Reboot Alberta

Friday, April 27, 2007

Who Can We Trust on Climate Change

UPDATE APRIL 30 - LINK BYFIELD of the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy says "Between Harper and Stelmach, We have been Sold Out on Climate Change.

UPDATE APRIL 28 - AL GORE SAYS HARPER GREEN PLAN IS A FRAUD INTENDED TO MISLEAD CANADIANS!


I was going to do a post today on who are we to believe on the environment. The mainline federal political parties all have some serious baggage but we need to think about the current changes we need to make to ensure our future as one of the survive species on this planet. Who in the current political culture is into that frame of mind? The Greens and Elizabeth May are for sure and Dion as a person is into this too obviously. I am not sure about Dion's party position though. Harper is not credible and Layton seems to be into the environment as a lever for policy influence more than an genuine engagement.

Instead of doing a post myself I ran across a really insightful and informative post on this topic. It comes from the blog Democratic Space. It is a worth a read.

The polls are showing we are so volatile as a public that they are useless in accurately predicting anything about our collective political future. In the meantime, without the silly seasons elections create, the conversations on climate change still have to happen. They have to happen in different context and the content has to change too. We have to engage more citizens and become broader and more inclusive and more informed on these issues.

Politics does not seem to be capable of ding this for us at this time. Too bad because all the decisions on these issues are going to be political at the end of the day.

5 comments:

  1. Whooee! Yer right as rain, KenFeller. It's tough to know what anybuddy's gonna do.

    I imagine when a lotta Con supporters voted fer Harpoon, they never thought he'd sell 'em down the river with buyin' in to anthropogenic climate change, carbon tradin' an' kissin' treehugger ass. I reckon they might not o' thought he'd put a tax on income trusts, neither.

    Polyticians who's "real" polyticians got only one motivation - votes. They do everything fer the sake of votes in the next election. That's short term plannin'. Ol' Mother Earth is a long term proposition. Doin' what's right fer the planet an' fer the long term ain't always the same as doin' what's gonna get votes in the short term. That might be changin', though.

    The gal I adore, Earth Mother Lizzie May, ain't much of a real polytician. She's too concerned with the long term. She ain't gonna whitewash troublems an' try to come up with a compromise that don't achieve diddly just so's she'll get votes. But, dang-it-all, more'n'more sensible Canajuns is linin' up alongside the Green Party.

    I reckon Canajuns ain't entirely stoopid. We know how to save money. We knoiw how to invest. Sure, we got some risk-takin' entrepreneurs an' venture capitalists but we really tend to look at the long term in our personal an' business finances.

    Proportionally, more Canajuns is home owners than Merkans an' our mortgage rules make that tougher fer us. Polyticians gotta start givin' us credit fer havin' a haff ounce o' brains. We CAN handle the truth. An' we can elect keaders who tell us truthfully, that we've gotta sacrifice a few things fer long term goals.

    There's really only one party takin' the long view. The rest is insultin' the intelligence of voters with lies an' false promises.

    JimBobby

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  2. Anonymous5:30 pm

    Gotta go with Jimmy!

    greengirl

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  3. Anonymous10:55 am

    Ken
    The confusion about who to believe becomes clearer when you recall what senior members of the government have been saying -- not years ago, just weeks ago.
    Contrast Baird and Harper now with what their senior colleague and former leader Stockwell Day was saying before Christmas:
    MP steamed by Day's blog joke 'begging for Big Al's Glacial Melt'
    McGuinty likens Day's comments to 'a Flintstones episode'

    Mike De Souza
    The Ottawa Citizen

    Tuesday, December 12, 2006

    An article penned by Public Safety Minister (Stockwell Day) that poked fun at global warming during a recent cold snap in Mr. Day's riding of Okanagan-Coquihalla, didn't amuse Ottawa South Liberal MP David McGuinty. He likened Mr. Day to Fred Flintstone.
    CREDIT: Fred Chartrand, The Canadian Press
    An article penned by Public Safety Minister (Stockwell Day) that poked fun at global warming during a recent cold snap in Mr. Day's riding of Okanagan-Coquihalla, didn't amuse Ottawa South Liberal MP David McGuinty. He likened Mr. Day to Fred Flintstone.

    A senior federal Conservative cabinet minister is being compared to the fictional, stone-aged Flintstone family, after publishing a newspaper article that jokingly questions whether climate change is happening.

    Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day originally wrote the tongue-in-cheek commentary on Dec. 1 on his Internet blog -- www.stockwellday.com.

    "Hey who knows, maybe Al Gore is right," Mr. Day wrote in the article that was later picked up by the Penticton Western News -- a newspaper in his Okanagan-Coquihalla riding.

    "Maybe all my constituents living high up on the West Bench or Lakeview Heights, or the hills of Logan Lake will soon be sitting on lakeside property as one of the many benefits of global warming."

    Mr. Day even suggested that he'd like to see things heat up in his region.

    "All I know is last weekend when I got home from Ottawa there was more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year," he said in the article. "And I was begging for Big Al's Glacial Melt when the mercury hit -24. Do not despair, my fellow dwellers of the Okanagan and Nicola Valleys."

    He also made light of recent pine beetle infestations in British Columbia forests that most experts attribute to climate change.

    "Rather than feeling badly for yourself, picture this: For every hour it's that cold, millions of those nasty ravenous pine beetles who are destroying our forests are having their pesky little heads and jaws frozen, literally to death," he wrote. "But brace yourself. We'd need about two weeks of that brain freeze weather to kill off all those burrowing bugs."

    All joking aside, critics said the commentary reflects the Conservative government's real skepticism about acting to fight climate change.

    "It reminds me of an episode of the Flintstones," said David McGuinty, Liberal MP for Ottawa South. "

    Mr. Day clearly does not understand the science of climate change. ... It's very concerning. He's a front-bench member of this government's cabinet, and it's reminiscent also of his comments some years ago about evolution."

    During the 2000 election, Mr. Day, who was then leader of the Canadian Alliance, was ridiculed by the Liberals after he said there was "scientific support for both creationism and evolution."

    Environmentalists said Mr. Day's latest views show the government is obsessed with conspiracy theories about Al Gore, the former U.S. vice-president who is touring the world to promote action against global warming. John Bennett, executive director of Climate Action Network, said the government should instead be educating people about climate change to encourage action.

    "A federal minister should be taking the threat of climate change far more seriously than this," said Mr. Bennett, who is also a climate-change policy analyst for the Sierra Club of Canada.

    "The real thinking going on in Canada's cabinet these days is that climate change is 'Big Al's Glacial Melt.' It's not a serious environmental problem (for members of government) that needs to be addressed."

    Mr. Bennett noted that Day was using a common tactic of climate change skeptics to confuse the climate with the weather as Prime Minister Stephen Harper had done a few weeks earlier.

    Meanwhile, federal Environment Minister Rona Ambrose now says the government is ready to spend public money overseas to fight climate change through the Kyoto protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, which helps facilitate carbon trading to fund projects that sell credits in developing countries.

    Although she had previously denounced the mechanism, quoting critics who called it corrupt, Ms. Ambrose told a House of Commons environment committee yesterday that she would support it if there were third party observers in place to ensure the money was well spent.

    Ms. Ambrose insisted that Canada was honouring all of its commitments under Kyoto except for its greenhouse gas reduction targets.

    But a senior government official later contradicted her at committee, confirming that Canada is late on a $1.5-million payment that was owed to the Clean Development Mechanism.

    "I heard a completely muddled minister," said Liberal environment critic John Godfrey. "Last time, she said she was not, under any conditions, going to spend any money overseas for emissions credits. Now she says she'd buy credits internationally, provided that they can be verified -- which was always the pre-condition that we (Liberals) had."

    Ms. Ambrose dismissed suggestions that she was changing positions, explaining that she was clarifying her government's position.

    Mr. Day did not make himself available to reporters following question period, but spokeswoman Melisa Leclerc said he was trying to use sarcasm in his article to show that climate change exists, and that his government has a plan to take action.

    Read stockwell day's full article in online extras at www.ottawacitizen.com
    © The Ottawa Citizen 2006

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  4. It blows my mind away how environMENTALists complain about the Harper government on CO2 emissions when they said nothing how the Liberals did absolutely nothing. Because I don't believe the CO2 global warming Maurice Strong-Al Gore hype (and science has refuted all of his "evidence"), I wish the old Liberals were back in power. Lightbulbs my ass.

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  5. Anonymous11:34 am

    I'd rather prefer the arguments of the environmental radicalist, Elizabeth May: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/politics/story.html?id=41a9655e-59c2-4ab0-a87a-4d18c0f67c3e&k=17322

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