Colby thinks he has the answer:
We know the Conservative government is reluctant to make the large, immediate economic tradeoffs that professional environmentalists want. Could this be why the report was dropped quietly onto the internet like a Victorian flirt's handkerchief hitting a parqueted floor?
It's possible, but I don't think it's true. The report we're talking about is called From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007. It's not a document about what we can do now to save Mother Earth: it's about what we can do to ready ourselves if some planetary warming, irrespective of the cause, is inevitable. In that sense it does not suit the environmentalist agenda to have the report widely publicized. Adaptation measures are competing for the same reserve of attention and funding as the Kyoto-type hair-shirt efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas output. The more we talk about living with a warmer Earth, the more we may come to see it as acceptable.
Now that's CHHHHHHutzzzPahhhh! According to CC, Harper has had the report stuffed, not because it makes alarming reading and raises question like what the hell do you plan to do about it?, but because Harper is down with the environmentalist agenda and wants to run cover for them. The report is, in a sense, too anti-Kyoto for the Tory government.
That's the most logical reading of the above passage. Alternatively, maybe Cosh is arguing that somehow Environmentalists have managed to reach inside the Ministry of Natural Resources and influence government policy. A photo of an angry Al Gore heads today's column. Maybe Al made a nasty phone-call to Gary Lunn and gave him heck for blowing the whole scam wide open.
In any case, the fact that the Federal Tories are ignoring a study they commissioned is somehow, some way, the fault of the Environmental movement.
How Mr. Cosh manages to write this stuff without busting out in giggles is beyond me.
4 comments:
Another denizen of the Lunatic Fringe - make that Harpo Conservatives.
Whooee! Colby Cosh likes to be convoluted an' indecipherable. Looks like maybe the NatPo editors are crampin' his style in the big words department. I didn't see as many 50-cent words in that piece as is typical on Cosh's blog.
If he ain't allowed to confuse readers with bigass, obscure words, he turns to complicated freaky-deaky logic.
Funny stuff, though, about the lowkey publication of the report. Especially after shellin' out $50,000 fer a bigass launch.
JB
Colby should look at the data . . . here's proof the climate is changing
http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2008/03/12/co2-global-warming/
That's the most logical reading of the above passage.
I'm surprised you managed to get any reading out of it. All I understood was "tree-huggers!"
I don't bother with people who think their clever turns of phrase and their faux-bemusement is good enough as analysis.
Actually, I shouldn't say I don't bother with them...I find them mystifying which is, of course, what they set out to do. I just wish they'd stick to reviewing plays or commenting on the diminished role of the white male, or lamenting their waning libidos, or something.
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