Open Letter to Conservative MPs

Dear Conservative Members of Parliament,

            I just recently read an article in The Guardian[i] that explained that we stand at the precipice of irreversible climate change. That if we continue with the status quo, even through your recently acquired four-year term, it will be too late to save our planet from at least a four-degree-Celsius global increase in the next ninety years. Through carbon feedback-loops in the permafrost and elsewhere, wherein carbon is released at an ever-accelerating rate by nature (no longer just by us), we will lose complete control over our climate situation and subsequently face the horrific consequences.

            This isn’t just a problem with the environment, because as agriculture fails due to drought, and oceans yield less and less due to increased acidification, mass starvation will almost certainly ensue. When individuals and their families are at the brink of death, they will fight for survival any way they can manage, and that means war, especially in Canada, because of our plentiful resources.

            If you continue to neglect the science and pursue increased expansion of the Athabasca oil sands, actively seeking weakened environmental efforts abroad, and inaction on climate change mitigation at home you are willfully subjecting your children to a life of violence and starvation. Will they stand by your side as they see their world crumble around them due to your actions? Where will you be in twenty years, as economies collapse, and your name is tarnished by your participation in the decline? When a starving family is banging at your door for food or shelter would you blame them if they took it by force? After all, you will be to blame for their position. It will have been your fault.

            The economy is reliant on the stability of the environment, not the opposite. Even within your term, we are likely to see some of the most extreme weather that has ever been recorded in Canada. Already Manitoba has flooded worse than has ever been seen this year, Slave Lake has been burned to the ground, and government has offered some compensation, though it could never really make up for the sentimental, housing, and agricultural loss. Can we really afford to compensate every Canadian who is subjected to environmental disaster as our weather gains in extremity? And what happens if we stop? Canadians are not stupid, and when we lose our homes due to neglect from the policy/weather-makers, who cannot spare us a penny, we are not going to stand for it. If you create a situation wherein people lose everything they have worked to build over their entire lives and they know exactly who is to blame for it, you can guess what sort of a response you will invoke.

            You have a choice. You could continue with the status quo, which will take us towards an inevitable decline. You may be wealthy and feel important in the present, but you will steadily be vilified, and rightfully so, by a public that will become ever more aware of your misguidance towards the decline of our species. Or, you could become a hero, who makes history by disaffecting from their ranks to appeal to their higher ideals. You could be someone who will go down in history as having taken the wheel and turned the Titanic just before the iceberg was hit. As you grow old, your children and grandchildren could look up to you in their healthy planet with wealth and plenty, and think of the bravery of grandpa or grandma who stood up for them, and all the rest of their generation. I hope that you choose to stand up for us, because you might just be our last chance for a decent life; one that we can share with our children, and them with theirs.


With the greatest desire for a reminder that there is hope after all,

   

   William R.D. Young

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[i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower?intcmp=122

An open letter to The Province and The Postmedia Network

In reference to: http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Liberal+light+bulb+edict+switched+socialism/4835935/story.html

Dear Editing Staff of The Province,

            I recently flipped through your “newspaper” while waiting for breakfast at a café, and I was reminded just why I tend to normally consider it to be a better fire-starter than read. The article that so blatantly made this clear was Jon Ferry’s “Liberal light-bulb edict switched-on socialism”. In the article, Mr. Ferry free-associates from one topic to another, sounding like a McCarthy-era propagandist so afraid of green and red that he doesn’t celebrate Christmas.

            From Jon’s take on the light bulb industry, you would think that he’s being given hefty payola from Thomas Edison himself. He talks about how cheap incandescent light bulbs are compared to compact fluorescents, without mentioning that you save far more in your electricity bills. He sounds like a man who has so much trouble with math that he eats out every meal because it’s far cheaper than grocery shopping, addicted to the present and blind to the future.

            Here’s a fun one, apparently by switching from one bulb to another, both of which are made by the same extremely large multinational corporations we’re socialist, who knew? There isn’t really much to say about this recurring thread in the article, other than the fact that if one is going to make huge overarching political statements, one should first be familiar with central tenets of the ethos, so as to not sound like a complete moron.

            Jon treats us to the fact that “Our bodies are made of carbon”, and therefore it can’t cause climate change. Which beyond being a blatant lie is also exactly the same as saying that because we are 70% water we cannot drown.

            The one thing that Jon does right in this article is to bring up NDP Energy Critic John Horgan’s concerns over toxicity in CFLs. Finally I thought, Jon might be able to bring real adult concerns to the table, maybe he can turn this into a mature debate about toxicity levels, or government regulation. But he fumbles that one to, diverting into a bit on how “those British Columbians [he’s] talked to positively hate the new pretzel-shaped bulbs, which … cast a sickly light, are slow to glow”. By this point, I begin to wonder if his vision’s failing, considering that most CFLs cast a light indistinguishable from incandescents called "soft white", except for those clearly marked “White Light”, which do exactly what they say they do.

            His conclusion is that believing in Climate Change is akin to believing in the rapture, and bases it on absolutely nothing. Also, he says that the world hasn’t warmed in the last ten years, even though 2010 was the hottest year on record.

            I could go on and on about Jon’s unfounded opinions, but this whole article seems to be fueled by a grumpy, old, entitled, white man with nothing better to do than complain about the fact that in the next 6 months when he has to go shopping and get new bulbs they’re going to gouge him an extra five or six whole dollars. He’ll have to take them home and screw them in same as always and look at a swirly “pretzel-shape”, rather than a vaguely testicular one, shed the miracle of electric light through the poorly decorated rooms of his sterile, unloving house. Worst of all, he won’t have to go to the store to buy new bulbs by the time he’s passed away, and his grandchildren might even get more inheritance due to the electricity savings.

            Ultimately, I can’t blame Jon Ferry for this because he’s clearly a very stupid man, and this is the dream job of any free-market extremist moron who thinks that by virtue of saying and feeling something it must be true. No, the blame falls on the institution itself that has given such a senile propagandist the mouthpiece with which to extol his quarter-baked rants against rationality. Your publication is only one of many (though all owned by The Postmedia Network) in our new pseudo-Berlusconian state that fights against all that is tangible, rational, and true in this world. By purveying such radical right wing, agenda-driven drivel with increasing regularity, I can only conclude that you are waging intellectual warfare. You’re on.

With great contempt,

           

            William R.D. Young