Hands Off My Money, Environmental Activists

Global warming is a socialist plot, climate change activists are fanatics, and Australians have short memories but green fields.

With the UN summit on climate change one week away, a skeptical Adrian McNair writes in the National Post that climate activists are worse than religious zealots and abortion activists when it comes to unflinching fanaticism. McNair argues that while anthropogenic global warming is a decent theory, it’s still just a theory. “It’s difficult for a lot of people to believe the hype about global warming when scientists consistently get their predictions wrong,” he says, citing the gross miscalculation that saw 34 million salmon return to the Fraser River this year after experts predicted they were all but extinct. This is a misleading example because no one was suggesting that global warming was responsible for low salmon runs, making McNair’s piece essentially an argument for not believing scientists’ predictions about anything. Perhaps the religious zealots are more accurate.

Sun Media’s Brian Lilley is not only skeptical of global warming, but says international climate treaties are in fact brazen attempts to “massively redistribute wealth” and “amount to nothing more than socialism on a global scale.” Lilley calls climate change activists watermelons (“green on the outside and socialist red on the inside”) and basically says that we should all hide our wallets before we find our life savings are being channeled to Belize through some sinister carbon tax scheme. If Lilley’s right, climate change socialists have been remarkably unsuccessful. After all Al Gore, the Grand Watermelon himself, was the second most powerful man in America for eight years, and somehow capitalism is still standing.

In the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson recounts one of the few instances where a consensus was reached on the climate change theory. After Australia faced 10 years of crippling drought, “even for conservative-minded farmers, [climate change] was no longer something in the abstract, an idea cooked up by dreamers and schemers, but a burning reality.” How to deal with global warming became a central political issue, but Simpson writes that now that the rain has returned the urgency has evaporated, leaving politicians with a bunch of half-finished policies so prickly they could topple the current government.