Blue Like You

I admit this isn’t the most charitable way to resume the post-Christmas blogging season, but Premiers McGuinty and Charest really need to be excoriated on their Copenhagen performance.

We’ve already singled out Dalton McGuinty in a previous post, but he deserves another needling along with his opportunistic Quebec sidekick.

Lorrie Goldstein pilloried them both in his Dec. 27 column – The Climate Blame Game. First of all Lorrie works from the premise that climate change negotiations have more to do with laying blame than actually trying to resolve a problem:

…Laying blame — elsewhere — is vital to politicians when confronting (a) a “problem” they don’t really think is a problem, but their voters do (b) a problem they know they can’t fix or (c) a problem whose solution, even assuming it works, would require sacrifices from people that people are unwilling to make.

All of these are relevant in the current climate of hysteria about global warming.

Blaming someone else is also important to politicians because, for all their grandiose rhetoric, they don’t think in terms of “saving the planet.” They think of successfully managing their own political careers, and, at least in most democracies, of four-year election cycles at best…

Then he goes after McGuinty and Charest:

…But since it’s important for politicians to appear to be concerned about “saving the planet”, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Quebec Premier Jean Charest blamed Prime Minister Stephen Harper for not showing enough leadership, while they and their seconds blamed Alberta for the oilsands.

Aside from throwing a hand grenade into Confederation, the hypocrisy of these two is breathtaking.

If McGuinty wants to “save the planet” from global warming, he should shut down Ontario’s coal-fired energy plants — a promise he has repeatedly broken — plus board up Ontario’s auto sector, which he and the feds just spent billions of tax dollars saving.

If Charest wants to “save the planet” he should stop subsidizing cheap electricity for Quebec consumers and sell more hydro power to the U.S,, so the Americans won’t have to burn as much dirty coal, as advocated by Laval University economists Jean-Thomas Bernard and Jean-Yves Duclos…

Charest’s outburst was indeed full of political posturing and lack of loyalty to his own country (H/T Back Off Government).  [More at BC Blue]

Now before any liberal trolls try countering that criticism with this tripe, please check out BC Blue’s response which underscores that even the Liberal premiers of Ontario and Quebec appear to be aware of the weakness of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. Apparently they feel the need to step into the vacuum.

Angelo Persichilli also shines a spotlight on the hypocrisy of those who blame the source of the ‘dirty energy’ while still using it themselves:

…The environment is not polluted by the people who extract oil from the tar sands, but by the people who use that oil. We don’t want to give up our cars, we refuse to lower our air conditioning and home heating, and we don’t want to give up our air flights, the most serious air polluters of our skies. Nobody wants to tell us that the cost of production will go up during the transition – in many cases destroying industries forever or lowering our salaries to remain competitive…

Exactly. Back Off Government sees a parallel to the Little Red Hen. Not only do Charest and McGuinty need that ‘dirty oil’ for power (especially in the case of Ontario’s auto industry), but they also rely on Alberta for wealth transfer in the form of equalization payments. Actually  a more apt fable may be the story of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

And all this would still be remotely acceptable if the science was settled – which it isn’t.

As Mark Steyn recently pointed out, climate change is more of a substitute religion and money-making scheme than a serious effort to reduce man-made global warming – if indeed it does exist (Why climate change is hot hot hot):

…When man was made in the image of God, he was fallen but redeemable. Gaia’s psychologically unhealthy progeny are merely irredeemable. Anti-humanism is everywhere, not least in the barely concealed admiration for China’s (demographically disastrous) “One Child” policy advanced by everyone from the National Post’s Diane Francis to Sir David Attenborough, the world’s leading telly naturalist but also a BBC exec who once long ago commissioned the great series The Ascent of Man. If Sir David’s any guide, the great thing about man’s ascent is it gives him a higher cliff to nosedive off.

Very few sciences could survive being embraced as a religion. Imagine the kind of engineering or math you’d get if it also had to function as a “faith tradition.” What’s also changed since the seventies is the nature of the UN and the transnational bureaucracies. Once it became obvious that “climate change” represents an almost boundless shakedown of functioning jurisdictions by dysfunctional basket cases, the die was cast. “Aid” is a discredited word these days and comes with too many strings attached. But eco-credits sluiced through an oil-for-food program on steroids offers splendid new opportunities for bulking up an ambitious dictator’s Swiss bank accounts…

And so we are left with two eastern Liberal premiers who obviously think that the path to their promised political land lies in efforts to humiliate our beloved country and stir up talk of western separation. The reason for their scorn has little scientific basis. It’s all about what they perceive to be the populist response to the flavour-of-the-month cause that could actually cause our country great harm in so many ways.

Let’s show them how off-track they really are in the next Quebec and Ontario elections.

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Related: “Mr Premier, are you ready to see me? Are you ready?” – ChuckerCanuk.  I missed that one just before Christmas but  L. Ian MacDonald’s column is really worth checking out. And frankly it’s rather frightening how easily President Obama appears to have been manipulated.