the blog quebecois

From the Anchorage Daily News:

A California author and filmmaker who became famous for trekking to Alaska's remote Katmai coast to commune with brown bears has fallen victim to the teeth and claws of the wild animals he loved.

"I told him to be much more cautious ... because every time a bear kills somebody, there is a big increase in bearanoia and bears get killed,'' Miller said. "I thought that would be a way of getting to him, and his response was 'I would be honored to end up in bear scat.' ''

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for -- it just might come true.

I remember seeing this guy and his girlfriend interviewed a few months ago. To put it mildly, they were both loons. They claimed that the bears communicated telepathically and were guiding them to some mysterious destination.

As they were. It's called "lunch."

I was reminded, too, of an incident in one of the National parks -- either Jasper or Banff -- a couple of years ago. A brown bear got into an authorized camping spot and mauled some tourists, fortunately not fatally. The rangers closed off the hiking trails and started to hunt it down.

This brought out the animal-rights clowns in force. Two of them, interviewed before they went skipping away down one of the closed trails, averred that, if they came across the bear, they'd "conquer it with love."

Unfortunately, the rangers found it first.

Use toilet paper sparingly, experiment with natural toilet paper substitutes including stones, vegetation and snow. Carry out all used toilet paper, brown plastic bags containing a drop of bleach make this more pleasant. Several forest fires have been started by burning toilet paper and burying paper in catholes is unacceptable as it doesn’t decompose. We can, however, bury used "TP substitutes" in the cathole, another reason to test these options. Know what you are using! Poison ivy and stinging nettle have been proven incompatible as a TP substitute.

Tips for campers, courtesy of the Sierra Club, via Professor Bunyip.

I myself have solved this problem by never going camping. Nature, you might know, consists mainly of:

a) bugs;
b) dirt;
c) bad weather;
d) carnivorous animals; and
e) lousy substitutes for toilet paper,

so I'd rather stay indoors and play Top Spin Tennis on my Xbox.

Still, you've got to admire their willingness to experiment. It must be one of those trial-and-error things -- "Hmmm. How about . . . cactus?"

We all owe a debt to the first guy who caught a lobster and said: "Now this looks like good eatin'!"

Or as the Sierra Club would have phrased it: "I wonder if I can wipe my bum with this thing?"

DUBLIN, Ireland (CP) - Prime Minister Paul Martin will do what he can at the G8 meeting in Scotland to persuade his neighbour George W. Bush to recognize the reality of climate change, say senior Canadian officials. But no one should expect the American president to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, they said, adding that just an acknowledgement of climate change would be a big step.

It'll be a big step if Bush acknowleges that Martin exists. Even if he believed the moronic Kyoto treaty would accomplish anything besides destroy the U.S. economy, he'd be up against the Senate's 95-0 peremptory vote against ratifying it. Talk about your bipartisan consensus.

But by all means, Paul, just keep nagging away on -- or as I just heard you on the national news -- "explaining" the concept. I'm sure the President will be all ears. While you're at it, see if maybe he's interested in buying a slightly-used gun registry. Sure, the computer code's still a bit buggy, but it's nothing another few billion shouldn't fix.

Al Gore quoted in Grist Magazine:

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Jonah Goldberg in NRO:

Gore told [Arianna] Huffington that this was his second trip to Cannes. �The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists -� Sartre, Camus. We were not allowed to speak anything but French!� This, gushed Huffington, �may explain his pitch-perfect French accent.� Perhaps. Though according to David Maraniss�s biography of Gore, the former vice president�s 15th summer was spent working on the family farm. . . . Then there�s the fact that young Al got C�s in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban�s. That�s some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre�s La Naus�e and Camus�s Betwixt and Between in apparently pitch-perfect French still can�t earn a B in French class. Mon dieu!

Gore is such a chronic dissembler that I doubt even he knows what's real and what's imaginary in his life.

But as the first quote indicates, he feels that the truth is at best a flexible thing. All in the service of Higher Causes, you see.

I haven't seen this anywhere in the Canadian press. It's from the Opinion Journal's Political Diary from a few days ago. (Pay-subscription link.)

The chancellor of British Columbia's Thompson Rivers University has become a public enemy after uttering judicious words on global warming on a Canadian Broadcasting breakfast show last week. Chancellor Nancy Greene Raine, previously an Olympic skiing champion and national heroine as Canada's official "female athlete of the century," told listeners: "In science, there's almost never black and white. We don't know what next week's weather is going to be. To say in 50 or 100 years, the temperature is going to do this, is a bit of a stretch for me."

The result was a "furor on campus," reports the local Kamloops Daily News. Professors have demanded Ms. Greene Raine's ouster from the ceremonial post. A Canadian government meteorologist "questioned why Greene Raine would offer comment about something on which she is not versed. He noted that no one comes to him for advice on skiing."

In fact, poor Ms. Greene Raine was making exactly the judgment that all citizens and politicians are called upon to make in the global warming debate: How reliable are long-range climate predictions? How should we weigh the costs and benefits of various policy prescriptions? Nor is she alone. Freeman Dyson, the legendary physicist and mathematician, offered similar views in a commencement address at the University of Michigan last year. For that matter, Ms. Greene Raine was kicked off a film of Canadian celebrities talking about global warming in 2005 when the producers discovered she thought spending money on poverty and disease was more urgent than spending money on climate change.

Questions of whether to adapt to climate change or try to prevent it, of how much to spend on CO2 reduction and the like, are questions the public is apparently supposed to shut up about. Message to Ms. Greene Raine and anyone else: Your job is merely to register support for "good" environmentalists versus "bad" skeptics, then submit to whatever policies the Al Gores of the world prescribe for our salvation.

You would think her name alone -- Green(e)-Rain(e) -- should inoculate her from the Gaiazoids' (I figured it's time their religion got a name) righteous fury, but apparently not.

Via Tongue Tied 3

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. -- Charles MacKay

Toronto Sun:

Here's what's happened so far in the two years the [European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme] ETS has been up and running.

- There's been "megatonnes" of profits, all right, mainly pocketed by some of Europe's largest energy companies -- the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

- The spot wholesale price of electricity in some jurisdictions, which will eventually be passed on to consumers, has jumped by up to 66%.

- The ETS has created an instant new industry of carbon trading consultants, brokers and speculators, many making big profits.

- By contrast, some hospitals and schools have been forced to spend millions buying emission credits, instead of hiring nurses and teachers.

- While ETS supporters argue overall greenhouse gas emissions will go down, all that's gone down so far are projections of future emissions. Real emissions are up.

It isn't only European power companies and brokers looking to profit: Note this:

The chief executives of 10 major corporations, on the eve of the State of the Union address, urged President Bush on Monday to support mandatory reductions in climate-changing pollution and establish reductions targets.

"We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection," the executives from a broad range of industries said in a letter to the president.

In case you were thinking that this springs from tender solicitude for Mommy Nature, guess again. They're simply following the path of another noted player:

With a payoff worth tens of billions of dollars at stake, Enron Corporation laid out millions in campaign contributions in the 1990s apparently in part to persuade the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Senate to support the Kyoto global warming treaty.

Enron hoped to cash in on the Kyoto treaty by masterminding a worldwide trading network in which major industries could buy and sell credits to emit carbon dioxide - the inert gas that some scientists and most environmentalists believe contributes to global warming.

Yes, that would be the Enron of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, those pillars of probity.

I've got no objection to companies making money. What I do object to is them raking in profit from gaming a phony market that won't do a damned thing to correct the problems it's purported to solve. It's often been said that there is only one taxpayer -- well, there is only one consumer, too, and it's from his hide that this money will be extracted.

I'll make a prediction. In 200 years, the Earth will still be here; the weather will be as varied and unpredictable as ever; our descendants will be as mystified by this hysteria as we are today, looking back at the Dutch Tulip Craze.

The Times Online:

The world has just 10 years to reverse surging greenhouse gas emissions or risk runaway climate change that could make many parts of the planet uninhabitable.

The stark warning comes from scientists who are working on the final draft of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report, due to be published this week, will draw together the work of thousands of scientists from around the world who have been studying changes in the world’s climate and predicting how they might accelerate.

It's kind of amusing how these doomsday scenarios slot neatly into nice round numbers. I recall that noted oceanographer, Ted Danson (link doesn't lead to the quote -- it was made before the Internet turned commercial) predicting the "death of the oceans" by the year 2000 if something (what, precisely, he didn't say) wasn't done.

Even though the death of the oceans made me sad, I've gotten over it by now. I'm resilient that way.

The Telegraph:

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

An interesting (and skeptical) look at the politics of global warming.

National Post:

Several Conservatives are objecting to David Suzuki's suggestion that politicians who ignore the science behind climate change should be jailed.

"It's environmental fascism," said Ontario MPP Randy Hillier, who has previously cast doubt on the theory of global warming, saying he did not see greenhouse gases as a "terrible evil."

"It used to be unacceptable to have thoughts that were not politically correct, but pretty soon it will be a crime."

Outgoing MP Bob Mills, who called the Kyoto Protocol "a great socialist plot," was taken aback by the exhortation.

"What he says accomplished absolutely nothing," he said.

"Besides, I don't know a Conservative, a Bloc member, a Liberal member who denies that there is climate change."

The member from Red Deer, Alta., suggested that Mr. Suzuki talk about grassroots ways of improving the environment, rather than making accusations.

"Let's talk about clean-coal technology or solar," he said, adding that he himself is trying to install 28 solar panels but has encountered 1½ years of provincial bureaucratic bungling.

"We need to get moving on these kinds of practical issues."

While a spokesman for the noted environmentalist and broadcaster insisted that the comments made last Thursday at a McGill University event should not be taken literally, Mr. Suzuki previously made similar remarks, and attendees said that his tone was serious.

In a similar vein, I hereby call for the assassination of David Suzuki.

Ha! Ha! Just kidding! Ask my friends, I'm always joking around like that.

More seriously, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do anything about Suzuki; and I have no doubt that my readership, such as it is, is probably engaged in more constructive pursuits, like earning a living.

I can't say the same for Suzuki's crew of acolytes, several of whom are probably even nuttier than he. Because politicians are -- to put it mildly -- unlikely to enact legislation making Suzuki effectively the dictator of this country and because ordinary citizens have no ability to imprison people they don't like, that leaves only one option, which I've alluded to above.

It would not at all surprise me if one of Suzuki's befuddled admirers, inspired by his incendiary rhetoric, reaches the same conclusion and takes a serious run at a politician. What he is doing is no less than counselling murder.

Surely the cheezburger kittehs are next?

The Telegraph:

Six thousand bunnies were killed last year. The corpses were frozen and then sent to a special heating plant at Karlskoga, in central Sweden, where the cadavers were burnt in order to help heat the homes of residents of Värmland.

The U.K. might be in terminal decline; but she still produces journalists that put the majority of ours to shame. The iconoclastic webzine spiked takes a realistic look at Alberta's oil sands and the stupid, stupid "documentary" it recently spawned:

While Dirty Oil suggests that we shift to renewable energy sources, it also provides a childish view of the relationship between big business and the rest of society. This is ‘big people picking on little people and assuming that they can get away with it’, says a spokesperson for the green group the Natural Resources Defense Council. The film also suggests that it is somehow our individual greed which, by creating demand for this ‘dirty’ oil, is screwing up the planet. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better off; the whole world should enjoy the living standards of the average American. Cheap, reliable energy is absolutely essential for that. Alberta’s oil boom is set to continue for many years to come.

CTV:

TORONTO - "Avatar" director-turned-activist James Cameron says Alberta's tar sands are a "black eye" to his native country's image as an environmental leader.

The Canadian-born filmmaker says he wants to learn more about the controversial Athabasca Oil Sands Project after being contacted by indigenous groups who are concerned by its impact.

He questioned why Canada is spending billions on extracting crude oil instead of pursuing sustainable options.

"I think it's bad, I think it's the wrong solution for us to be doing greater and greater environmental damage pursuing a dead-end paradigm, which is fossil fuels, instead of spending those billions ... on building wind turbines," Cameron said Tuesday from his home in Los Angeles.

"Those same areas are a great wind belt and we could be generating ... wind energy out of the same place. Why aren't we doing that?"

Who is this "we" you speak of, Kemosabe? You seem capable of generating great gusts of wind out of your rear end. I suggest you bottle it and try powering your limo with it.

CTV:

On Tuesday, Syncrude's lawyer says he'll ask a judge to throw out all of the charges against the oil company stemming from the deaths of 1,600 waterfowl on one of its tailings ponds in 2008.

The move comes as the Crown completed its case Monday.

The Crown has called a number of witnesses over the course of the nine-week trial, including first responders to the accident, environmental experts and bird migration researchers.

Syncrude has entered a not guilty plea to both provincial and federal charges after the animals were found dead. Officials maintain the company did everything in its power to prevent the tragedy.

This is from last week, but I've been giving it a lot of thought, and I've come up with a solution that should make everyone happy. Windmills, my friend.

Yep, surround those tailings ponds with those magnificent whirring beasts and then go for a beer with your new friends at Greenpeace. Not that windmills are much good at generating electricity, but they are first-rate bird killers. Those feathered bastards will be dead long before they hit the water.

And since environmentalists have yet to betray the slightest concern for birds chopped up by these turbines of death -- we might even call it Gaia's righteous wrath -- everybody goes away, hey, hey.

Except for the birds, of course. But screw 'em.

Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire.

EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority.

The new EPA rules call for a reduction in the national ambient air-quality standard for ground-level ozone, a precursor of smog, from 75 parts per billion to between 60 and 70 parts per billion, a cut of up to 20 percent.

While this might seem innocuous enough, setting a more-stringent ozone standard will in fact cause economic havoc.

Hundreds of U.S. cities and counties already don’t meet the current standard. If the EPA tightens the rules, these counties will fall permanently into noncompliance, even with costly investments in new pollution controls.

Under the Clean Air Act’s nondegradation provision, state and local governments are not permitted to take actions that would worsen air quality, even if the area is in compliance with EPA standards.

If a county or city is not in compliance, its economy won’t be able to grow-so the EPA’s proposal would spell economic stagnation for many communities.

A study by the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a 75-year old organization that provides economic research and training for business executives, warns that the new standard would destroy an estimated 7.3 million jobs nationwide and add $1 trillion annually in new regulatory costs beginning in 2020.

In Mississippi, the EPA proposal would kill an estimated 130,000 jobs and add $32.2 billion annually in new regulatory costs from 2020 to 2030.

Direct compliance costs are only part of the burden, however. If the new standards go into effect, the costs of nearly everything we buy also will go up, as higher energy prices raise production costs.

This huge price tag, however, wouldn’t appreciably improve public health. So it’s fair to ask why a more stringent ozone standard is even needed.

Efforts to achieve cleaner air over the past 20 years have been extraordinarily successful, with pollution in some places cut in half.

If we’ve learned anything from clean-air regulation to date, it is that there is no low-cost way of substantially curtailing ground-level ozone or greenhouse-gas emissions within a relatively short time frame, which the EPA insists is necessary.

I got Lisa Jackson in the dead pool for March 15 of next year.

The Examiner:

President Obama's green energy push is rapidly proving to be a crooked racket. It works like this: Revolving-door political hires rev up subsidy programs that enrich their former employers. Then they cash out themselves, pocketing taxpayer loot while turning out energy products that range from inefficient technologies to total failures. Faster than the turbine on a subsidized wind mill, the "clean-tech" revolving door spins out green bandits who get rich off the subsidies they helped craft.

Cathy Zoi, an Al Gore acolyte, has left her job as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy to go to work for a new fund that invests in green energy. It was started by Democratic donor George Soros.

Her former "special assistant," Peter Roehrig, joined DOE's renewable energy office from the U.S. Renewable Energy Group. The latter is a company founded by lobbyists who saw they could pocket taxpayer dollars by acting as cutouts for Chinese windmill barons trying to get their hands on stimulus money.

Via Jack's Newswatch:

National Post:

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “wellbeing and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

[ . . . ]

Canadian activist Maude Barlow is among global environmentalists backing the drive with a book the group will launch in New York during the UN debate: Nature Has Rights.

“It’s going to have huge resonance around the world,” Ms. Barlow said of the campaign. “It’s going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tar sands in Alberta.”

I can see why she's so enthusiastic about this. She's about as thick as a tree stump and has all the charm of swamp gas, so it'd be a natural fit.

Walter Russell Mead:

But if “Climate of Denial” doesn’t teach us how environmentalists can have more success, it does help us understand what’s wrong with [former VP Al] Gore. The essay begins with one of his earliest childhood memories when young Master Gore (as southern boys from the better white families were then still addressed) was taken to a professional wrestling match at the Fork River Elementary School gym in Elmswood, Tennessee.

The boy was perplexed: the wrestlers seemed to be really fighting, but the whole thing somehow seemed scripted. Worse, the referees weren’t doing their jobs. When the bad guys hit the good guys with a metal chair, the referees were somehow not paying attention, but when, as Gore puts it, “the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him.”

CTV:

Climate change will cost Canada about $5 billion a year by 2020, a startling new analysis commissioned by the federal government warns.

Those costs will continue to climb, to between $21 billion and $43 billion a year by the 2050s, the report estimates. It all depends on how much action is taken to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as how fast the population and the economy grow too.

In the worst-case scenario, climate change could cost as much as $91 billion per year by 2050.

You scoff, but consider:

The report was issued Thursday morning by the prestigious National Institute For Pulling Numbers Out Of Our Asses.

Sounds about right to me. (Portions of the preceding sentence might have been accidentally edited for clarity.)

Globe and Mail:

I want to be very clear that I’m not pointing a finger at the people of Canada; neither is any American I know. We’re all in this together, and that’s the only way we’ll turn it around. We need to stand up, Canadians and Americans as one, to draw the line at tar sands.

Robert Redford speaketh. Encouragingly, he's taking a pasting in the comments.

The Atlantic:

It's been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China's one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions---what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that's the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says "you can only have one or two children." A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

'Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.'— George Orwell

. . . to capture a wackadoodle. Enter Alex Jones, 9/11 troofer and conspiracy nut extraordinaire. He has a keen eye for the crazy, and he's (or rather, his confederate Paul Joseph Watson) found the latest example in the UN (and NASA)-backed Planet Under Pressure conference:

The mindset of this gaggle of arrogant, scoffing elitists in their drive to micro-manage the human race, which they regard as a plague on the earth, is best encapsulated by the following quote from ‘Planet Under Pressure’ attendee and Yale University professor Karen Seto.

“We certainly don’t want them (humans) strolling about the entire countryside. We want them to save land for nature by living closely [together],” Seto told MSNBC.

The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.

Quoted at length is another woman, Kari Norgaard, described as an Oregon-based "professor" of "sociology" and "environmental studies" (I added the scare quotes because these are, at best, dubious career choices). Now it is true that it's considered unethical for a psychiatrist to diagnose someone that he's never met in person.

Fortunately I am not a psychiatrist, so I am free to note that she looks as crazy as a shithouse rat.

Not to get all hippie-preachy or anything, but this is kind of an offensive amount of trash, right? Do normal and reasonable human beings not look at that mess and say, "...maybe we ought to like, I don't know? Take some of this trash with us? To a trash can?" or "Maybe we should bring that coffee table back home?" We've seen our share of litter-y days in Dolores Park and some embarrassing trash pileups in Golden Gate Park, but leaving actual pieces of living room furniture is a whole new level of prickish park use.

Earth Day (There is some confusion if this mess was made then or the night before. Ehh, whatever. Same pigs, different sty.) revelers leave San Francisco's Fort Mason park in some disarray. Hey, it'll eventually bio-degrade.