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A painless death for Kyoto

Billions of dollars in government subsidies have been wasted trying to comply with Kyoto

If Prime Minister Harper has any guts he’ll remove Canada from the Kyoto Accord the same way we got into it: with the stroke of the pen in the comfort of his office.

Never mind those big rooms down the hall full of elected representatives. Prime Minister Chretien ratified the Kyoto Protocol at a brief ceremony in his office in 2002. He did not consult scientists, economists or anyone in his cabinet, nor was David Anderson — Canada’s longest serving environment minister — consulted. Only Preston Manning and the Reform Party spoke out and were attacked as stooges for Big Oil.

Most Canadians remain blissfully unaware that there was never a vote on Kyoto in Parliament. I repeat, no vote.

They’re also blissfully unaware that oil companies have all agreed to support this asinine treaty. After all, oil execs already support exorbitant taxes on fuel which amount to about half the cost we pay at the pump. So why would they be worried about a few more percentage points going to the government? Do you remember any oil companies complaining when Gordon Campbell gave B.C. the first carbon tax in North America?

President Clinton had attempted a similar stunt in 1997 but, unlike those wily Canadian despots Chretien and Campbell, he was overruled by his own Democratic allies in the Senate who united with Republicans to kill Kyoto unanimously. Unanimously! That’s the benefit of having checks and balances. In absence of those checks and balances, Harper should hurry up and reverse what Chretien single-handedly saddled us with.

Interestingly, Chretien is a close friend of the man who started all this socialist-environmental madness. Maurice Strong, a Canadian who lives in China and runs some sort of bureaucratic office through the United Nations that no one comprehends, had tried for years to get everyone in developed countries to feel guilty for our standard of living. Finally, he united the new breed of professional environmentalists with old-guard socialists left over after the collapse of communism, and it was all downhill from there.

You see, spreading free enterprise and democracy can be so difficult these days, what with all the accusations of racism from social relativists. So Strong and Co. decided to just destroy Western economies to make everyone equal rather than do anything to actually improve quality of life in the Third World.

And so it was decided that Western economies would be undermined through cap-and-trade schemes and carbon taxation, and gullible Liberals like Chretien and Campbell played along.

Never mind that all the CO2 trapped in fossil fuels came from the earth’s atmosphere which once held 10 times more CO2. Never mind that any farmer can tell you that increasing CO2 levels boosts agricultural yields, and that scientists estimate 15 per cent of the earth’s population exists today thanks to rising CO2 in the last century. You’re supposed to ignore all that.

You’re also supposed to ignore the news that Michael Mann’s much-touted “hockey-stick graph” — which multi-millionaire environmentalists like Al Gore claims shows that we’re living in the warmest period ever — was shown back in 2005 to produce its hockey-stick shape even if random data were used. Yeah, never mind the facts. Strong’s anti-Western legacy lives on here in Canada thanks to Chretien’s anti-democratic actions nine years ago.

Billions of dollars in government subsidies have been wasted trying to comply with Kyoto. If Harper doesn’t stop this madness dead in its tracks right now, he’ll be just as guilty as Chretien for hurting Canada’s prosperity.

Mischa Popoff

 

Osoyoos