Vincent J. Curtis
15 Nov 2013
The thing to understand when dealing with environmentalists
is that they care about the environment, not people. To an
environmentalist, people and their activities are the causes of problems in the
environment, and the environment is the thing they care about.
The belief that mankind is the problem is often accompanied
with a political and moralistic agenda towards a solution. For example,
rarely is an environmentalist not heard calling for the curtailment of some
wealth producing activity. In extreme cases, such as in those who believe
in Gaia or in “deep ecology,” the good for the planet of the existence of
mankind is called into question. Mankind being the source of the problem,
mankind’s ruinous activities on the planet would be at “sustainable” levels
were mankind to number one billion instead of the current seven billion
souls. An echo of this sentiment is found in in Mr. M.’s article,
where he congratulates Ontario for reducing total emissions of carbon dioxide
but observes that Ontario could have done much better had her population not
increased so much in the last two decades.
To an environmentalist, mankind’s quality of life have to be
made to suffer for the sin of living better and better.
Take Mr. D.M., who has arranged his life so that he
has been car-free for nine years, has lowered his electricity bill to $34.00 a
month, and lives in a modest townhouse. He has, in his words, “tr[ied] to
do the right thing for the environment.”
I am glad that Mr. M. has lived accordance with his
beliefs; he deserves to. But not everyone wants to live the pinched life
of an ascetic monk. A Hamiltonian who wants to put his canoe into a quiet
Algonquin lake has to drive a vehicle big enough to carry a canoe. That
canoe, whether made of fibreglass, Kevlar, or birchbark, caused untold
destruction of the environment in its manufacture. To say nothing of the
manufacture of the newest canoeing equipment, camping gear, and foods for that
trip.
A problem arises, however, when Mr. M. thinks that
everyone else should live the life of the ascetic-monk as he does. In
particular, he thinks that Alberta should be impoverished because the
exploitation of her tar-sands resources offends his sensibilities.
When an environmentalist says “everyone knows…” you can be
sure that what follows is far-fetched nonsense. In Mr. M.’s case,
mankind has to reduce the use of fossil fuels so that homes around the Red Hill
Parkway in Hamilton won’t be flooded again. Apparently, a “damaged
climate” is doing this, and engineering deficiencies are in no way
responsible. He says that “300,000 deaths a year are caused by climate
change” except that climate change has not happened yet. Climate
change is supposed to be the consequence of 100 more years of carbon dioxide
emissions at current rates, and cannot have happened yet! We have
heard this so-many deaths per year argument before, but it was associated not
with climate change but with the emissions that came from coal burning.
What is amusing is Mr. M.’s admiration of China for
leading the world in “installed renewable energy capacity…” China’s air
pollution problems are world-famous, and last month a Chinese city had to be
shut down for several days to allow pollution to dissipate. There is a
theory among conservatives that an environmentalist is green on the outside and
red on the inside. By citing China favorably in the face of its
well-known pollution problems, Mr. M. seems to confirm conservative
paranoia.
In a free society, people are allowed to hold and espouse
any belief they like. They can bay at the moon if like, so long as it
doesn’t disturb the neighbours.
An environmentalist may have a grain in truth somewhere in
his utterances, but it is usually surrounded by arrant nonsense and one needs
to be careful in separating truth from fiction.
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