Posted February 23rd, 2011 in Climate Change by Adrian MacNair
I live in B.C. where the carbon tax is responsible for higher energy and consumer prices, and has accomplished no significant reduction in emissions of any relevance. In fact, BC Liberal leadership candidate George Abbott recently suggested the carbon tax should go to a referendum to be cancelled.
Nevertheless, according to a new survey conducted by Leger Marketing, four out of five Canadians believe in global warming, and a majority would be willing to pay a $600 annual carbon tax. That’s in stark contrast to just 15 per cent of Americans who would pay for a carbon tax.
What the survey found is that belief in man-made climate change is largely dependent on the left-right dichotomy:
Canadians who described themselves as supporters of the federal Liberals or the Bloc Quebecois were the most likely to believe in climate change — even more so, surprisingly, than Green party supporters.
Of the Liberal supporters surveyed, 91 per cent said they believed in climate change, compared to 90 per cent of Bloc voters, 87 per cent of Greens and 84 per cent of New Democrat supporters.
A significantly smaller percentage of Conservative voters surveyed, 64 per cent, gave credence to global warming.
In the U.S., 69 per cent of Democrats and just 41 per cent of Republicans said they believed the science.
I’m somewhat surprised that two-thirds of Canadian Conservative voters believe in climate change, but then again their own political party has advocated for action on climate change, so maybe the surprise isn’t warranted.
In unrelated news, weather has been so cold in Florida and Mexico that tomato prices have nearly doubled.
Posted January 25th, 2011 in Climate Change by Adrian MacNair
Before I attend to the purpose of this blog entry, a few of you may have noticed the absence of Mark Collins lately. This is a permanent change to the blog at my request. Although Mark is a fantastic blogger (in fact I’m the one who begged him to blog here in the first place) and provides amazing information and research on many topics, I decided that my blog has been a part of cultivating my writing and journalism career. I wanted to keep my blog as a source for people to read my writing samples, and unfortunately too often people were confusing Mark’s entries with mine.
I’m hoping Mark will start a new blog where he can continue his work, but I understand he is keeping busy at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute blog where he is keeping people up to date on Afghanistan and military issues. I know he is also a frequent guest blogger at Small Dead Animals, so if you’ve been missing his content please venture to either of those locations.
The CBC is reporting that the National Roundtable on Environment and the Economy, created in 1988 under the Mulroney government, has advocated that Canada should proceed with its own climate change initiatives. They said we can’t afford to wait for U.S. support before we battle climate change:
“Harmonization, where possible and when feasible, makes sense for Canada,” NRTEE president David McLaughlin said. “But in the face of persistent U.S. uncertainty as to its own climate policy future, Canada will need to look to its own options, in the right way, at the right time.”
Canada has pledged to reduce its emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, less than 10 years away. Waiting for the U.S. to chart its course puts Canada in danger of not meeting those targets, the paper said. Worse still, it might require a higher carbon price in Canada than in the United States to achieve those targets.
You know climate change will always be a tough sell in Canada, particularly when record temperatures are being broken this year. Record cold temperatures I mean:
A deep freeze that has engulfed Eastern Canada shattered records Monday and made it dangerous for anyone to go outside unprepared.
The culprit is a frigid Arctic air mass gripping the region and leading to warnings for people to bundle up and avoid frostbite or hypothermia.
[...]
Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, it was an unseasonable 0 C in Whitehorse, Yukon, on Monday evening — a far cry from the city’s January average of -17.7 C and its coldest day on record, when the mercury dropped to -52.2 C in January 1977.
But in New Brunswick, with the wind chill close to -40 C Monday, the only good walk was a short one. In such cold with brisk winds, exposed skin can freeze in as little as 10 minutes.
A glance at the CBC website notes that the “unseasonable” warmth in the Arctic is being attributed to global warming, but the record cold is just weather.
Don’t look now, but BC Liberal leader hopeful George Abbott is calling for a referendum on the hated carbon tax, saying the province can’t remain competitive as the only jurisdiction in “North America to address the issue [of climate change].” Not the province’s current carbon tax is likely to drive down emissions given the province’s paradoxical relationship with energy.
Just so you know, the Pembina Institute, who advocated for B.C. to set its carbon tax to $200 per tonne of CO2 emissions (a 48-cent tax on each litre of gasoline), fully agrees with the recommendations of the NREE. Which should scare you, just a little bit.
Chaos! From Roger Cohen in the NY Times on the European travel catastrophe:
Snow! Hit the Panic Button
…
Add to that dismal stew a pinch of global warming, which some people, including Matthews [British Airports Authority chief executive], apparently took to mean the end of European winters, and you end up with the current farce. Europe, thy name is pitiful…
Apparently, if you don’t want to blame greed or the cuts or Matthews or the breakdown of the French state, you can blame the North Atlantic oscillation. That, for the uninitiated, is the difference of atmospheric pressure at sea level between the Icelandic low and the Azores high. When the difference is low, Arctic air penetrates Europe. That happened a lot in the 1960s. Now it’s happening again.
This, according to some, is the result of global warming. So if all else fails, blame global warming for the freeze…
…
Passengers may experience delays and cancellations due to adverse weather conditions at airports across Europe. Select the relevant airport below to find out the latest situation:
Boxing Day travellers could be disrupted by heavy snow
…
…
Update: Guess who’s involved in the profit-making at Heathrow?
…
Matthews…[is] running a vital British public service, which remains, despite BAA’s forced sale of some of its airports, a kind of monopoly – there are other London airports, but there’s only one Heathrow. At the same time he isn’t running it for its users, the passengers and airlines. He’s running it for its shareholders – Ferrovial is the majority owner, the government of Singapore and the Quebec pension fund are the others…
And it ain’t justQuébec involved with British airports:
…the C$100bn (€73.7bn) Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has stakes in both Birmingham and Bristol airports…
A fellow Canadian fund, the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, owns 26% of BAA, the UK airports operator that runs Heathrow…
Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed more than a quarter of a million people in 2010 — the deadliest year for natural disasters in more than a generation.
The Earth “struck back”? Sounds like a really bad B-movie.
And just what the hell is a “super typhoon”? Is it a typhoon that wears a cape and spandex tights?
Here’s the end of the article:
Scientists say Earth’s climate is also changing as a result of man-made climate change, bringing more extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding.
That is why those who study disasters for a living say it would be wrong to chalk 2010 up to just another bad year.
Debarati Guha Sapir of the World Health Organization said the planet often strikes back as a result of bad decision-making by people.
Debarati Guha Sapir sounds like a real swell human being.
But the problem is that the largest number of deaths and disaster this year were caused by earthquake (Chile, Haiti), while the chaos caused in Europe was due to the explosion of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The last time I checked, anthropogenic tectonic plate movement was something even Al Gore didn’t try to sell.
Now, I’m certain our friend Debarati would blame the current ice age in Europe on climate change (cold being the logical conclusion to a warming planet), but I fail to see how she can blame the thousands killed in Earthquakes for their poor decision-making.
It’s pretty specious to blame a quarter million deaths on global warming, too. Lumping everybody who dies as a result of floods, drought and hurricanes into one big catch-all category called climate change is the surest path to confirmation bias.
Hey look, somebody just drowned in a flood. Climate change. Oh no, a drought killed thousands in Africa. Climate change. A storm killed a dozen people in the South Pacific. Climate change.
The end result of such imbecility is a new generation of children who actually believe the planet is an entity and strikes back at people:
Last week, Michael Ignatieff and 142 other Members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion to ban oil tanker traffic on the north coast of British Columbia. This week, Liberal MP Joyce Murray from Vancouver Quadra introduced Bill C-606 to put that motion into law by amending the Canada Shipping Act to prohibit oil tanker traffic on the north and central coast of British Columbia.
[...]
If marine conservation were really the issue, the ban wouldn’t be only for the north coast of British Columbia and U.S. foundations would be funding a tanker ban in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. But no, U.S. foundations are funding a tanker ban campaign only for the central and the north coast of British Columbia — right smack where oil tankers, export-bound for Asia would need to travel…
Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mailnails things nicely:
…Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, declared: “This is not the end, but it is a new beginning.”
Translation: Nothing happened, but we need to save face. See you next year in Durban! Actually, something happened. There were lots of parties with Mexican music and free booze. At the end, everyone agreed to agree next time. One thing they did agree on was a $100-billion transfer of money from rich countries to developing countries – just as soon as they can figure out where the money’s coming from and where it’s going to. If you seriously believe that will ever come to pass, then you probably believe in Tinkerbell.
Why does no one tell the truth? Maybe they believe that, so long as they keep clapping, Tinkerbell won’t die. Even worse, they’d be forced to admit that the hopeless UN climate process, in which they have invested so much lip service, is a ridiculous boondoggle that benefits no one but the vast bureaucracy needed to support it.
Besides, events such as Cancun are an inexpensive way for politicians to show they really care about the planet…
I kid you not. And I thought they didn’t believe in negative campaigning. Dan Gardner (talk about muscular writing) of the Ottawa Citizen reveals what’s at the core of Jumpin’ Jack Layton’s thought, Vladimir Ilyich he is not. No ringing call for “Peace! Bread! Land!”
New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton faces a problem that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution have vanished from the intellectual climate.
Photograph by: Mark Blinch, Reuters, Ottawa Citizen
…Layton elaborated. “If you look at the new approach to energy, for instance, it’s all based on decentralization, particularly around energy efficiency. My buddy Amory Lovins likes to talk about negawatts. If you can save a megawatt cheaper than you can produce one, then go out there and save it. And by the way, you’ll also create more work by doing that. And we’ve got lots of negawatts out there. We’ve got lots of homes, we’re moving into the heating season, and they’re turning up their furnaces, if we have people out there with caulking guns, insulation, and new tripleglazed windows, all over the country, people apprenticing, young people having jobs in their local area, you wouldn’t have to fly to the tarsands for a three-week shift or a two-week shift and then go back home for a week. You’d be able to work right there in your own community, upgrading the building stock.”
Now, I like triple-glazed windows as much as the next guy, but we were talking about global politics at a pivotal moment in history. This sounded like the third bullet point on page six of a really boring campaign brochure. Could there be a clue here about why the left is failing to seize the day?..
The piece is Norman Spector’s “The column I wish I’d written” today. Well chosen. As for the V.I. guy:
I’m Sure Murray Dobbin Can Find A Way To Blame Stephen Harper
Strangely, a few recent articles in international news makes no mention of how a failure to come to a global agreement in Copenhagen is all Canada and Stephen Harper’s fault.
Posted December 5th, 2010 in Climate Change by Adrian MacNair
Climate researchers hard at work solving global warming.
I haven’t been around lately. That’s mainly because I just finished my first term in journalism school and it was extremely time-consuming. Yesterday I even went in to school to finish my last assignment.
As a result I haven’t had time to read the news and write about it. I did do a little catching up today, however, and I enjoyed some articles featured in the National Post pertaining to the global warming fad.
Lawrence Solomon has a good piece about the imminent collapse of the green industry in Canada, an industry that has only managed to stand with the assistance of government subsidization. Ontario’s Liberal government, facing a nearly $20 billion deficit and yawning collapse of industry, has expedited that ruin by investing billions in green technology.
Green subsidies are being slashed globally as nations attempt to rebound from the recession. Spain, France, and even green-obsessed Germany have decided to tone down spending on the green machine, realizing that taxpayers aren’t as generous with these wealth redistributions during tight times.
Meanwhile, climate alarmists are escaping the terrible cold of Europe to partake in taxpayer-sponsored junkets in — of all places — Cancun, Mexico. I suppose they learned their lesson shivering in lineups in Copenhagen last year.
As Rex Murphy writes, “the grim, grey priesthood of sustainable living are convening in one of the great sybaritic strips of the entire Western world.”
The global recession that hit immediately after the crowning of Al Gore’s mockumentary was a fitting antidote to this poisonous fad. And though the co-religionists continue to shun unbelievers of the climate science, most people can’t help but feel as though they’re playing characters in a global play about an Emperor’s invisible clothes.
For a time we feared to speak, lest we be called stupid and ignorant for failing to see the beautiful fabric. But at a certain point one is left with the inescapable truth, its self-righteous pasty nakedness staring you in the face.
