Climate denier?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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