It’s entirely mystifying to me that Canada, of all places, has been so ravaged by the current outbreak of decennial environmental hysteria.

At the root, of course, the present pattern of the disease can be traced fairly easily, with the media having served as the primary agent of infection. While it’s tempting to think that there’s a bunker somewhere where the elders of the press draw up their secret protocols, I think that it’s more likely that environmental hysteria is transmitted through a more naturalistic method.

Simply put, liberalism is sort of virus which severely compromises the immune system. Once it takes hold, it leaves the carrier – even a latent carrier – vulnerable to any number of opportunistic infections, of which environmentalism is simply the current example. The Canadian people, a majority of which are in the terminal stages of the disease, are a fertile ground for its spread.

Here’s a real inconvenient truth: radical environmentalism is fundamentally irrational.
Sensible conservation, like the Prime Minister sought to push with the Clean Air Act, makes all sorts of sense. There’s an obvious public interest in not having raw sewage dumped into rivers, in keeping the air relatively clean, and so forth. All of that, even if sometimes it is achieved in a fashion which is overly-intrusive and damaging to private enterprise, can be justified on the basis of rationality and logic.

What cannot be sustained in the face of any level of reasoned scrutiny is the present enthusiasm for the Kyoto Protocol and other economically-destructive measures which may or may not be the best way of doing something which may or may not work about a problem which may or may not be correctable at all and which may or may not exist.

The history of the modern environmental movement is one of false predictions of the imminence of Armageddon followed hard upon the failure of those predictions to materialize with renewed warnings that the end will be coming, if not tomorrow, then the day after or the day after that – but definitely perhaps sometime in the reasonably close to near future.

Of course, there’s nothing near about this – people have been predicting the end of the world since its beginning. There is, I suppose, something psychologically comforting in the feeling that the rest of the world will cease to exist at roughly the same chronological moment as oneself.

I take it as read that the average environmentalist would feel insulted at being lumped in with the unwashed; sandwich-board wearing bums walking down the streets announcing the rapidly-approaching end of humanity. Of course, they shouldn’t feel insulted – they should feel stupid. Because they are stupid.

The common observation that environmentalism has been transformed into a kind of secular religion needs no further illustration than the present situation up here in Canada. The sheer unreality of listening to Stephanie Dion prattle about following the already-dead Kyoto Protocol, despite the fact that he – if he’s not retarded (and just because his English is less comprehensible than that of one is no reason to assume) – is fully aware of the impossibility of what he demands can only lead one to the conclusion that the Liberals and their fellow-travellers in the other parties take their new unofficial religion about as seriously as most of their leaders take their official religions.

Perhaps the way to cut our CO2 emissions is to declare Wednesday or something to be the Sabbath Day of the Church of Our Holy Goddess, establish said Church as the National Church (hell I’m sure, especially if some of the rumours about him from a few years back are true, that HRH The Prince of Wales will be happy to be a Defender of That Faith…) and force everyone to stay home and shiver in the cold that day.
Speaking of the cold – and getting back to my main topic – I’d like to repeat the main question: why the hell should the average Canadian care about “climate change”?

To being with, given the size of our population, it seems doubtful that even if we decided to kill each and every single Canadian (and to then dispose of their bodies in some environmentally-sensitive way, perhaps as soybean fertilizer or something) it would make any difference to the overall global climate. Given that, even an extremely painful-but-possible reduction would be entirely pointless as anything but a moral gesture. And, to assume that such a Canadian gesture would even be noticed anywhere else in the world is to presume an awful lot.

Even if one believes the doomsday scenarios, we need to ask ourselves what the most sensible response is. Does it really seem plausible that all of the world’s major industrial nations (and it’d have to be all of the big ones for it to make any difference at all) are going to agree on anything, let along measures which would be immensely destructive to the economic well-being of their people?

Anyone want to lay down some money on the likelihood of that actually happening? Oh, perhaps they might agree to something – simply to score some political points – but do you really think any of them would actually do it?

Assuming that self-interest will remain the guiding factor, the easiest and most rational thing for most governments to do will be to sign various environmental accords and to thereafter thump their chests on the subject – then to hurry up and quickly ignore them. Which, of course, is what most did with regard to Kyoto.

Even if the worst is coming (and I sincerely doubt that it is), wouldn’t the best response of any advanced country, given how much warning we have and how much time we will have to adjust, be to do nothing but work to continue to build up wealth – and to do sensible things which ought to be done in any case, such as discouraging people from building in easily-flooded areas, building up various guards, and ensuring that sufficient land is allocated to provide for the agricultural needs of the people?

In truth, if you really wanted to drive people towards cleaner technology wouldn’t you do the exact opposite of what the environmental left proposes? Higher taxes and higher prices will squeeze people economically, driving them towards the lowest-cost provider wherever possible – and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that the lowest-cost provider is likely to be the one with the least regard for the environmental consequences of your actions. Prosperous people – and companies – have the luxury of considering such factors. People – and companies – on the margins just want to survive.

Of course, we aren’t going to hear these arguments because, alas, most major politicians of the right – including my personal trifecta of Harper, Bush, and Howard – have been pushed and prodded into violating one of my cardinal rules of politics: never bid when you can be outbid. By making the concessions that they have to the various environmental lunatics, they’ve simply emboldened them and given them cause to demand – and hope for – much, much more.

Still, this too shall pass. Mystified though I am why the people of a country with a massive landmass which is rendered largely-uninhabitable by the cold should be frightened by the idea that the Earth may get a few degrees warmer long after they are dead, I’m also well-aware of the truth that people, especially the people who fret about stuff like this, have notoriously short attention spans.

Soon enough our recurring course of environmentalist nonsense shall remit once more.