A Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, who writes from the relatively conservative side of the street (she writes in Canada, after all), declares the death of global warming hysteria and urges environmentalists to save their movement—of which she is a part as a director of the anti nuke Energy Probe. Her prescription: In the wake of the Copenhagen fiasco, environmentalists should focus instead on the extinction crisis. From “Can Environmentalism be Saved From Itself?”
The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. The European Union’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions has been exposed as a giant fraud. (The EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990, if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it produced.) Public interest in climate change has plunged, and the media have radically reduced their climate coverage.
The biggest loser is the environmental movement. For years, its activists neglected almost everything but climate change. They behaved as if they’d cornered the market on wisdom, truth and certainty, and they demonized anyone who dared to disagree. They got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media, who parroted their claims like Sunday-school children reciting Scripture. No interest group in modern times has been so free from skepticism, scrutiny or simple accountability as the environmental establishment.
Wisdom! Still, she has seen the enemy, and it is us:
Don’t worry about the polar bears, which have survived hundreds of thousands of years of melting and freezing ice. Worry instead about the lions and tigers, which face extinction within our lifetime. Their problem isn’t climate change. It’s us.
A century ago, there were more than 100,000 wild tigers in Asia. Today there are just 3,200. Civilization is squeezing them, and poachers hunt them for their skin and body parts. This week, the unlikely team of Vladimir Putin and Leonardo DiCaprio headlined a 13-country tiger summit in St. Petersburg that is tackling the challenge of making live tigers worth as much as dead ones. Then there are the lions. They’re not as scarce as tigers – yet – but their habitats are ideal for ranching, and they face increasing pressure from population growth. Or how about the bluefin tuna? This one is close to home – we catch them and sell them to Japan – and Canada is on the wrong side of the issue. If the World Wildlife Fund could whip up as much alarm over the bluefin tuna as it tried to whip up over fictitious drowning polar bears, I might even be persuaded to send them money again.
Preserving endangered species is a worthy cause. But in our desire to save the tigers, we have to be careful not to punish the poor.
Still, I find this column encouraging, being published in Green Canada’s largest national newspaper. So long as we don’t turn the campaign over species diversity into the same kind of panic mongering as in global warming—a clear and present danger as the UN is gearing up—some good can be done. Perhaps environmentalism will finally go cold turkey from its more anti human and Utopian approaches and sticks to what it does best—challenge us to improve our environmental husbandry without sacrificing human thriving. But I am not holding my breath.
