NATIONAL POST

The only thing wrong with a new film on global warming hysteria, Not Evil Just Wrong,
is that its title may be too generous to the alarmists responsible

By Peter Foster



Al Gore is about to feature in a new movie, but he’s not going to like it very much.

Titled Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, the film presents a devastating account
of the shaky foundations and hefty price of Mr. Gore’s brand of self-interested and hypocritical alarmism.

Created by the Irish film making duo of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — who made another excellent
documentary about the “dark side of environmentalism” called Mine Your Own Business — Not Evil provides
the perfect rebuttal to Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Despite being chock-a-block with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Mr. Gore’s movie has frightened
schoolchildren all over the world, driven the public policy debate, and garnered both an Academy Award
and a Nobel Peace Prize for its star.

Not Evil — which is due to be released later this year — will appear at a crucial time. The world’s crisis-beset
nations are due to meet in Copenhagen in November to concoct a new policy straitjacket to succeed the
meddlesome but utterly failed Kyoto Accord. If global warming's U.N.-based ringmasters have their way, this
will lead to a slashing of industrial production in developed countries and to a huge extension of boondoggle
redistributionist schemes to fund “green” technologies in developing countries.

Such policy represents a triple threat: it will destroy economic activity; it will cripple trade; and it will hurt the
poorest the most. Nevertheless, President Obama appears to be on-board this ship of fools, having bought into
the notion that there are net “green jobs” to be had from a massive increase in taxation and regulation of industrial activity.

The impact on Canada could be horrendous, and not merely on the oil sands, which have been targeted by
environmental non-governmental organizations. This week, Environment Minister Jim Prentice admitted that
Canada could be forced to adopt more draconian regulation if it is not to be hit by threatened U.S. carbon tariffs.

The truly astonishing feature of this policy fandango is that it will have little or no effect on the climate, the science
of which is still only dimly understood. However, alarmists such as Mr. Gore have successfully sold the notion
that the science is “settled.” This is just one of the claims to which Not Evil Just Wrong puts the lie.

Alternating credible skeptics with arresting imagery, the film makes clear that the science, far from being settled,
has been comprehensively misrepresented by the likes of NASA’s James Hansen, who is to Al Gore and climatology
what Trofim Lysenko was to Joseph Stalin and agronomy.

There is a wonderful scene of Mr. Hansen becoming almost discombobulated at the very mention of Stephen McIntyre,
the maverick Canadian who, with the help of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, took on the UN climate change
establishment over the so-called “hockey stick” temperature graph, and won. Mr. Hansen claims that paying attention
to such inconvenient truths amounts to just “clouding the issue.”

The film dramatically outlines the dreadful damage already done by environmental hysteria, in particular the millions
of unnecessary deaths caused by the campaign against DDT. That campaign started with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,
which was at the root of the modern environmental movement in every sense. Despite the World Health Organization’s lifting
of the DDT ban, Al Gore remains devoted to Ms. Carson’s memory. And methods. As Patrick Moore, one of the founders of
Greenpeace but now a skeptic, points out, radical environmentalists “care more about fish eggs than they do about children.”
Meanwhile kids are shown fretting about about imminent global inundation and the deaths of polar bears.

Just as Mine Your Own Business showed how opposition to mining in developing countries comes often not from the
“grassroots” but from well-funded multinational NGOs with as little concern for local employment as they have for truth,
so Not Evil Just Wrong further demonstrates environmentalists’ disregard for humanity, and in particular the poor.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in Mine Your Own Business was that of the WWF’s local representative in Madagascar,
Mark Fenn, who was leading opposition to a development by Rio Tinto. The appalling Mr. Fenn, who owned a $35,000
catamaran and was building a local luxury home, claimed that poor people were happier, and that if the locals had more
money they would “just spend it.”

The film makers have come up with similar buffoons for their new movie, including a Bible-thumping environmentalist in
Uganda who opposes using DDT and claims that the U.S. never experienced malaria and Hollywood actor Ed Begley,
who suggests that Fijians are “happy with nothing.”

Not Evil Just Wrong  which will be released later this year —is an important film that deserves the widest possible
distribution, both in theatres and schools. The only quibble that I have with it is that its title might be too generous to
those it exposes.