Editor, The News:
Re: Protecting the environment not radical idea (Letters, April 4).
The letter highlights some assumptions that should not be allowed free pass without some questioning.
First, self-styled environmentalists are not the sole valid representatives of the environment. We are all environmentalists and concerned about clean air, water, and food.
But many of us do not see the contemporary green approach as the best means of protecting the environment.
And this gets to science and factual evidence.
One of the repeated problems of the environmental movement has been its inability to deal with evidence that conflicts with the environmental alarmist narrative. We saw this in the climate-gate scandal in Britain, where leading alarmists tried to prohibit credible contrary evidence from being published.
Some of the most respected climatologists in the world were demonized as “deniers” without consideration of the very credible research they had done. None of them denied that a mild warming had taken place from 1975-1995. They simply recognized that there was little final evidence that it was solely human-caused or catastrophic in nature.
Now even the climate alarmists have been forced to acknowledge that we have had 15 years of no further warming (http://thegwpf.org/press-releases/5360-no-global-warming-for-15-years.html).
No one denies there is climate change. The question has always been how much, if any, is human-caused and how much is natural.
Climate has always changed as paleo-climate records show. And much more rapidly and severely than today. That is the normal state of climate – to change. We adjust to it, and not like King Canute, believe that we can prevent it.
And there is no “constant erosion of environmental protection” going on. The Kuznet’s environmental curve correctly notes that as people grow and develop economically, their environment improves because once basic needs are met people can afford to focus, on their environments.
The only areas suffering serious environmental degradation are areas of poverty, where economies are not improving.
Overall, world environmental indicators show no serious general degradation, but many areas of improvement.
And far from rushing through the Enbridge pipeline, activists have been trying all sorts of gimmicks to slow the process down, including inviting fellow activists from outside of Canada to speak at the hearings (the list now has 4,000-plus registrants).
Further, we all need to question the assumptions of green growth. It has brought Britain to the brink of an energy crisis, with intolerable rates of fuel poverty.
We also have the example of Spain, where for every job created in the heavily subsidized alternative energy sector, two were lost elsewhere.
And now we are watching the collapse of green policies across Europe under the weight of subsidization and inoperability.
More of a concern is the anti-progress perspective of hard core greens. Bill Rees, Canada’s leading environmental theorist, once said to us in a class at UBC: “I would not only halt economic development, I would reverse it”.
David Suzuki, said that he wants us to return to plowing our fields with oxen, just as they do in Cuba. They want us to return to a more primitive past, which appears to be part of the message expressed in the Earth Hour blackouts.
I would offer the conclusion of a friend that to be anti-progress is to be anti-human.
Most unsettling in this more fundamentalist strain of modern environmental activism is the offensive and irresponsible terrorizing of children with all sorts of exaggerated alarmism.
Children now even suffer a new psychological disorder, eco-anxiety.
Shame on you, Mr. Rees and Mr. Suzuki. This is not science, but another form of ideological extremism.
There is much evidence to show that the overall state of the world is improving and offers good reason for hopefulness about our future, not fear.
By the way, the latest polar bear counts show populations healthy and increasing in numbers.
Wendell Krossa
Maple Ridge