and medical responsibility.

The same applies to self-defence. We've all heard stories of people like the corner store owner who grew tired of repeated burglaries at his business, who fights back against the criminals with, say, a baseball bat.

In such cases, chances are it's the owners who will be charged. Too often, the rights of thieves outweigh the rights -- and responsibilities -- of citizens to protect their own property and livelihoods.

A mere symptom

Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms was supposed to liberate the people of this great nation. What was not noticed was that Canadians were already free. Today, the Charter appears a mere symptom of a deeper dysfunction.

To paraphrase former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, ask not what are your rights in Canada but what are your responsibilities to Canada. And ask now, before the cloud of "rights" chokes us into oblivion.

Terrorism

2005-08-21T19:36:00.000-04:00

Terrorism must be fought like a disease

By Ian Robinson

It's not often that I have my ghast completely flabbered by a newspaper story.

But there it was in the Calgary Sun, an Associated Press story that began: "Britain began reaching out to Muslim communities yesterday, launching an effort to confront the resentment and anger that helped breed the suicide bombers who attacked London's transit system."

Pretend for a moment that it isn't 2005.

Pretend that it is, say, 1941. An invasion of Great Britain by Nazi Germany has narrowly been averted by the bravery of mere boys in RAF blue who took off in Hurricanes and Spitfires to fight the Luftwaffe to a flaming standstill at 20,000 ft.

Parts of London are in ruins from German bombs raining from the night sky.

Europe is under the Nazi heel, and the concentration camp crematoria are being built to eradicate Gypsies, Jews and opponents of Hitler's regime.

Now imagine the horror and outrage that would have followed a news story published in 1941 that began: "Britain began reaching out to Nazi communities yesterday, launching an effort to confront the resentment and anger that helped breed the German war machine that conquered half the world and turned much of London into unattractive heaps of smoking rubble."

We would have thought such a thing insane.

Today, we do not.

And we should.

There's nothing to understand about terrorism other than the fact of its existence.

The bombers who attacked London's transit system are not drawn from the legions of the impoverished.

They were Britons, born and raised, most of them.

Even being on the dole in Britain is better than being middle-class in Pakistan or most of Africa.

These were not people living hand to mouth, oppressed beneath a vicious system that exploits them.

They lived, in fact, in one of the most politically correct societies on the planet, a country in which teachers propose that the word "fail" be purged from the vocabulary because it makes failures feel bad to be identified as such.

Terrorists are not generally bred by communities of the disenfranchised.

Russia's Lenin? Middle-class.

Germany's Bader-Meinhoff gang? University students.

The American Weather Underground? Ditto.

The 9/11 morons who flew passenger planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon? University students and graduates.

Osama bin Laden? Multi-millionaire.

Terrorism is a potentially fatal, disease infecting the body politic.

And, like any other disease, we must understand it.

But, like syphilis, where terrorism comes from is not the issue.

You can't negotiate with syphilis. (If you could, the disco era may never have ended.)

You can't convince a spirochete not to infect you with the purpose of doing you harm.

No. You recognize the symptoms and hope to God that a seriously applied regimen of antibiotics will take care of it and -- if you've got any brains at all -- you protect yourself against future infections.

Western society has long chosen to devalue its institutions and values to the point of ceasing to demand that immigrants jettison what is not compatible with those institutions and values.

In Ontario, it has been recommended that Muslim law be sanctioned for the resolution of some disputes, including divorce -- something which has aroused the ire of the largest group representing Muslim women, which is something that even gives pause to the most devotedly stupid of the politically correct.

When mutiny struck the French army during the First World War, the French government randomly executed men from the mutinous regiments.

"Pour les encouragement des autres," was the explanation -- for the en-couragement of the others.

Catching them and killing them is the only answer, and in such numbers that it will, indeed, encourage the others to think twice about acting on their twisted belief system.

The answer to terrorism isn't a warm and fuzzy outreach program.

Give A Terrorist A Hug Day just won't work.