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Thursday, February 15, 2007

Leftism as an Immunosuppressant Disease

Leftism is a disease of civilizations. In and of itself it is not fatal – or, at least, it’s not likely to be the cause of death. Instead, much like AIDS, leftism destroys the natural defenses of civilization and leaves it vulnerable to attack by opportunistic infections and diseases.

Western civilization’s strength is (or, at the very least, was) multi-dimensional. Each of these strengths worked together to create a system of interlocking defenses which assured our continued superiority over other inferior civilizations. Without such defenses, even the lowest, the most backwards, the most barbaric of civilizations can defeat the most advanced and cultured. One need only look to the defeats of the Greeks, the Romans – or even the Chinese – to understand this.

A barbaric civilization with confidence and will can – and often will – defeat even the most advanced civilization if it lack them.

What were the bulwarks of Western superiority?

They weren’t material. Though in recent centuries we have enjoyed superiority in this area, that was not always the case. Nor was it the cause of our success.

They were our faith, our families, and our history. The finest weapons, the greatest accumulations of wealth – these are all worthless if there’s no one with the will to use them. We have the latter because we had – and to some degree still have – the former.

These things: our religious faith and our faith in ourselves, the strength of our families, our knowledge of and pride in our history – these are what gave us the strength to make use of our material superiority.

A century ago a relative handful of Britons ruled most of the world. The United States conquered a continent with fewer men under arms than the NYPD has today. Japan defeated China and made itself the master of much of Asia. A few hundred Spaniards conquered the New World.

They did these things not through material strength alone – but through moral, cultural, and civilizational strength. They had confidence in their destiny and in the rightness of their cause.

Forget material things. Those things – our faith, our families, and our history – are what gave us the strength to have and to use them. With them, we were safe. Without them we are not.

They were our immune system, the natural defenses of our civilization. All of the medicines in the world will not, in the end, save a body without those defenses. In such cases, medicine can delay – but it cannot deny.

Leftism will not destroy civilization in and of itself. Most of it is, taken independently, relatively harmless nonsense. Most leftists (though not all) are basically well-meaning people. But the contagion they spread will leave us at the mercy of other, less benevolently-minded, forces.

Just as a person suffering from AIDS will die of diseases which a healthy body could have fought off, so too will a civilization suffering from leftism die from prosaic causes.

Do you really think that Mongols would have been able to conquer a healthy China?

Rome fell to barbarians only after it was weakened from within.

The reasons for the weakening, of course, are not consistent or identical across the span of centuries: but the final result is the same. A civilization whose defenses have been destroyed from within will succumb to the historical equivalent of a cold.

One needs look no further than our present struggle against the Islamists to understand how this plays out. Under normal circumstances, a healthy civilization would – as we did during the challenges posed by Islam in the past – be able to quickly (and without too much fuss) fight off the disease. However, because of LCIDS (Leftist Civilizational Immune Deficiency Syndrome), we lack the moral capacity to employ the strong measures necessary to truly defeat – or even effectively slow – the advance of the disease.

We have been stripped of our faith and, with that, of our ability to see anything clearly – and to make firm and complete judgements. Stripped of those abilities, many of our brethren find themselves lacking the moral clarity to see the degree of our peril – or the necessity of the cure. Instead, they sit on the fence. They’re not ready to surrender and die (yet, at least) and they’re not ready to win, either. So instead they’re willing to countenance only half-measures and, because these morons regrettably vote, we’re stuck at the speed of our slowest ship.

Without the strength of our families – and that is something that we’ve lost – we no longer have others to defend or whose future to truly worry about. It continually amazes me that people can spend so much time obsessing about hypothetical threats which may or may not come to pass a century from now, while at the same time dismissing the very real threat of an Islamic conquest of Europe – and never mind the threat posed by those who would like to kill millions of us today.

That disconnect is a symptom of a post-modern political age, where people’s political beliefs – at least in many cases – have far more to do with keeping pace with changing trends than they do with anything else. Such epic silliness is a direct result of our nihilistic and egocentric concern for the individual about all other things – and the sad reality that most of us don’t have “family” to worry about in the traditional sense. There are no families of dozens, no extended families. There aren’t even intact families for most.

Without that sense of permanence – that certainty that these things really do matter – people feel free to indulge the stupidest and most unserious fantasies imaginable.

And, finally, without a sense of history – of where we came from, of what we had to do to get here, and of our own place in the greater scheme of the future, there’s little motivation to do any more than simply to live for today.

Without faith in our history, in our destiny, what motivation is there to care for anything beyond purely selfish concerns? I can see none.

Instead, we go so far as to degrade our ancestors and their lives to the point of mockery and ridicule. We denounce them for their sins and we forget their virtues. We teach our kids to worship marginal third world figures like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, instead of the truly great men of history – like Churchill or Lincoln. We spend more time teaching our kids about Greek homosexuality – and trying to gay-up history – than we do teaching them about the heroes of the Civil War. We spend more time trying to blow up insignificant figures of politically-convenient flesh-pigmentation than we do teaching the truly inspiring stories of our past.

This terrible disease attacks the basis of our greatness and, as in the case of that other famous disease, there is no known cure. We can only treat it as best we can and hope for the best.

This theory is, like all of my work, something of a work-in-progress. I expect that it is a theme to which I shall return in the near future.

posted by Yoshi at 10:22 PM

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Let’s Fight an Election Over Kyoto

In the next few days, the House of Commons is probably going to pass a Private Member’s Bill which would legally (or possibly legally, depending upon who you ask) bind the government to meet the absurdly unachievable short-term Kyoto targets. The Liberals and the rest of the Opposition are using this as part of their cynical political game on the issue – after having failed for the better part of a decade to do anything to meet the arbitrary requirements of this ruinous and ill-conceived treaty, they’re trying to trap the Prime Minister between reality and their delusions.

But, there’s a way out of this trap – and to deal honestly with the nonsense which has contaminated the Canadian climate in the months since Stephanie, sorry, Stephane Dion ascended to the leadership of the Liberals: the Prime Minister should declare that the passage of a bill legally obligating the government to meet these impossible targets constitutes a vote of no confidence and ask the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and launch a General Election.

Now, of course, this runs counter to the consensus reality of the moment. The environment is supposed to be the Conservatives’ weakness and little Stephanie’s greatest strength. We’re supposed to want to avoid an election over this and instead fight one a few months from now over a tax-cutting budget.

But let’s step back for a moment and consider a few things.

First – the feelings of a “majority of Canadians” about Kyoto or, well, pretty much anything are essentially totally irrelevant to the results of any election. The Tories need just shy of 40% of the people who actually bother to vote to agree with them in order to form a majority of Canadians. In other words – the vote of about one in five adults is what’s needed here: we don’t have any need for unanimity.

Second – up until this very moment we’ve been debating the issues of “the environment”, “climate change”, and so forth in a more or less abstract sense. “Are you for or against the environment?” and that sort of things. It’s little wonder that spineless, limp-wristed, tree-hugging whiners are able to get a lot of favourable coverage under such conditions.

However, an election fought on Kyoto – and specifically the demand that the government meet stringent targets – would move the debate from the abstract to the real. Just how much would the Liberals raise taxes in order to meet these entirely arbitrary targets? How much money would the send overseas? How many jobs would be lost?

Calling an election over this specific part of the issue would allow us to move from the theoretical to the real. It would force the Liberals to stake out a position on climate change other than “opposed.” It would expose the deep sense of cynicism with which this issues has been exploited by the left on a global basis.

More to the point: now is the time to fight an election. Again, it runs contrary to the conventional wisdom: but I’m pretty convinced that, if we put Harper up against Dion in an election this year, Harper will be re-elected with either a majority or damned-near close to one.

First of all, at this point Dion and the Liberals have actually turned their biggest issue – the environment – (and I thought that Universal Child Care, or health care, or something was the ISSUE THAT WE ALL HAD TO ADDRESS OR WE WERE ALL GOING TO DIE) into a possible vulnerability. Their record – and their lack of any plan to actually implement Kyoto – indeed, the truth that there is no possible plan to do so and they already know that – would prove to be a huge vulnerability during the campaign. Indeed, I would expect that the move to make the environment the ISSUE WE MUST ALL OBSESS ABOUT could backfire upon the Liberals in that, once the generally fraudulent foundations of their platform are exposed, it could result in people who’ve been radicalized over the issue going to the Greens or the NDP.

Though the two parties are starting off, from the look of the polls, about where they left off last January, I expect that Dion’s support will collapse under the pressure of a national campaign. Once again, up until this point the Canadian public have known Dion only in the abstract – most have yet to see him up close. I don’t expect the results of such a meeting will be pretty.

Dion’s core problem is that he’s a Frenchman. Not only a French citizen – but he strikes me, when I see him on television, as looking at sounding as through he’s stepped right off a plane from Paris. It’s one thing, I think, to deal with the prospect of a Quebecker as the Prime Minister (though, I think that the rest of the country has earned a few turns by now) – but Dion doesn’t even seem like that. He strikes me as a foreigner in his manner, his dress, and his speech. Which, of course, I guess he is.

This isn’t a matter of “questioning the loyalty of dual citizens” – it’s a matter of questioning the loyalty of Dion. This is particularly relevant within the context of Kyoto and the environment in that the French government – to which Dion owes some degree of loyalty – is pushing for some kind of international tax against non-socialist Western nations (well, that’s not what they call it…). In supporting the kind of measures which the French government want here in Canada, which master does Dion serve?

Also helpful is the fact that Dion seems to be a genuine fanatic on these issues. A fanatic, as they say, is someone who can’t change their mind and can’t change the subject. If we successful discredit Dion on this issue, I doubt if he’ll have the sense to actually try and fight back by shifting issues – I expect him to continue to play his role as a French David Suzuki right up until the bitter end.

As I’ve told some people, I didn’t have anything non-political against Jean Chrétien. Actually, in a lot of ways, I kind of liked the guy. But I hated Paul Martin. And I really hate little Stephanie. Of course, I really, really, really, really hate the spawn of Satan likely to be the next leader of the Liberal Party. So, let’s get on with this so that we can get to fighting that real enemy.

posted by Yoshi at 10:10 PM

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

The Knife and the Back

From the very beginning what has frightened me most about the Global War on Terrorism is this: that the United States and the West simply do not, in their present condition, have the stomach to bring this war to a successful conclusion. I have never really been given a satisfactory answer to the question, “how do you win a war against the enemy in front of you while ignoring the knife-wielding enemy behind you?”

At every step, the left – and its many allies on the rest of the political spectrum – have sought to obstruct all efforts to win this war. At every turn they’ve handcuffed our forces and circumscribed our options. Time and time again those of us, particularly including myself, who have been agitating for a more vigorous prosecution of the war have been forced to compromise in the face of the fear that, if we push too hard or do too much, our moderate support will melt away.

Everytime we have compromised, reconsidered, or conceded we have taken another step towards disaster. Instead of fighting this war as it should be fought we have engaged in a sort of half-war. But one cannot be part at war and part at peace when our enemies are all at war. The search for a successful war prosecuted half-heartedly is, to borrow from Lincoln, as vain as the search for a man who should neither be a living man or a dead one.

Resultantly, we have ended up in a terrible predicament. This was to be expected. As Von Clausewitz wrote, “in such dangerous things as war, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.”

There is no military crisis. The strength of the United States military is sufficient that the entire situation may be easily controlled. But there is a political crisis. And there is a public image crisis. In such days as these, that may be sufficient to bring about defeat.

Compromises with the self-appointed guardians of the public virtue have prevented us from waging the sort of all-out war that would be necessary to secure a triumph which might withstand even the assault of the fifth columnist media. Instead, we have been left in a holding pattern – a situation which, though militarily stable and relatively under control – can be abused by a media which has managed to convince an ignorant public that the only successful war is a zero-casualty one.

It may well be the case – as I certainly believe it is – that the insurgency is militarily impotent and has been more or less reduced to little more than a ragged band of killers who murder their own countrymen by the hundreds to get a few minutes on the evening news. But, when the media portrays every single murder as a great victory for the insurgency, how can we possibly win the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public?

We can’t.

One of the fundamental laws of warfare is this: to allow your enemies to freely operate from within a protected sanctuary is to invite defeat or stalemate. Yet we have, out of fear, done exactly that. We allow the murderers in Iraq to be supplied from Iran and Syria. We allow the Taliban to operate out of Pakistan. We allow the al-Qaeda 1.0 remnant to shelter there as well. We allow Iran and Syria to more or less openly supply Hamas and Hezbollah. We allow the advocates of Jihad to operate, free from fear and scrutiny, within their Mosques and “civil rights” groups within the West. We allow avowed enemies of our cause within the media and important public institutions to attack at will – and virtually without response.

All of this we have knowingly allowed. We have allowed it out of fear.

We fear a wider war. We fear the consequences of limiting civil liberties here at home. We fear the assassination of Musharaff and the seizure of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

But, most of all, our fears our political. All of us understand that we can do nothing to defeat the enemy without political power. This drives into us an unreasonable fear of the consequences of other actions. That is because, rather than join in the effort to defeat this enemy, certain treasonous elements within lurking here at home have seized the opportunity for their own petty political advantage – or, in certain cases, out of genuinely-felt but nonetheless objectively evil moral principles.

The enemy within acts as a form of heavy artillery on behalf of the wider enemy conspiracy. They keep us disoriented and unable to shift positions without risking a complete rout. Far better, it would seem, under such conditions to simply stay in our trenches.

But, amid the politics, we cannot forget what is at stake: millions of lives and, in all probability, the future of much of the West itself.

If we are forced to retreat in the face of the enemy, what conclusion do you think that Bin Laden’s successors will draw? Do you think that they will retire to build hospitals and debate the means of funding a universal health system? Or do you think that they will plan bigger and more spectacular attacks designed to break and bow us forever?

When liberals betrayed us during Vietnam and stabbed our soldiers and our allies in the back, the result was millions of dead. Not that many people noticed because it happened in a far away land about which we know little. But, if we let them pull off their betrayal this time, the millions of dead will be in our own cities. They will come from our own towns and our own homes. We will no them. No one will be shielded from loss.

It need not even be as spectacular as a mushroom cloud over Miami. The tactics – of random murder and collaboration with willing traitors in the media – which have worked so very well in Iraq will work well anywhere. Today there are already Moslem areas of Paris into which the police dare not venture. What will happen when the Mohammedans there move from torching cars to transforming them into bombs? Will we abandon the city to them?

Do you remember how long it took to capture the Beltway Snipers? Imagine the chaos that a dozen, or two dozen, of them could create. How long would it take to catch them?

And – what if they can’t be easily caught. Should we withdraw from New York into New Jersey and hope to contain the threat?

Of course, in the end, it wouldn’t come to that. The people would realize how thoroughly they have been betrayed at some point and stand up. But when – and at what cost?

What is required today is what has been required from the very beginning: an all-out and total offensive against the enemy on all fronts and without the least shred of compassion or restraint.

However, it’s getting late – so I’ll be outlining how that would look tomorrow.

posted by Yoshi at 12:27 AM

Sunday, February 04, 2007

A Conservative Response to Climate Change

The left tries to make it out as though this argument is over whether or not climate change exists. It isn’t. Of course climate change exists – it would be abnormal it didn’t. Climate change is normal – it’s the reality of the entirety of the existence of the Earth. If the climate was stagnant – that would be a source of worry.

Nor does anyone really question that human activity probably contributes to this. However, neither does any sensible or educated person claim or believe that this is solely the result of human activity.

No, the question is this – to what degree is this a problem and what should we do about it?

Those on the left are using and abusing this to argue for what they’ve always wanted anyways: for higher taxes, for more government spending, and for a reduced standard of living for all people in the world. They want us to use less and to live with less. The only thing they want more of it government and trees.

I agree that we need to tackle the problem of climate change, to the extent to which it is human caused. What I disagree with are the solutions proposed: big government projects like Kyoto and its spin-offs will do nothing more than kill jobs, raise prices, and reduce our standard of living. They will do nothing at all to actually help the environment because, in the end, they’re dependent upon universal cooperation. Now, unless you want to go to war with India, Brazil, China, and Russia to force them to cooperate in this – and even I’m not belligerent enough to want that – there’s no way on Earth that it’s going to happen. Nor, even if it did, would it do any good.

We need to tackle this problem not by taking away – not by making do with less – but by finding ways that everyone can have more. We need newer technology and innovation – the very things which would be strangled by the high-tax and anti-business policies which so-called lovers of the environment want.

How do we go about this? We do it by letting the market do its work. New factories and power plants are inevitably cleaner than new ones. New technologies use substantially less energy – and deliver higher performance – than older ones do. Cleaner technologies are already available – at slightly higher prices. These technologies have other virtues which, in and of themselves, make them more desirable.

Want to do something about climate change? Then let’s cut taxes and reduce the size of government. The more money that we put back into the hands of the people, the more money they’ll have to buy newer and cleaner cars, to replace old appliances, to pay a premium for locally-produced food, and to pay sensible prices for better forms of energy.

We shouldn’t – and we don’t – have to accept a lower standard of living or a lower quality of life in order to help the environment. If we do this sensibly, we should be able to continue – as we ought to – to increase our standard of living while, at the same time, making the air and water cleaner and leaving a better Earth to our children.

To see the results of socialism and collectivist economic policies when it comes to the environment, one needs look no farther than Eastern Europe. When we eliminate individual incentives, beggar the people, and restrict the rights of individuals to their property we also eliminate all incentives – beyond mere altruism – to use clean and safe practices. When people are poor or financially squeezed, we leave them with no real choice but to, as consumers, pursue the bottom line about all else.

Destructive environmental practices are a common result of two things – a prioritizing of immediate needs over long-term ones and a lack of real incentives to adopt best practices within a competitive environment. Neither of these can be cured through more government control and more regulations. New taxes, regulations, and fees will simply put a further squeeze on consumers and businesses and lead them to cut more corners. Where the cruel realities of fixed numbers render that impossible, then we will simply see companies shut down and people stop buying things. When that happens, we will see a cascade effect throughout the economy whose end results will be directly the opposite of those which the (mostly) well-meaning people who advocated the policies that created them sought to achieve.

Wealthier people, for the most part, any cleaner people. They have more time to worry about such things.

The fundamental flaw of the environmental schemes proposed by the do-gooders is that they run contrary to human nature. Even assuming that they are an effective and proportionate response to the threat, their plans would never work because they require a level of cooperation and self-sacrifice which humans are incapable of. Even in the face of an urgent threat – like Hurricane Katrina – many humans behaved in a venal and selfish fashion. Do you really expect that Chinese peasants, enjoying their first taste of wealth, will be willing to sacrifice it in order to combat a conjectural threat to far-away lands which is due to manifest itself several decades hence?

I mean, folks, let’s face it – a majority of people don’t even stop their cars to assist an injured person lying on the road. Do you really think that they’re going to drive them less, or stop driving them, or even willingly pay more to drive them because it is possible that, if they don’t, sea levels in coastal areas might rise by a foot and a half by the year 2107?

No government which required their people to make the kind of sacrifices necessary to meet the targets set by the environmentalists would be able to continue in office for more than a few weeks. If they weren’t removed democratically, they’d probably be removed by force.

That’s why governments all over the world adopt the cowardly, but politically-sensible policy, of paying lip service to the issue and following those symbolic words with symbolic deeds. To seriously do what the environmentalists demand would be incompatible with any democratic form of government.

Frankly, it won’t be long before some of the more intellectually-honest members of the movement start admitting just that. If – if you really believe that the future of the world and the human race depends upon the massive reduction in carbon emissions, then the only real solution is to seize control of governments, rule by totalitarian means, and to wage war upon noncompliant states. A dictatorship of the ecotariat, if you will.

The way to slow the rate of growth in – and ultimately reduce – carbon emissions is to move forward, not backwards. The trend in all fields of technology it towards cleaner gear. This is a historical force and it seems doubtful if it will be reversed. Indeed, the progressive move towards cleaner technology will, in all likelihood, eventually consign the present hysteria over this issue to the dust bin of history.

And yet, as always, there should be contingencies. While we pray for the best, we should also prepare for the worst.

Given the inevitability of some degree of climate change – and the impossibility of controlling carbon emissions on a global level – we shouldn’t be wasting our time, thought, and resources on utopian global schemes which are doomed to failure. Instead, sensible and pragmatic conservatives should concede the needs – and appropriate the necessary funds to plan and prepare for – geoengineering projects and other works to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, should they come to pass.

Which makes more sense: to waste trillions of dollars in the futile hope that the whole world will sacrifice in pursuit of marginal and far-off goals, or to devote a small fraction of that money to efforts which do not require the cooperation of any foreign nation and which, if enacted, could ameliorate the effects of climate change and, indeed, leave us in a better position relative to other nations which fail to prepare?

For example, it would be prudent to conduct realistic surveys of coastlines all over the world to determine what lands are most at-risk and to respond appropriately. Such a response need not be instant. In fact, it could – and would – take place over the course of generations for we are not taking about an event of a day, but an event of decades. In some areas, we could build up the level of the land, in others we could potentially divert and even desalinate some portion of the inflow. Elsewhere we could – over the course of a century – encourage gradual and entirely voluntary relocations, perhaps by preventing new construction in those areas deemed most vulnerable.

Finally, of course, there remains the possibility of large-scale geoengineering projects, something which seem far more viable – if they were to become necessary – than trusting in the good intentions of others.

Such projects – likely to cost far, far less than any of the other proposals – could include a large-scale program of carbon captures, the creation of ice, the seeding of the oceans, and so on. With adequate planning – and, again, we have an awful lot of time – any number of modifications would be easily achievable.

We need to stop engaging the left on their terms. The left has managed, in a Lakoffian sense, to argue that any opposition to their agenda is de facto opposition to the idea of climate change. Patent nonsense though it is, it’s certainly been widely accepted.

posted by Yoshi at 4:10 PM

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Latest Podcast

In which I discuss the citizenship issues of Stephanie Dion.

Is up.

posted by Yoshi at 1:36 AM

Why Should Canadians Care About Climate Change?

It’s entirely mystifying to me that Canada, of all places, has been so ravaged by the current outbreak of decennial environmental hysteria.

At the root, of course, the present pattern of the disease can be traced fairly easily, with the media having served as the primary agent of infection. While it’s tempting to think that there’s a bunker somewhere where the elders of the press draw up their secret protocols, I think that it’s more likely that environmental hysteria is transmitted through a more naturalistic method.

Simply put, liberalism is sort of virus which severely compromises the immune system. Once it takes hold, it leaves the carrier – even a latent carrier – vulnerable to any number of opportunistic infections, of which environmentalism is simply the current example. The Canadian people, a majority of which are in the terminal stages of the disease, are a fertile ground for its spread.

Here’s a real inconvenient truth: radical environmentalism is fundamentally irrational.
Sensible conservation, like the Prime Minister sought to push with the Clean Air Act, makes all sorts of sense. There’s an obvious public interest in not having raw sewage dumped into rivers, in keeping the air relatively clean, and so forth. All of that, even if sometimes it is achieved in a fashion which is overly-intrusive and damaging to private enterprise, can be justified on the basis of rationality and logic.

What cannot be sustained in the face of any level of reasoned scrutiny is the present enthusiasm for the Kyoto Protocol and other economically-destructive measures which may or may not be the best way of doing something which may or may not work about a problem which may or may not be correctable at all and which may or may not exist.

The history of the modern environmental movement is one of false predictions of the imminence of Armageddon followed hard upon the failure of those predictions to materialize with renewed warnings that the end will be coming, if not tomorrow, then the day after or the day after that – but definitely perhaps sometime in the reasonably close to near future.

Of course, there’s nothing near about this – people have been predicting the end of the world since its beginning. There is, I suppose, something psychologically comforting in the feeling that the rest of the world will cease to exist at roughly the same chronological moment as oneself.

I take it as read that the average environmentalist would feel insulted at being lumped in with the unwashed; sandwich-board wearing bums walking down the streets announcing the rapidly-approaching end of humanity. Of course, they shouldn’t feel insulted – they should feel stupid. Because they are stupid.

The common observation that environmentalism has been transformed into a kind of secular religion needs no further illustration than the present situation up here in Canada. The sheer unreality of listening to Stephanie Dion prattle about following the already-dead Kyoto Protocol, despite the fact that he – if he’s not retarded (and just because his English is less comprehensible than that of one is no reason to assume) – is fully aware of the impossibility of what he demands can only lead one to the conclusion that the Liberals and their fellow-travellers in the other parties take their new unofficial religion about as seriously as most of their leaders take their official religions.

Perhaps the way to cut our CO2 emissions is to declare Wednesday or something to be the Sabbath Day of the Church of Our Holy Goddess, establish said Church as the National Church (hell I’m sure, especially if some of the rumours about him from a few years back are true, that HRH The Prince of Wales will be happy to be a Defender of That Faith…) and force everyone to stay home and shiver in the cold that day.
Speaking of the cold – and getting back to my main topic – I’d like to repeat the main question: why the hell should the average Canadian care about “climate change”?

To being with, given the size of our population, it seems doubtful that even if we decided to kill each and every single Canadian (and to then dispose of their bodies in some environmentally-sensitive way, perhaps as soybean fertilizer or something) it would make any difference to the overall global climate. Given that, even an extremely painful-but-possible reduction would be entirely pointless as anything but a moral gesture. And, to assume that such a Canadian gesture would even be noticed anywhere else in the world is to presume an awful lot.

Even if one believes the doomsday scenarios, we need to ask ourselves what the most sensible response is. Does it really seem plausible that all of the world’s major industrial nations (and it’d have to be all of the big ones for it to make any difference at all) are going to agree on anything, let along measures which would be immensely destructive to the economic well-being of their people?

Anyone want to lay down some money on the likelihood of that actually happening? Oh, perhaps they might agree to something – simply to score some political points – but do you really think any of them would actually do it?

Assuming that self-interest will remain the guiding factor, the easiest and most rational thing for most governments to do will be to sign various environmental accords and to thereafter thump their chests on the subject – then to hurry up and quickly ignore them. Which, of course, is what most did with regard to Kyoto.

Even if the worst is coming (and I sincerely doubt that it is), wouldn’t the best response of any advanced country, given how much warning we have and how much time we will have to adjust, be to do nothing but work to continue to build up wealth – and to do sensible things which ought to be done in any case, such as discouraging people from building in easily-flooded areas, building up various guards, and ensuring that sufficient land is allocated to provide for the agricultural needs of the people?

In truth, if you really wanted to drive people towards cleaner technology wouldn’t you do the exact opposite of what the environmental left proposes? Higher taxes and higher prices will squeeze people economically, driving them towards the lowest-cost provider wherever possible – and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that the lowest-cost provider is likely to be the one with the least regard for the environmental consequences of your actions. Prosperous people – and companies – have the luxury of considering such factors. People – and companies – on the margins just want to survive.

Of course, we aren’t going to hear these arguments because, alas, most major politicians of the right – including my personal trifecta of Harper, Bush, and Howard – have been pushed and prodded into violating one of my cardinal rules of politics: never bid when you can be outbid. By making the concessions that they have to the various environmental lunatics, they’ve simply emboldened them and given them cause to demand – and hope for – much, much more.

Still, this too shall pass. Mystified though I am why the people of a country with a massive landmass which is rendered largely-uninhabitable by the cold should be frightened by the idea that the Earth may get a few degrees warmer long after they are dead, I’m also well-aware of the truth that people, especially the people who fret about stuff like this, have notoriously short attention spans.

Soon enough our recurring course of environmentalist nonsense shall remit once more.

posted by Yoshi at 1:01 AM