The trouble with ideologues is often based on their lack of vision. They're so focussed on their ideology that they shut out anything that doesn't fit their agenda.
Stephen Harper positively loves to depict Canada as a future "energy superpower", especially when he's talking to Americans. It seems to make him just a bit squirmy in the pants but it's best not to notice. I guess he feels it makes Canada somehow bigger, worth listening to, more meaningful. Harper is fixated on this opportunity to transform Canada into a "global player" in the Big Leagues.
Now, if you're on Stephen Harper's team you must have Stevie's muscular, waxed and oiled vision of Canada. That's especially true for Canada's ultimate ticket to superpowerdom - the Athabaska Tar Sands.
The oil sands are a beast - big and voracious and dirty and smelly. Getting usable oil out of tarry sand requires enormous resources including vast amounts of natural gas and fresh water. The process also produces almost as much greenhouse gas as the end product will generate once it's burned in somebody's SUV.
When critics raise the pollution question the pat answer is that the technology to make the tar sands process pollution-neutral is just around the corner. Okay, what corner? Why are we going ahead with this environmental disgrace when Nirvana is almost on us? Maybe because the corner is a long way off if it even exists at all but, regardless, there'll be no talk of Kyoto accords while we're on our way to become energy rockstars.
And so Canada, for the sake of a bunch of American oil companies, the security of U.S. oil supplies and a wave of prosperity for Alberta, turns into a global warming leper. After all, how can Stevie ask Ontario industrial GHG emitters to clean up without imposing the same restrictions on Alberta? He can't and so he won't.
Maybe for us it's just a few more rainstorms here, a bit more drought there and somewhat higher tides. Out of sight, out of mind. Let's not kid ourselves. The Harper/Klein mentality is a very real Weapon of Mass Destruction that is going to kill millions, likely tens of millions - just not here in safe, prosperous Canada.
The first victims will be from Africa whose countries, ironically, generate low levels of GHGs. They're relatively clean and they're incredibly poor and, thanks to our mentality, they'll soon get poorer until we bring them to the point where poverty itself is irrelevant, the point of death. The neat thing is that, right now, these people are just down the road from Canada's environmental corruption minister, Rona Ambrose. This account from Sunday's Observer is telling:
"They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers sit down in Nairobi at this weekend's UN Climate Conference, the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a few hundred miles away from their deliberations.
"Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya, whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now face eradication. Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have decimated their livestock in recent years.
"The study discovered that:
· Incidence of drought has increased fourfold in the Mandera region in the past 25 years.
· One-third of herders living there - around half a million people - have already been forced to abandon their pastoral way of life because of adverse climatic conditions.
· During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost that 60 per cent of the families who remain as herders need outside assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them.
"The new findings follow recent warnings from the UK Met Office that if current trends continue one-third of the planet will be desert by the end of 2100. The scientists modelled how drought is likely to increase globally during the coming century because of predicted changes in rainfall and temperature around the world.
"At present, according to their calculations, 25 per cent of the Earth's surface is susceptible to moderate drought, rising to 50 per cent by 2100. In addition, the areas susceptible to severe drought - 8 per cent - are expected to rise to 40 per cent. And the figure for extreme drought, currently 3 per cent, will rise to 30 per cent.
"And what is doubly worrying about Kimenye's research is that it has revealed that a system of nomadic pastoralism that has, over the centuries, been able to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and regular drought has been brought by climate change to the point of utter extinction.
"It is a fact not lost on those who have been forced out of their historic lifestyle to settle at the Quimbiso settlement. Nearby is a stinking pit where the bones of the last of once thriving herds were dumped and burned - victims of the worst drought in living memory.
"The families who until a few months ago herded these animals across northern Kenya and beyond now huddle in this riverside settlement, their children prone to malaria and other illnesses, but at least close to a reliable source of water. Now they are completely dependent on aid handouts for most of their food."
WMDs? Saddam was a pussy. We're the WMD Masters and we're getting rich at the same time or at least so long as we've got people like Rona manning the ramparts.
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