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The myth that we care

Enough already. I’m tired of being preached to about climate change, global warming, thinning ozone, and living a sustainable life. It’s a scam. A scam and a fraud. There is no global warming. Climate change is just a myth.
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Enough already. I’m tired of being preached to about climate change, global warming, thinning ozone, and living a sustainable life. It’s a scam. A scam and a fraud. There is no global warming. Climate change is just a myth. Well, maybe not a myth but certainly as natural as the law of gravity. After all, change happens. Without change, we’d all be protozoa swimming around in the primordial ooze. Stop whining.

The evidence against global warming, the evidence against catastrophic climate change is everywhere. All you have to do is look around you to see it.

I see the evidence every morning when I walk past the Husky station and Southside Diner. Every bay at the Husky is full of big trucks and big SUVs. In the bed of every big truck is a big snowmobile, maybe two if they’ve got one of those nifty articulating platforms that make loading easier. Behind every SUV is a trailer with one or two more snowmobiles.

Scurrying around the big trucks, big SUVs and big snowmobiles are earnest young men, men who came of age in the Age of Environmental Enlightenment. Earth Day babies who were born long after Rachel Carson warned us of the coming silent spring, long after the first OPEC oil shock, long after Stewart Brand published that marvelous picture of Earth from the Moon on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. They’re filling the big trucks and big SUVs up with gasoline. They’re filling the big snowmobiles — powerful two-stroke sleds, none of those pussy four-stroke jobs — with gasoline. They’re filling extra gas cans with gasoline.

Then they’re driving across the street to fill themselves with hearty breakfasts while they plan the day’s strategy. The work those earnest young men have to plan is very important. Somewhere in the backcountry around Whistler there exists a myth more powerful than the Holy Grail awaiting discovery. The perfect slope. The perfect cornice. The perfect drop. The line so perfect it has never before been captured on film or digital video being dropped, shredded and schussed by cool young dudes on skis and snowboards. A slope just crying out to be high-marked. An avalanche just waiting to be triggered and captured for that insatiable DVD or YouTube market. Fame. Glory. Celebrity.

Unless, of course, they’re just heading into the backcountry to burn up some gas and have a blast. That’s okay too, obviously.

Now how could a Chicken Little enviroweenie run around crying about global warming and climate change and falling sky in the light of such evidence? Surely the earnest young dudes with all the environmental sensitivity they’ve grown up with wouldn’t be mindlessly blasting around, bringing on global warming — which, after all, would kinda screw the pooch, skiing and snowboardingwise, wouldn’t it? — just for the hell of it. Would they?

And if you don’t put too much stock in earnest young dudes and their spewing machines, you have to look no further than the actions of our Captains of Industry and draw the only rational conclusion a rational person could draw. Climate change is a pernicious myth designed to undermine the very reason we’ve been put on Earth — to get rich! Now!

Smart, rational people with advanced degrees and the most important pedigree known to man — the ability to amass a fortune — wouldn’t be trading the future for the present, would they? Of course not. The evidence is overwhelming. Whenever they speak about the future it’s in glowing terms, tender terms, terms that have only the best interests of their “children and children’s children” at heart. They wouldn’t strip the Earth of its, our, future wealth just so it could be burned up, used up, contribute to atmospheric degradation and the asthmatic, choking, Soylent Green future of their children and children’s children just so they could make more dough today, buy a new SUV, build an addition, maybe one of those oh so trendy outdoor fireplace/big-screen theatres onto their 10,000 square foot house in the country. They wouldn’t be so shortsighted. It doesn’t make any sense.

I mean, if the Age of Peak Oil was really near that would mean only one thing: that oil will only become more valuable in the future. If oil is going to become more valuable in the future, a rational person might decide to leave most of it where it is right now, extract it slowly, just enough to keep your industry going, not growing. That way an oil exec could release it to a starving petromarket sometime in the future when he could really make a killing instead of ramping up production now when it’s relatively cheap and barely even worth starting a war over. Surely the entire Canadian oil industry isn’t populated with shortsighted, take-the-profit-and-damn-the-future kind of smart businessmen, is it? Just doesn’t make any sense. Must be a lie.

Okay, I can understand how you might look at industry’s track record the past couple of decades — centuries — and be a teensy bit skeptical about their ability to think long-term. Sometimes it seems they missed the whole delayed gratification lesson in life. But no one in their right mind could look at the actions of our democratically-elected government and come to the conclusion global warming and climate change is anything but a scam. After all, we get the government we deserve, don’t we?

If climate change was a real threat, wouldn’t our Conservative government demand more of us than simply changing our light bulbs? Of course they would. And wouldn’t they be anxious to actually reduce our, allegedly, greenhouse gas producing emissions rather than just reducing their intensity? You bet. Wouldn’t they introduce a carbon tax to help fund research into alternative energy sources and reduce demand? Not on your life, you dreamer.

And closer to home, since all politics are local, wouldn’t our elected leaders — Leader: n . One who acts as a guiding force. — be, well, leading us toward reducing our consumption of fossil fuels, reducing our solid waste, living a greener life? Oh, I know. We’ve got a Sustainability Plan. We’re planning to be sustainable. But we’re so busy planning to be sustainable we’re actually not doing a very good job of being sustainable. Our major indicators are trending in the wrong direction. Maybe if we were actually engaging in some leadership instead of touting our highly-regarded plan we’d be reining in things like open shop doors all winter long, propane patio heaters — let’s just heat up the whole damn mountains for the sake of selling a few more beers, eh? — high-ambience, propane fireplaces and all those cool young dudes lined up to buy gas for their backcountry jaunts… for example.

Screw it; I’ve got lightbulbs to change.