“Made in Canada” environmentalism
Okay, so yesterday our illustrious Prime Minister Stephen Harper, flanked by a bunch of his cabinet ministers, spoke in Vancouver, the Green capital of the country, about the government’s proposals to help improve the environment. Yeah, there was no talk about that Kyoto accord thing, which the Tories are hoping we’ll just all forget about, so there’s no use to start chitter-chatter about that again. It’d really suck to remember that our country committed to making it work.
Anyhoo, the details of this plan, this “Made in Canada” plan (as Harper likes to call it), have started attracting ire from environmental groups, which, in turn, has put Environment Minister Rona Ambrose on the defensive. The reason? The emission restrictions will be “intensity based,” meaning that a company’s emission targets will fluctuate accordingly to said company’s economic activity. As the article at the CBC explains, “even though individual emission limits for each barrel of oil or piece of coal could be lowered, if production increases, the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants could grow.” Thus, your targets grow with your company’s growth. Or, as Odiyya at The Conscious Earth puts it:
current pollution - small per unit reduction in emissions x BIG increase in production =
BIG F@#!IN’ INCREASE IN SMOG!!!
So I can’t really blame Rona for being on the defensive, with such dunderhead reasoning coming up with this stuff. Then again, Ambrose is just setting herself up to look like a disconnected moron, what with hiring a global warming skeptic as her chief of staff and all.
In all seriousness, hoever, there is absolutely no logic in setting environmental standards based on the standards of man-made institutions. Come on, how does that even remotely start to make sense? The quality of the Earth’s environment doesn’t change to follow regulations we establish for ourselves. The Earth has always determined our standard of life, whether it has been through climate, terrain, or other natural phenomenons (like earthquakes or volcanoes) and we have learned to deal with those obstacles. There are reasons why mankind settled its first major cities around rivers instead of on mountaintops, or why housing constructions in the Yukon differ from those in Melbourne, or how they are both structurally apart from those built in earthquake-prone Japan.
But cooperating wasn’t good enough. We’ve tried to take control of the planet, but Nature can’t compensate us anymore; and it won’t successfully be able to pick up the pace if we allow polluters to continue filling the skies with toxic gases.
This “Made in Canada” plan makes us look like a bunch of, pardon my French, retards.
Why, oh why are people so anti-nuclear power? Yes, it produces extremely toxic waste. But that waste is very concentrated, and stays where it is. Chunking nuclear waste into stable rock formations far away from populated centers is very feasible and very safe.
On the other hand, you can’t do a bloody thing about fossil fuel emisions other than try to cut back. They’re in the air. You can’t pull them out and store them somwhere they’ll sit until they’re no longer harmful.
I don’t know, it just bugs me that the answer to energy problems is stabbing everyone in the face with lasers, and it is ignored because people are unrealistically afraid of it.
The shit ends up in the water, and after that, everything. Hooray, Cancer! Hooray, Global Warming! Hooray!
(Don’t mind my morning bitterness)
[…] Of course, the PMO is saying that the PM isn’t going because he has to spend more time in Canada, what with being a minority government and whatnot. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that Harper hates being challenged. Nah, of course not. And it couldn’t possibly be related to specifications of the Clean Air Act; that there bit of legislation is tight. Air-tight. As in being tight on air; breathable air. […]
you need to remember environmentalism is about the destruction of the modern economy. About destroying all production and infrastructure which makes this plentiful life possible.
There is no evidence behind global warming, nor is there any behind any other environmental claim. There has no need to be, its never been about truth and science. Its about scare tactics and fascism.
You can see it in the very post this began with. How our “quality of life” is determined by the earth. Rather then human civilization. Which is of course blatant lies hes pulling out of his ass.
There is no “problem” with emissions from fossil fuel plants. Other then coal plants which spew far more radioactive wastes into the atmosphere then any nuclear plant could have ever hoped to. But you won’t read about that in a “environmental” article.
Even if global warming was real, for one, the changes won’t be significant since THE TEMPERATURE WAS FAR HIGHER DURING THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD! Humans flourished during that period more so then any other time. Up to the industrial revolution. For two, what better way to solve it then to allow 30 million free thinking men in a laissez fair capitalist system to go about the solution each in their own way.
This is about unraveling what was created in the industrial revolution. With the advent of electrical man-made power, man did not have to rely completely on his feeble muscles to do work, nor on beasts of burden. Instead he now had this magical force called electricity. When you think about quality of life improvement, electricity stands out ahead of everything. More so then better doctors. The use of both fossil fuels and electrical power is the sole reason men are living better and longer now, as opposed to a thousand years ago. Everything else derives from those two advances.
And now we sit idly by while the environmentalists try to destroy everything man has worked for for the last 150 years.
Environmentalists are poison, pure evil poison. We would do best to throw them out.