Canada lame, greens too rigid on Global Warming

Is environmental orthodoxy blocking action?

Commentary from Larry Solway

  It's lonely out here on this limb. I consider myself to be a strong environmentalist, but I'm out of step with orthodox belief. I actually believe in nuclear power and GM foods. Before you drum me out of the party, listen up.
  In the power-gluttonous 60s we really believed we could "Live Better Electrically." Premier Bill Davis promised that Ontario's burgeoning Hydro system would make us more fuel self-sufficient. We would even have our commuter train system powered by electricity!
  Fast forward to 2000. After the collapse of The Hague Conference on Global Warming, the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development said: "Canada walks away with egg on its face." If you missed it, Canada, along with the world's arch fuel guzzler, the U.S., declined to endorse the climate summit resolution to support the Kyoto Agreement on Global Warming. Our lame answer was that we deserved to pollute because we had all those forests soaking up pollutants.
  What in the bloody, benighted, blue blazes is going on with our leaders and the just-as-bumbling dissemblers in the United States? What do we have to hit people over the head with before they wake up? They'll say (but not out loud) so what if a few bears can't get on the ice to hunt seals because the winter is slow in coming and the ice isn't thick enough. Our environmental knickers are in a knot when there are much more important fish to fry, like the deep economic doo-doo at Daimler Chrysler, which can't get those jumbo trucks-pretending-they-are-cars on the road in numbers sufficient to keep all Buzz's workers going three shifts. Big Business echoes the alarm that too much conservation and too much clean fuel technology is the slippery slope to lost jobs - not to mention profits. The western cement barons, who depend on developers to keep paving over farmland, warn that rising oil prices will make them return to coal to fire their high temperature kilns. So we are told to get our priorities straight.
  So what if thousands sicken and some even die from asthma caused by industrial and automotive smog? A few tree-hugging, granola-munching zealots want to stop fossil-fuel-fired electric generation or stop the monoxide-spewing gridlock of a rush hour that is now all day long.
  Society seems out to lunch. The highways are jammed with sport-utes and trucks gorging fuel because of weight and speed. Remember the carbon tax Bob Rae tried? Remember how his figures showed dramatic fuel consumption increase when speeds went up. We heard numbers like 20-25% fuel saving by decreasing speeds from 120 to 100 KPH. But Mr. Busy-man has a God-given right to get there as fast as possible.
  The US now lets many states put limits to 70 MPH. In Ontario the police "forgive" up to 20 KPH over the limit.
  We must demand the kind of action voter-friendly governments won't touch. Instead of lowering fuel prices - they should be raised. The government must go beyond carbon-taxing heavy cars, it should outlaw further sale of any private vehicle over one ton. It should, instead of pouring millions into new gridlock-causing highways, subsidize intermodal transport so more trucks ride railway flatcars instead of highways. It would not only reduce gridlock, and exhaust smog, it would cut down rampant wear and tear on pavement caused by too-heavy, too-fast trucks.
  An item in last week's SG argued that in the 1972 fuel crisis when fuel costs rose people ran to Japanese cars for fuel efficiency. There was also panic at the pumps. Gasoline retailers wouldn't fill your tank and the line-ups were long. Fights broke out.
  Small cars were in, road hogs were out. Boaters switched in droves from power to sail boats. TV news ran pictures of the Iowa farmland where Winnebago stored thousands of now-unwanted RVs, and it looked like the company was headed for bankruptcy.
  But fuel supply returned and so did the motorists and campers and boaters with their profligate ways. They simply got used to higher prices. It was business as usual.
  The other major polluter is industry and power generation. Nuclear power has become, along with GM foods, the scapegoat for fear-mongers. The conservationists (and I am on their side) say we waste power. But over the long haul, our prosperity is linked to power.
  The only practical technology we have now to generate power in large quantities is nuclear. We can come up with a solution to spent-fuel storage long before we can create enough power with biomass or wind or fuel cells.
  Finally, to saw the limb off completely - I'm not moved by the hysteria over genetically modified (GM) foods. The latest uproar is over a French-developed corn called StarLink. Writing in the Washington Post, Thomas Ghoban, a professor of food science and sociology at North Carolina State University says StarLink was not approved for human consumption because of a concern that its new protein may cause human allergies. But, he points out, allergy specialists have said it's virtually impossible for anyone to have an existing allergy to a protein that would be completely new to the human diet. But listen, who cares about any science that runs contrary to your own closely-held views?
  The fact is that there are now American corn-belt farmers who can't move their corn because it is StarLink. It is also corn that is insect resistant which cuts out the use of toxic pesticides.
  So the zealots deny us the use of foods that grow better and are pest- and weed- resistant. I agree that DDT had to be stopped. I don't agree, for example, that Alar should have fallen under the weight of a slightly hysterical Meryl Streep.
  But the self-styled saviours of the environment won't stop. On a recent program about, of all things, margarine versus butter, one apparently caring and socially-conscious woman said she preferred butter because it was natural. She, like millions, is a slave to the mythology of "natural." Belladonna is natural. Poisonous mushrooms are natural. And I have yet to see the health difference between sea salt and the stuff that comes from my shaker at home.
  Ooops - there goes that branch. Heeeeeelllp!

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