{"id":22299,"date":"2013-09-27T10:07:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T15:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22299"},"modified":"2013-09-27T10:07:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-27T15:07:02","slug":"harper-and-climate-change-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/27\/harper-and-climate-change-spending\/","title":{"rendered":"Harper and climate change … spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Akin<\/a> points out that all the major federal parties believe the same thing about climate change, except that the Tories are the ones who’ve been chucking around the money on climate change programs:<\/p>\n

The simple fact of Canadian politics here is that, if you do not believe in climate change, there is no federal political party that shares your view. There almost was one in Alberta in its last provincial election<\/a> but, boy, did that idea get shouted down<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But back to what [former environment minister Peter] Kent said to me in that interview:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no question that since the Industrial Revolution there have been anthropogenic, man-made effects on our global climate. The argument continues in the scientific community how much is evolution and how much is man-made but there is certainly something we can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what is the something<\/em> that the Harper government has been doing? Well, truth be told, the Harper Conservatives, like the Martin and Chretien Liberals before them, have not been doing very much. None of them, in fact, got the job done. Which might, come to think of it, be a good reason \u2014 if climate change is the only thing you\u2019re voting on \u2014 to consider choosing the NDP or the Greens next time around. Not to say they\u2019d actually get it done but it\u2019s pretty clear the other two parties, while they talk a good game, just don\u2019t have the political stomach for the job. Those New Democrats brought us universal health care. Maybe they can fix the environment, too.<\/p>\n

Still, that doesn\u2019t mean Conservatives aren\u2019t prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars \u2014 billions even \u2014 on a problem they are accused of not admitting even exists. Take biofuels, for example. Early on, the Harper government got the idea that if corn- or plant-based ethanol displaced enough fossil fuels, we\u2019d easily roll back greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently no one bothered to point out that there is serious doubt that corn-based ethanol is actually a lower-emission alternative to fossil fuels<\/a> but why complicate things? Ethanol is a good, solid, job-creating green story!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the long run, the subsidies and outright gifts of government money to green-ish sounding companies will likely be the only reminders of the great global warming panic of the last decade. Certainly little or no actual environmental improvements will be traced to the billions of dollars doled out to cronies under this government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Akin points out that all the major federal parties believe the same thing about climate change, except that the Tories are the ones who’ve been chucking around the money on climate change programs: The simple fact of Canadian politics here is that, if you do not believe in climate change, there is no federal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,65,84],"tags":[245,727,240,258,793],"class_list":["post-22299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-environment","category-government","tag-climatechange","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-globalwarming","tag-stephenharper","tag-subsidies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5NF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22301,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299\/revisions\/22301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}