24th October 2006

I religiously trot my blue box to the end of my driveway every week, because I believe that we are very wasteful in our use of trees
and our packaging is very profligate in its use of materials.

I also believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon and the automobile is being blamed unnecessarily for its existence.
If we shut down all private transport tomorrow morning, we would reduce carbon emissions by 3%.

Sending our Environment Minister to a Kyoto conference in Africa is like sending a Maori warrior to do a war dance in the middle
of the Vatican.

Signing the Kyoto treaty is equivalent to agreeing to impose a 50 kilometre per hour speed limit on the Trans Canada highway.
When it cannot be enforced, the law is always an ass.

Religion has been the cause of most of the wars in the last 2000 years.

Catholics and Muslims are now struggling for supremacy, but they are being over shadowed by environmentalism.

All religion is about superimposing its will on the will of the majority and because the uninformed media and that part of the
public that fails to inform itself, is carrying along the myth of a global doomsday, environmentalism has a very good chance of
being more powerful than any other form of religion. To urge things in their direction, tree huggers are now using the word
"catastrophic" on almost every occasion.

To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from
empirical or theoretical science. 

Is any amount of climate change catastrophic?
Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when?
What index is being used to measure the catastrophe? 
The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for
behavioural change.

There are many straws in the wind:
Red Ken Livingstone is going to increase the congestion charge in London on SUVs to $60 per day.
A proposal has been floated to charge another $50 on all airline tickets, already loaded down with hidden charges, just to
discourage people from flying.

As with other religions, the hoi poloi with privilege will not be affected by these restrictions, because they will have banked all the
penalty money so that they can fly in a private jet when necessary.

Somebody should tell the Pope that all the pollution in the world  is caused by one basic factor: not enough birth control.

There are some voices of reason out there, but they are muted and obscured by the cacophony created by the "the sky-is-falling"
catastrophe crowd.

On this site, we put Hydrogen in its far away place and we herewith publish some contrary opinion that is well worth your
consideration:

"Everyone seems to be cheering a clampdown on 4x4s - even 4x4 owners themselves.

I went to a Friends of the Earth meeting the other day, just to find out what the purveyors of perfidy were up to and there were their
wealthy supporters hiding their SUVs in the supermarket car park across the road and cooing their approval as the local socialist
MP posited higher taxes for 4x4s.

Think about a flock of turkeys voting for an early Christmas.

Recently, Sir Nicholas Stern published his 700-page report into the economics of climate change. Much of the subsequent debate
has been characterised by sanctimonious finger-pointing at the middle classes, cheap airline flights and 4x4s.

This was accompanied by a very real sense of déjà vu for those of us who have followed the post-war baby boomers through the
decades. They've had the best of times, a free education, the contraceptive pill, the Swinging Sixties, the flower
power, the drugs and the E-types. They've enjoyed full employment, the white heat of technology, unprecedented consumerism
and rising house prices, and as they've aged they've made sure that their guilts, regrets, fears and bogeymen are everybody's
concern, be they divorce, the demise of index-linked pensions, nuclear war, Chilean apples, HIV, the new ice age or, now,
global warming.

While no one should doubt the seriousness of the greenhouse effect, one wonders if we are witnessing yet another example of this
generations guilt-obsessed, hair-tearing histrionics. An example of the hysteria is the plain bad science and even worse economics
paraded as unassailable fact in the media.

Earlier this summer, Sir Nicholas Stern said:
"To tackle this problem we will need all the economics we have learned and then some more."

Few will dare to criticise green taxes that could curtail air travel and 4x4s, but no one appears to be sure what these taxes will
pay for, whether they will deter the biggest polluters and whether they will merely serve to make an economy less competitive
and usher companies and jobs to less green pastures overseas.

This week, the ecumenical Christian group the Iona Community, suggested that such taxes are a good thing in themselves.
Yet even if God thinks that green taxes are incontrovertibly good, we've yet to hear what He thinks we should do with them.

Two months ago, General Motors announced that the reluctance of western governments to invest in a hydrogen fuel infrastructure
had persuaded it to launch its forthcoming fuel-cell vehicles in China, where the government is investing heavily in nuclear power,
facilitating a carbon-free hydrogen economy. So can we really trust our Government to invest the green windfall in effective
carbon-neutral technology? Green taxes on everything means there is no environmental choice, merely more expenditure,
inflationary pressure on the economy and taxpayers enmeshed in ignorance, envy and hatred of each other.

These days green activists try to quash reasoned debate on the environment by claiming that all of science, and all of the worlds
experts, are on their side. But here’s an Inconvenient Truth. They aren’t.

There are many scientists, really properly good ones with really properly good qualifications, who maintain that mans impact on
the environment is minimal. There are even more who say we just don’t know.

Then you have Danish egghead Bjorn Lomborg, who studied a vast range of eco reports before presenting his findings in a book
called the Sceptical Environmentalist.

Let us take the Exxon Valdez tanker crash as an example. After it happened men with sandals came on the television to call the
accident an environmental catastrophe. We saw shots of sticky guillemots in their death throes, and, of course, we knew it was all
our fault for driving 4x4s and turning up the heat whenever it gets a bit chilly.

But Lomborg presents an interesting fact that wasn’t covered by the news reports. Yes, 250,000 birds were killed by the spillage,
but this is also the number killed each year in America from collisions with plate glass. In Britain alone 250,000 birds are killed
every two days by domestic cats.

Sadly, though, the true impact of man’s activities on the environment are almost always swept away by headlines suggesting
we’ll all soon be “consigned to the dustbin of evolutionary history”.

Not in a thousand years, but maybe by teatime if we don’t watch out.

Then you have the Kyoto protocol. This is seen by most people as a political device that would save the world if only George Bush
and his oil-rich neocon advisers in the White House would sign up. But Lomborg disagrees.

Kyoto calls for industrialised nations to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30% below what they would be by 2010, but, as Bjorn says,
this would only postpone by six years the temperature we’d reach in 2100. So to reach the Kyoto goals we’d be spending anything
between $200 billion and $700 billion each year and then we’d have to pay the costs associated with global warming anyway.

In other words we’d spend all the money we should be using to feed the poor and heal the world’s other problems so that we don’t
have to rehouse 200m Bangladeshis. Only to find that in 2106 we’re going to have to rehouse the Bangladeshis anyway.

A big story? You’d have thought so, but it simply doesn’t get a look in. If anyone dares to suggest that global warming isn’t man’s fault,
or that it won’t be such a bad thing, or that technology will save the day — like it always has done — you will be ignored.

Some of the green propaganda is driven by a post trade-union vision of world equality. You’ll note they never attack fat lazy northerners
who won’t get off their arses and fit insulation in their roofs; only middle-class mums with 4x4s and families who use cheap airlines.

Then you have plenty of other greenies who need funding for their research and they know it’ll all dry up if they announce that
everything’s fine.

This is probably why, in 1997, the World Wide Fund for Nature announced that two-thirds of the world’s forests had been lost for ever.
When questioned, it admitted that the report on which this was based had never existed. In fact, the truth is that there are many more
forests in the world now than there were in 1950.

But of course, it was swallowed whole by the media, who have an endless appetite for bad news, and now we have the world’s
governments leaping on the bandwagon too, because they’ve realised that they can capitalise on our guilt with a raft of new
green taxes.

You know in your heart of hearts that the world is constantly changing, that continents move and that ice ages come and go, but
you’re being browbeaten by a slick and unstoppable industry into believing that because of your car, and your heating furnace
and that cheap weekend break you took last year to Miami, the gods are angry and that unless you pay another$10,000 a year they
will visit upon you a plague of locusts and a storm that will last for at least a thousand years."