Canada's conservative government came out with its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions last week, a plan that in general has been described as 'politically expedient' and 'staking out the middle ground'. And if that is indeed the case it will for now be sufficient to take the wind out of the Liberal opposition's Goresque green momentum, while at the same time keeping a deeply unsettled business sector at ease.

Yet, some constituencies will never be satisfied and the green movement, notably Al Gore himself who called the plan a fraud yesterday. But prime-minister Harper is experiencing dissent and concerns on the right flank too and not without reason. The plan to implement an outright ban to sell and use traditional light bulbs has provided excellent fodder to evoke the advent of the eco-fascist state. Columnist George Jonas explains:

But for nuts we don't need to go all the way to Iran. The Green Gestapo of the environment seems ready to launch nuts right here at home. Eco-fascists share the self-righteous arrogance of Islamo-fascists, safety-Nazis and other control freaks. They're like the multicultural censors excising "Merry Christmas!" or the feminist ones neutering the word "fisherman" and substituting "fisher" as the mot juste. They're the anti-gun crusaders obliging us to register Grandpa's squirrel-plonker; they're the Victorian don't-step-on-the-grass crowd; they're our version of the Persian dress police. They're prepared to enforce a government-regulated climate in Canada, indoors and outdoors, literally and figuratively, itching to counter global warming with an economic ice age.

Environmentalism has alternately taken on the guise of religion and political extremism, yet in both cases it is essentially unchecked fanaticism. And it has traction. If you can get a free-trading conservative like Harper to sign-off on a blanket light bulb ban you know that one side of the debate is having an incredible amount of success in getting its message across. To hear Al Gore describing these plans as a fraud is exactly the kind of indicator we need to have to know that the stage of reasoned debate about climate change is long over. The fanatics now own the environmental debate, and they're winning it.

Today Betty Krawczyk a 78-year old environmental activist was sentenced to 10 months in prison by the British Columbia Supreme Court. Her crime was to ignore a court order which called on her and a number of like minded activists to vacate the Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver, an area designated for highway development. The latter is part of a huge infrastructure overhaul as three years from now Vancouver and Whistler will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics and the bluffs happens to sit right on the road that connects the two locales.

The fact is that I am very familiar with this case as I live around the corner from the endangered bluffs and last year we were all treated to the daily spectacle of Krawczyk and friends. To her credit, not once did they block traffic or engage in other violent actions. They did however delay the project's construction which I am told has eaten into the profit margins of the developer who had assumed this potential risk in its deal with the provincial government. Needless to say, they took the raging environmentalists to court last year. As is the case with the neo-religious green movement, they not only believe in unrestricted and justifiable rage, they also have no issue in rejecting the rule of law which I surmise they consider to be pre-empted by the law of nature. Any potential damage to what they construe as 'the environment' is exempt from whatever democratic or judicial process which is why they ignore court orders.

Well there's justice after all - the relative harshness of the sentence by local standards is remarkable - but a new generation of natural law environmentalists is being nurtured:

Ten-year-old Roan Reimer was crying and holding a picture of Ms. Krawczyk. She missed school to protest the sentence with her dad.

"Betty was like a grandmother to me," she said. "I used to go visit her a lot in jail. I just couldn't miss this. It's more important to me than school or anything else."

And:

Don Leith was demonstrating with his nine-month-old daughter.

"I'm here because when the government makes an error, when it makes a mistake, we need people who will actually stand up and be counted," he said.

Yet the quote of the day comes from Kim Hines, with the group Women Helping Women Coalition from Victoria:

" ... the fact that most people couldn't even get into the packed courtroom "shows the unjustness of the justice system."

Hines is right, there are lots of open spaces in local parks and forests here that would serve as the perfect setting to apply the law of nature.

Yes, the debate over global warming is over according to this FAQ at Global Warming 101. Now, I am more than happy to listen to the climate change message and also more than willing to support measures that will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. However being told that "the debate is over" is a little too rich for me, especially if the site in question is one that came recommended by our local school distirct. The debate it seems to me is in full swing, take a look for instance at this which I found via Kate McMillan:

I want to lobby for decency, modesty, honesty, integrity and balance in climate research. I hope and pray we lose our obsession with climate forecasting. Climate simulations are best seen as sensitivity experiments, not as tools for policy makers. I said it in 1990 and I am saying it now: the constraints imposed by the planetary ecosystem require continuous adjustment and permanent adaptation. Predictive skills are of secondary importance.

And there are more calls for moderation and a rational approach.

In Canada meanwhile, moderation is not on the menu, but at least it is generating some worthwhile politcal theater. The opposition parties yesterday managed to pass a controversial piece of legislation:

The bill, which is expected to receive the swift approval of the Senate, gives the government 60 days to table a detailed plan for meeting the Kyoto targets.

It also compels the government to set fines or jail terms for businesses and industries that over-pollute.

The Conservatives have rejected the Kyoto targets – a six per cent drop from 1990 levels – calling them unattainable and dangerous to the economy.

Note that many experts and even trade unions - who are usually in sync with the left-of-center opposition - have highlighted the folly of trying to adhere to Kyoto standards using the aggressive timetable of this new law. Once enacted, the incumbent conservatives will no doubt ignore this controversial piece of legislation, possibly triggering a vote of no-confidence and a subsequent election with climate change as the defining campaign issue. The opposition may at this point not be as confident to let things go that far, but I would certainly look forward to a discussion where Canadians are given the option of investing billions more in healthcare or sending them to Russia in return for carbon credits. The debate it seems has only just started.

Not only was it part of my early childhood education - before I was into politics and markets it was stars and planets - it was also intuitive. Now here is the science to demonstrate the sun's role in global warming.

There are of course not just political explanations for the environmental frenzy that is currently sweeping the western world. There is, argues Joseph Brean in the National Post a good argument to cast environmentalism as the new religion, complete with hymns, a messiah and an end of days catastrophe. And of course with a propensity to spawn fundamentalist currents.

It’s funny that the article talks about “the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage”. For years now that has been an issue which has sparked some debate in the Dorsman household where I, in my zeal to clean-up the kitchen, forget to properly recycle plastic items. Irene has always taken me to task for that sort of 'errant' behaviour and in response the term ‘eco-fascism’ long ago became staple of our daily conversation here.

Thankfully, there are green experts who are able to pierce the absurd dogmatism that we are now forced to accept as both science and the road to our ultimate salvation:

Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier. He calls himself green. But he understands the unjustified faith that arises from the psychological need to make 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.

Read the Green Fervour in its entirety and get ready for the next wave of fundamentalism.

As I said in my longer piece about global warming earlier today, the marketing effort behind it is phenomenal:

A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" is being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before an audience of a global audience of 2bn.

The event, scheduled for July 7, will feature co-ordinated film, music and television events in seven cities including London, Washington DC, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Kyoto, with major broadcasters and media owners aiming to extend the reach of public awareness of global warming.

It is understood that former US vice-president Al Gore, whose movie An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change to cinema audiences last year, will announce the event tomorrow in London.

Live Aid tried to raise awareness about one particular issue and encourage individuals to take action. If the outcome from an environmental Live Aid is that rather than compelling governments to implement draconian measures and elaborate schemes, all the power to it.

The plans however may envision something bigger than Live Aid, it can and will never be better because of this:

One reader asked me this week how global warming made it to the center of the political agenda and why it has become such an incredible success story, despite the real questions being raised about the science underpinning it all.

One of the things that occurred to me during my evening with one of Al Gore’s ambassadors who are spreading the word about the Climate Project is that the general public doesn’t really understand climate change. While global warming is a fact, the underlying causes are so complex and wide ranging that it is relatively easy to massage the phenomenon into one seemingly coherent message, package it and sell it to the masses. You can do that successfully, provided you’re first to market and the “global-warming-Kyoto-is-the-solution” product has been around for over decade and its critics are way behind the curve in presenting a cogent and above all compelling counter case. And while many on the right still rejoice over Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, one has to wonder where climate change would be on the agenda today had the former veep captured the White House that year. So a lot can be attributed to timing and marketing.

It is also important to note that following socialism’s collapse in the 1990s there was no longer a defining issue that separated the left and right. There was debate, discussion over many things but an ideological split was largely absent. And while conservatives were quick to jump on terror, jihadist violence was not an entirely natural fit for the left. The environment was a far better match and a highly necessary one: the emergence of green parties all over the western world heralded the end of the unified electoral power of the left and it is no coincidence that it is Al Gore who has worked so hard to go green. After all, it was Ralph Nader that cost him the 2000 election, not George Bush.

It is also important to note that an environmental platform has not been tested electorally. Americans will no doubt cast their next ballot with Iraq and budget reforms in mind and the question is really if Canadians believe that carbon credits are to be the defining piece of their lives next time they’re asked to vote. I certainly do not think that will be the case. Gore’s ambassador, a devout Green Party man was not that confident in his own politics and expressed the hope that Stephen Harper as a conservative would be the man to do the unthinkable and deliver a package of environmental reforms. And my neighbor, an equally green man, did not hesitate to state during question time that all change is cultural and that there was no way he was going to trade in his truck for a low-carbon micro-hybrid. Add to that some of the confusing comments from one lady in the room about regulating ‘animal gas emissions’ and I think it is fair to say that however well marketed and positioned, global warming is too fragmented and an insufficiently unifying issue politically to enable realignments that change the electoral landscape. For now, it has momentum, the question is if it will last.

More likely is that that various parties of the right and left will – forced by the excellent marketing power behind it all – will frame policies that are palatable to the public and industry at large and that will be financable. The evening with the Gore ambassador did in the end not raise my concerns over an alarmist and dogmatic movement, it actually revealed global warming for what it really is: open to interpretation, ready for compromise and not nearly as dramatic as some would have us believe.

NOTE: And what better example of global warming’s ambiguity than to let a powerful voice from the left inform us on the consequences of implementing Kyoto:

Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Autoworkers Workers, does not expect any government to try to implement Kyoto according to current deadlines.

"It would be devastating for the whole community, anybody that signed on," he said. "It's not even a remote possibility. No prime minister in any one of the parties in the House of Commons is going to bring in any kind of regulation that says we have to do that. It would be suicidal for our economy.

Never thought I would approvingly quote a union leader, but I guess it underlines my argument.

Yes - there is lots to talk about and thanks for all the questions and suggested links. Give me a few days to peruse it all. Tomorrow I will attend a briefing from one of the Climate Change Messengers who will present the basic message of Al Gore's documentary and I expect that it will be followed by a debate. The plan is to weave it all together in one large post later this week. Stay tuned.

A reader points me to the book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer. In short:

The thesis of this book, backed up by extensive research, is that the slight warming our Earth is undergoing now is part of a long-established cycle associated with activity on our sun, is not dangerous, and is not something we could do anything about even if there were any need to, which there isn't. If man-made greenhouse gasses are contributing to warming to anything more than the most trifling degree, the global warming activists have not come even close to demonstrating this.

This is more or less the train of thought that I've considered worthy of as much attention as that inconvenient truth. More on this next week when one of Al Gore's emissaries will give a presentation here in my neighborhood. An open mind is required, sure, but so is an open debate.

Re-purposing the concept of hate speech, The Weather Channel’s (TWC) and well-known climatologist Heidi Cullen advocates that:

" ... that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming"

I've never been aware that TV-weathermen and women were 'certified', in fact I have always believed that they were just channeling whatever the meteorological reports said. So, engaging in a debate - scientific or not - is actually some good news. But according to Cullen any debate will have to start at a certain level of undisputed knowledge, hers to be precise:

Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

Crushing dissent or manipulating the global warming debate? Probably both.

But I think that the real cause of this cold snap in the L.A./Hollywood area is that Al Gore has been shortlisted for an Oscar. Al just can't catch a break. - Glenn Reynolds

Colby Cosh has discovered the middle ground in the debate over global warming.

It may get lost among all the media excitement over the Baker-Hamilton report, but it seems to me that another fruitful area for writing reports has emerged in Afghanistan. And I use the plural deliberately as one such report can look at the future of the nation and the West’s strategy towards fixing it, the other one can deal with the failure of NATO countries to share the burden of an increasing workload. Or better, the burden of combat:

Britain's Foreign Office minister says reluctant NATO allies need to “get real” about the threat posed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

Kim Howells told a diplomatic audience at Canada's Foreign Affairs building in Ottawa that Britons are just as frustrated as Canadians about bearing the brunt of heavy fighting in the country's south.

German, Italian, French and Spanish forces patrol relatively quiet
sectors and have refused to allow their troops to engage in combat.
At the NATO summit two weeks ago, those countries agreed to loosen restrictions and promised to help Canadian, British, Dutch and American forces battling the Taliban, but only in emergencies.

This issue has been on the frontburner especially in the UK and Canada where frustration over selective opt-outs by ‘NATO partners’ is understandably growing.

Invoking the NATO’s Article V, its collective defense clause, after 9/11 essentially created the first real combat situation for the organization. By deploying to Afghanistan most NATO governments must have known that it hardly would be a mission focused exclusively on rebuilding and maintaining peace. It was a unique venture in that the peace still had to be established before it could be maintained, but no political leader was willing to wager some political capital on that unpopular notion. This approach solidified the evidence that leaders from Canada and key European nations failed in not only recognizing and articulating the dangers of the post 9/11 world, they willfully neglected to inform their citizens of the nature of the Afghan mission.

We’re now a good five years further and while Canada is under new management and thus less ambivalent, beyond Blair’s Britain and a half-baked Dutch effort there is very limited appetite for beefing up NATO’s efforts. Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Paris and Madrid are not the best places in Europe to invoke the spirit of common defense and joint operations.

I’ve often been asked when my Euro-disparagement first emerged and in response I pinpoint the embarrassing failure of almost all European nations to end the well organized civil war and mass-murder in the former Yugoslavia. Symbolic efforts, peacekeepers and observers paved the way for an ethnic bloodbath that only the United States seemed capable of handling in the end. Kosovo was kept whole by a version of NATO that at the time had a determined nation in the driver’s seat. And by all accounts, the risk profile for the Balkans was a much easier one to digest compared to a mountainscape littered with faith based suicide bombers.

So as Washington’s hands are tied, European leaders in places like Paris and Madrid are deeply mistaken to believe that somehow Kandahar and Kabul can emerge from the rubble, in much the way that Sarajevo and Priština did. Few will understand the urgency, and even fewer will want to put precious political capital on the line to turn the Afghan mission, and NATO’s long-term future, into a success. Needless to say, the outcome of such inaction is worrisome to say the least.

Final word: while admirable we also have to see if British and Canadian efforts can endure mounting domestic criticism and political turbulence.

UPDATE: Some useful comments from Fareed Zakaria on the need to succeed in Afghanistan:

As Iraq has descended into chaos over the last three years, Washington policymakers have often pointed to Afghanistan as the success story in the war on terror. Even those who worry about the situation on the ground agree that the United States and its NATO allies have the right strategy in place; they just think we've devoted too few resources to the problem. In fact, Afghanistan is in danger of becoming a version of Iraq, where the central government has collapsed, disorder is rife and a Qaeda-backed insurgency controls large swathes of the country. In addition, the policies that the United States has in place are at best inadequate. We have tried to handle Afghanistan with an Afghan strategy. But it is now clear that the only way to stabilize the country is to have a Pakistan strategy.

As always, these solutions are multilayered.

The debate over global warming rages on at the Telegraph:

In the climate change debate, one figure is real. The Sunday Telegraph's website registered more than 127,000 hits in response to last week's article revealing that the UN had minimised the sun's role in changing past and present climate, persisted in proven errors and used unsound data, questionable graphs and meretricious maths to exaggerate future warming threefold.

And here is a PDF-file with 200 e-mails addressed to Monckton following his controversial article in which he debunks the notion that human activity is responsible for climate change. The debate which according to some has been settled, is just beginning.

UPDATE: Conspiracy theories abound. Margaret Wente sums them up:

There's more. Tomorrow, the CBC's fifth estate airs an exposé on The Denial Machine. "Call them skeptics, deniers, or naysayers," says the promo. "They are scientists that see themselves as keepers of the truth about global warming: that it is a theory only, not a scientific fact, some even call it a hoax. Who are they? They may be small in number, but they have rich and powerful allies -- the oil industry and the U.S. government."

Yikes! I hate to debunk a good conspiracy theory, but this one is pretty nutty. So many smart people have questions about climate change that it's hard to believe they've all been bought off. They include people such as Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT and a co-author of the United Nations climate-change report. "Yes, there does appear to be warming, but the amount is hardly certain or indisputable," he says. "And the amount found does not appear that alarming."

Not alarming at all. Interesting and reason for more research? Yes.

The climate change debate has taken on such dynamics that it is increasingly hard to tell who is right or wrong. It seems to me that fudging the numbers - and the science - is integral to the entire debate and given the royal media access given to the alarmist camp, it is only prudent to let some debunk the claims of impending doom. Consider Christopher Moncton when he presents his numbers.

As it was a holiday here today the Dorsman family ventured out for a hike in the Alice Lake provincial park. We were one of the very few who did so on this bright and sunny fall day and you wonder why on earth so few people take advantage of discovering such a beautiful piece of wilderness. We settled on the theory that the ratio of people to parks must be relatively low around here. Interestingly, Victor Davis Hanson had exactly the same experience in California's heartland:

“ … it struck me that it is little more than an hour away from much of Fresno County. That is, for about $25 in gas, almost any of the 1 million plus of the greater Fresno area could be here in clean air, natural beauty, and grand vistas within minutes.

But none were. For all the worry of the Sierra Club over an endangered wildness, even the areas contiguous to the lake were deserted—never mind the great emptiness in the thousands of square miles above Huntington in the higher Sierra. The problem, it seems to me, is not that there are too many hoi polloi despoiling the wilderness, but far too few enjoying it"

Judging from the line-ups near the shopping malls and fast-food outlets on our way back, that indeed seems to be the case. It's another sad reflection on our times, but it is probably good for what is left of North America's pristine wilderness.

Or good, depending on how alarmist his message needs to be in order to get the global warming message across. It appears things may not turn out as bad as they have been portrayed so far. Be prepared for more revised warming projections down the road, science and emotion don't mix very well and they certainly yield unreliable forecasts.

UPDATE: Interestingly, Michael van der Galien argues today that Al Gore deserves for respect for standing up for global warming. Well yes, but it is (a) incumbent upon Gore to present his audience with credible numbers and (b) for his audience to be aware of the former Vice President's propensity to the embellish issues that he cares about.

Here is another pretty cool interactive map (via the Herbinator) that allows you to manipulate water levels and see what the world will look like after the huge gobal warming induced deluge. It's safe to say that the global warming projections fall into the same alarmist category as the demographic doom scenarios: they will become reality only if current trends persist, unaltered. And the chances of that happening are, in my opinion, remote.

In a significant, but hardly surprising move, Canada's new conservative government has made it clear that it will abandon the plans made in accordance with targets under the Kyoto Protocol. These are impossible to achieve according to environment minister Rona Ambrose who will probably be mandated to come up with a unique Canada-based formula to reduce greenhouse gases. These efforts are supported by a letter from 60 leading international climate change experts who once more reiterated the near impossibility to seperate the various causes that are contributing to climate change:

"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.

"Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'."

To be frank, I am no expert in climate or environmental matters but the theory that earth will warm up over time (the impact of the evolution of the sun comes to mind) has been around long before the environmental movement started to sound the greenhouse gas alarm bell. There is evidence that the latter does accelerate some of the climatic shifts. However, until we really get a better sense of what each component contributes to global warming there is no point in signing up for politically expedient, arbitrary and costly measures which in the end only seem to contribute to a weird feel-good factor. A healthy dose of realism is required here.

The global warming debate has strong momentum again all of a sudden, and now the Times is saying that London could be under water by 2100. Thankfully there is an interactive tool available online where you can manipulate the water levels: Flood Maps. Once you have done that you can determine how to plan your future, Florida and The Netherlands probably being the least attractive places to build your house.

UPDATE: More from Roger Simon.

No sooner had I posted my call to support Spirit of America’s efforts in Iraq rather than green causes, or I got a call from one of Greenpeace’s tele-marketers. No, they’re not reading my blog, but my name is on their list as an erstwhile contributor as seven years in Hong Kong can turn you into a staunch environmentalist. Anyway, I explained the caller politely that our charitable donations are now going to hospitals and schools in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without missing a beat the Greenpeace caller jumped on the importance of saving the Iraqi marshlands, which according to him was an ecological disaster waiting to happen. With that he unintentionally confirmed why I had cooled on the green cause and its highly dogmatic approach: environmental issues takes precedence over immediate human suffering or any other need. It is fine for Greenpeace to stay close to its mission, but to identify the marshlands as the key problem for Iraq, well, that’s a little bit too rich for me.

NOTE: Greenpeace's involvement with Iraq is a little less innocent than I initially thought: Greenpeace Activists Block Military Port in Iraq Protest. Sure that wasn't about the marshlands.

UPDATE: Well, Greenpeace has known about the marshlands all along, but during the Saddam years it stayed suspiciously quiet about it:

Again, the environmental movement knows about this — and used to complain. More recently, however, they have been oddly silent. When President Bush marshaled his list of Saddam's crimes — as part of the public-relations war to rally the world against the Iraqi regime — he didn't get any help from the environmental movement. To the best of our knowledge, no statements of support were offered by the likes of Greenpeace or other such groups, urging the president to rescue the Iraqi marshlands.

To the contrary, many members of these organizations joined the peace movement, where they marched in antiwar rallies organized by far-left groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R. and Not in Our Name.

Interesting.

It's been a while since I paid attention to environmental issues, a reader probably noticed and he sends me an interesting - and scientific - piece which argues that the Kyoto protocol is based on flawed statistics.

It seems the army of environmental skeptics is growing. While staying true to their conservationist instincts – which I fully support - they have become disenchanted with the sensationalist zero-tolerance attitudes propagated by institutions like Greenpeace. Here’s Patrick Moore who helped co-found that organization but moved on and started his own environmental company:

Beginning in the mid 1980s, Greenpeace, and much of the environmental movement, made a sharp turn to the political left and began adopting extreme agendas that abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.

As an ex-Greenpeace activist his criticisms are credible and the various arguments he makes in favor of nuclear energy, genetically enhanced foods and salmon farming not only make sense, they are grounded in years of experience in this business. We can only hope that more enviro-skeptics raise their voices before the world enters into more misguided multi-billion dollar efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol which came into effect last week.

Yesterday Bjorn Lomborg was in town to do one of his energetic pitches to look at the world’s problems and impending tragedies from a completely different perspective. He focused on the results of his Copenhagen Consensus, some intense brainstorming by a group of the world’s leading economists who had been given the task to allocate scarce resources over a number pressing issues with a view to make significant progress for each problem with as little resources as possible and, as early as possible. I hadn’t really looked into this study when it got media traction last year, but when I saw what projects made the top of the list, I wasn’t that surprised. Lomborg targets these as “good projects”, having met the criteria laid out to the Copenhagen forum:

1. Diseases - Control HIV/Aids and avoid adding 28 million sufferers to the list by 2010;

2. Malnutrition - Provide micro-nutrients such as with iron, zinc, vitamin-A

3. Trade Barriers and Subsidies – Removal is a very low cost solution with potentially lots of winners, especially in poor countries.

4. Diseases – Control of malaria and contribute to productivity increases.

The inability of large organizations, like the UN, to provide adequate help is often a result of a lack of prioritizing and efficiently providing direct relief in the areas where it is needed most. And Lomborg also lamented the fact that the media overplayed and hyped recent world problems such as climate change which as an issue ended up low on the Copenhagen’s forum final list of worthwhile projects. Without delving into detail, Lomborg wasn’t too pleased with the billions that are now being poured into implementing Kyoto and argued for carbon-taxes as a much more efficient tool to deal with global warming.

There’s a strong argument to re-assess relief work around the world and re-prioritize not only the various tragedies but also look closely at what institutions are best suited to address the most immediate needs around the world. The commendable efforts to help the tsunami victims and the quest to do something about global warming have overshadowed phenomenal human tragedies that are equally, if not more, deserving of attention and funds. It is perhaps an emerging domain for private foundations to target specific problems and deal with them, unhindered by political and institutional roadblocks. Iain Murray and Zack Klein echo the Danish oracle appropriately:

While some could disagree on the methodology of the Copenhagen Consensus's results, it is important to bolster the discussion of prioritizing the world's resources to solve global challenges. Environmental alarmism — including scientists emphasizing unlikely worst-case scenarios and Hollywood making up impossible catastrophes — merely moves us away from a rational, dispassionate assessment of the issues. There is no reason why a warmer world cannot remain an enlightened, rational world.

UPDATE: Within a time span of twenty-four hours two good examples of each approach: alarmist environmentalism and Bill Gates stepping up with more cash for the immunization of Third World children.

This report tells us that a luxury condo owner in Vancouver has directly or indirectly been involved in poisoning some trees on public parkland in a desperate attempt to destroy the trees and improve his or her views. Stories like this pique my immediate interest for in spite of the phenomenal outcry over this (true, true, you can’t destroy public property) I would like to put a few things in perspective.

First, in most of British Columbia the health and well being of trees is not only tantamount to, no it often exceeds, the care and well being of human beings. You can entertain the most bizarre and xenophobic viewpoints, but start to discuss removing trees and you’re in real trouble and even a reasonable argument to cut a tree for safety or esthetic reasons might result in you being nailed to the cross of green righteousness. I know that for a fact for I live in a community with splendid ocean views but any hint at improving those by chopping the odd fir brings out disdain and anger. You see, environmentalism is fine and I can go a long way with it, but the moment it becomes both institutionalized and “gospellized”, we are leaving the domain of ideas and reason and we are dealing with nothing less than pure envirofascism. There’s no room for your argument, in fact, with your suggestions you are endangering not just the trees but the entire system of beliefs built around the damn things.

In this case the view-obstructed condos are not that cheap so the enviro-fascists were able to bolster their case by not only pointing to the damage done to the sacrosanct tree, no these condo-owners were boosting their property values, the ultimate horror: they were enriching themselves! When envirofascism merges with anti-capitalism it’s time to cut your losses in BC, chances are economic value is going to be destroyed one way or the other and you might as well leave before you are being wiped out in the process.

In any other place in the world a formal request to get rid of trees would have been dealt with in a reasonable fashion. A request to have your everyday view improved would be balanced against the interests of an occasional passerby, in this case in a province with probably the highest ratio of trees per person it could hardly have been an onerous request. Yet that’s not the way it works here, the bureaucracy has some solid built-in defenses against those that challenge to enshrined environmentalism and now that the affected ones have taken the law into their own hands they have put themselves in an awkward spot, but they shouldn’t be. They have a valid point that should have been listened to in the first place.

UPDATE: Here's a website devoted entriely to the ever increasing lunacy of the environmental movement: Greenie Watch. In particular the entry "fuck for forest" is worth a visit and then the title of this post could have read: "get laid by saving a tree".

When the discussion centers around global warming I very often throw in a comment that I kind of welcome rising temperatures, a remark that until recently could be qualified as politically incorrect. My reasons for unusual environmental commentary are generally two-fold: I like to wind people up and test their reaction, but also I do believe there's some truth to it. It does not always get a great response from friends and family yet, these days remarks about the positive side effects of this phenomenon are increasingly welcomed and this blogger - who by the way produces good content, with a healthy dose of irony – jumps into the debate with his view pointing out that it is not the first time that the globe is experiencing a period of relatively high temperatures. I can’t vouch for the scientific base but it is becoming ever clearer that we are not sure what causes global warming and that indeed it may not be all that negative. On the contrary, here in Vancouver after a few years of really mild temperatures and lots of sunshine the weather is sold as an additional bonus on top of lower taxes and a highly skilled workforce: a great place to invest, work and live!

Update: Iain Murray alerts us to the fact that in New York, Al Gore picked the coldest day in years to deliver a speech on, you guessed it, global warming.

Dean Esmay links to a speech by Michael Crichton on the environment, which for anyone concerned about the environment yet skeptical about environmentalism is a must-read. The essence of his argument is that it is time for environmentalists to abandon their religious beliefs and start acting based on facts, on science. While I strongly agree with him it should be noted that this is a near impossibility for it means that the environmental movement would have to question the core of the agenda it has been advocating for over 30 years. That's not going to happen and we will likely see an environmental nucleus that is ever more becoming radicalized and fundamentalist in its beliefs, passing the cost of its delirious ideas on to society at large. After seven years in Hong Kong I had come to believe environmentalists, a few years on Canada’s West Coast made me realize that we need to use common sense, feed the Kyoto Protocol through the shredder and listen to people like Crichton.

Kris Murray today makes very clear why she doesn’t like organic foods following a critical piece in the Observer about especially the taste of organic foods, and William Sjostrom reacts to the same piece by taking on the sanctimony that is so often part of the organic culture. While I fully buy into a very critical examination of environmentalist and green excesses, advocating to enthusiastically cut trees and exterminate excess wildlife, I have a problem with an across the board bashing of everything organic, which is what Kris does. Irene and I started to bring organic foods into our lives when we lived in Hong Kong, prompted by the fact that most vegetables available on the local wet markets there where imported from China where every farmer still enthusiastically uses the most lethal pesticides and chemicals banned in any other country in the world. So we got our weekly vegetable delivery from a small farm in the New Territories, an equally polluted part of the world, but the beets they produced were some of the best we ever had. It didn’t make any difference to our diet or health, really, but we liked the initiative and after a visit and lunch with the former fisherman and hyped ex-lawyer who together ran the place we knew this was a pretty unique initiative that deserved our full support.

A more critical examination took place when we moved to North America where pretty soon half of our entire intake became organic, a practice that gained momentum during Irene’s pregnancies. We are not trying to make a statement, save the earth or otherwise, but plain logic will have it that certified organic goods do not contain the artificial supplements and hormones, or are exposed to certain pesticides, that so often can be found in regular food. I like Bjorn Lomborg, but if he can convince me that there are no issues with red-colored fat dripping with hormones passing as beef, I will have to start questioning some of his methods. People that enjoy healthy lifestyles and a balanced diet should by the way be sufficiently healthy to withstand all the potential diseases that Kris identified come with organic produce. As for taste, true, not all of it tastes necessarily better, but I will gladly put forward that if I throw a handful of MSG in my evening dinner it will no doubt make it taste better, but it surely doesn’t make it any healthier. I am not positioning this as a religion, on the contrary, a big chunk of our food intake is non-organic, but I think in some areas, notable meat and dairy, you’re better off going organic or natural. Especially in North America the spectacular physical growth rates of children have been linked to an overabundance of hormones in meat and dairy. As for fish, the orange dyed pieces of salt that these days pass for salmon are indicative of the need to pay a premium for chunky pink salmon from the wild. The same holds true for the watery grey stuff that is chicken filet, for a few bucks more you can have some very tasty free-range or organic stuff.

That brings me to the last part, Kris’s assertion that it is a big con. She may be onto something here, consumers with disposable cash love being led by a feeling that they get premium stuff for inflated prices and the organic industry has like any other industry taken advantage of this. Some up-market fancy bio-retailers have raked in huge profits on the basis of this fad. Large retail chains have jumped onto this and now offer “organic brands” at a premium to their normal offerings, but at a discount to what organic specialty stores charge for their goods. This is where I get suspicious as nothing stops me from believing that regular milk and orange juice are simply wrapped in an organic label and sold at a premium price. Bring a higher middle class fad to those with smaller purses and you have just written your ticket to solid revenues by selling more items as well as luring green consumers away from the traditional organic outlets.

The key in this is probably some common sense. Neither an exclusive regular diet, nor an exclusive organic plate offers us a road to tasty health, and ignoring organic foods on the presumption that they negatively affect your basic health seem ludicrous. But so is forking out a fortune for some poorly tasting spinach.

The forest fires in British Columbia continue unabated. Here’s what one of the National Post’s columnists thought about it last week, complaining that the overbearing environmentalist tradition of this province probably has something to do with the violent fires.

The writer, Elizabeth Nickson, has a point, I think. The environmental movement has drifted towards a totalitarian attitude that condemns even benign trimming of trees and shrubs as a criminal activity, and shooting cougars and bears that pose a direct threat to humans in urban areas that border forests as murder. In trying to solve some problems they have created another layer of equally serious problems. I know all about it as I happen to live in a village that is located right on the edge of Mother Nature, but from time to time we have to ensure that nature does not interfere too much with what I would call, a normal life. That includes trimming trees by the local power utility in order to make certain that there will be an uninterrupted supply of power to the residents’ dwellings here. I will spare you the vitriolic hyperbole that comes from some of the residents here in response to the annual trimming (which I wholeheartedly support as I value both my power supply and my views) but it makes you wonder what motivates them to unleash their pent-up emotions in such a manner. Only this weekend one of my neighbors ripped into me over suggesting that we should pre-emptively cut some trees, given that the fire danger level now has been raised to “extremely high”. These suppressed emotions that somehow erupt when you talk about things environmental extend to taking measures against unwanted wildlife with the comment “that we live in a forest and we should respect the rules of that forest”. Wrong, patently wrong. We live in a village and in the village live people, including children, and if they are at risk of being attacked by cougars or bears we should simply ensure that they are safe and can go about doing what they are supposed to be doing. If that means we have to clip some wildlife, so be it.

Believe it or not, following my years in Hong Kong I was a pretty convinced environmentalist and even donated on a regular basis to Greenpeace but 4 years in North America have ensured a more realistic take on things environmental and I now believe it is probably wise to cut the tree and shoot the bear if it happens to do something for the better. It is interesting to note that the most fanatic environmentalists here are what I would call part of the older generation, most of them are 50+ and probably have had their ideas shaped in the 1960s and 1970s, the younger set are all pragmatists and thus avid (or should I say realistic?) tree cutters, me being one of them.

Here’s some hope for Elizabeth Nickson, I know where she lives and Salt Spring Island is one of the most splendid island beauties in the Pacific Northwest and it is populated by a weird mixture of alternative enviro-nuts and wealthy professionals who bought a second home on the island. It so happened that the enviro crowd arrived first and helped enacting the byzantine laws that prevent you from doing anything with land that is rightfully yours. I guess overtime the pragmatic youngsters with disposable income will become more infuential by virtue of their numbers, and ensure that you can cut the odd tree; the same process is unfolding here in my village. There’s nothing wrong or abject in protecting forests and wildlife, I support it, really. But it becomes a problem if it starts to interfere with common sense and it becomes dangerous when it can be linked to forest fires that obliterate entire communities.