It ticks off Weaver that Harper, having been voted in on a promise to do away with the unelected Senate, instead packed the institution with ill-informed patronage appointments (" Mike Duffy, climate scientist extraordinaire" ) who waited until 15 opposition members were absent before defeating, without debate, a bill that had already been OK'd by the elected arm of Parliament.
The UVic climatologist, sputtering words like " unbelievable" and " dictator" and " shocking affront to democracy," says he hopes the opposition will force Harper's minority government to fall. " He's got to get kicked out. This is Canada, not Zimbabwe . . . or maybe it is.
" It's all about not wanting to do anything about the issue," Weaver says of the Senate sabotage. It's about pandering to the oil industry, to the Conservatives' Alberta power base.
Weaver had a lot of time for Jim Prentice, who quit as Harper's environment minister this month to take a job in banking. Prentice understood the issues, but couldn't get past the wilful ignorance of the Flat Earth Society at his own cabinet table, Weaver says. "The level of scientific illiteracy in the Harper government is mind-boggling."
The UVic climatologist, sputtering words like " unbelievable" and " dictator" and " shocking affront to democracy," says he hopes the opposition will force Harper's minority government to fall. " He's got to get kicked out. This is Canada, not Zimbabwe . . . or maybe it is.
" It's all about not wanting to do anything about the issue," Weaver says of the Senate sabotage. It's about pandering to the oil industry, to the Conservatives' Alberta power base.
Weaver had a lot of time for Jim Prentice, who quit as Harper's environment minister this month to take a job in banking. Prentice understood the issues, but couldn't get past the wilful ignorance of the Flat Earth Society at his own cabinet table, Weaver says. "The level of scientific illiteracy in the Harper government is mind-boggling."
" Climate scientists are a collective Noah," Weaver says. They have done their job, given the evidence to the politicians — only to be ignored. Weaver, the author of Keeping Cool: Canada in a Warming World, also had a key role when the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its report in 2007. People like him must be tempted to throw their hands in the air and walk away, particularly when constantly challenged by the half-informed.
9 comments:
I agree it is outrageous, but what can we do aside from voting against the Conservatives... The minority keeps winning because of the split left and we continue to be stuck with our mighty leader with his head in the tar sand...
"This is Canada, Not Zimbabwe..."
How little he knows...hell...how little Canadians know.
True, how little people know. An NDP MP, whose name escapes me, called Harper's environmental policy "Classic Mugabe - Scorch and Burn" in our HoC during QP. People perish for no vision or worthy leadership. And when the propagaters of (lies) misinformation own the media, it is not always the people's fault.
It's horribly sad but democracy has been degraded during Harper's tenure. By gagging the public service and armed forces and blatantly positioning his PMO between them and the public they're supposed to serve this guy has at times resembled Stalin. And he gets away with it, even though he rarely has the support of more than a third of the voting public, because of two cowardly opposition party leaders who continuously place their own personal fortunes ahead of their responsibility to the Canadian people.
From the article:
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It's all about not wanting to do anything about the issue, Weaver says of the Senate sabotage. It's about pandering to the oil industry, to the Conservatives' Alberta power base.
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I'm not so sure. I think it more subtle than that. The reality is that the oil and gas industry has been on record as supportive of a Carbon Tax, and is not broadly against tackling climate change (of course, they want to protect their interests in developing tar sands).
I think Harper is not so much pandering to a base. He wishes to create, by default, a base in Alberta that the whole country must pander to, in order not to satisfy Alberta's industry, but to cement Harper's conservative party's political power.
For example, would Alberta's oil industry care if Ontario developed industrial leadership in renewable and nuclear energy? Not really -- oil is primarily for transport, not electricity. Tar sands companies could still make money, no matter what the rest of the country does, energy wise. It's a free market, after all.
But if Ontario had leadership in those areas, it would mean that reliance upon Alberta's oil industry as the only industrial driver of Canada's economy would be diminished. Ontario's economy would not be a slave to whatever happens in Alberta. Politically this only makes HARPER weaker.
It wouldn't make oil and gas companies weaker, though.
Chris, I'm no longer willing to give much credence to the public positions taken by the fossil fuel industry. To me, they've repeatedly shown themselves to be rank dissemblers. Their promises mean about as much as they can be compelled to honour them.
MoS: no opposition = we're done?
LK, honestly I don't know. I really don't. James Lovelock has already thrown in the towel. Hansen and others say we have until 2015 to cap all growth in greenhouse gas emissions and then immediately start transitioning to renewables and I can't see any way that's remotely possible. If they're right, and I so hope they're wrong, after 2015 we're playing Russian Roulette with runaway global warming.
There's talk about expanding the Tar Sands production fivefold and, with that, comes the standard Tory talk about carbon sequestration. What's almost never mentioned is that the Alberta government's sequestration target is 20% of the CO2 emissions of the Athabasca operations. It's an empty public misinformation gesture.
Expanding production = Conspeak for rape and pillage. Yes, I mean that.
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