Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (22 page)

Either that, or I’d left the fridge door open. Again.

Al is on a crusade. The chads are history. The one-time geek who lost to the frat boy has, in the immortal mantra of a million therapists, “put all that behind him.” He’s found himself, again. He is no longer wooden Al Gore. He is Al Gore the Jeremiah of a planet whose thermostat has gone wacko.

Al is a salesman. He’s the doctor, too.
An Inconvenient Truth
is the finest expository opus since Michael Moore caught George Bush reading about a billy goat to school kids the morning of September 11.

Al is everywhere. He’s new again. And he cares. Am I skeptical? Do Rice Krispies crepitate?

I know the word is delicate these days, but Al is on a crusade. And of all the causes that are out there, none is so sentimental, so saturated with vague, emotive attitudinizing, fed on soft science and ripe with moral grandstanding, as global warming.

Global warming, precisely because it is so grand and nebulous, precisely because it is that perfect storm of scientism and moralism, because it is so susceptible to demagoguery (however fashionably packaged and presented), is an almost unstoppable cause.

Hands up, those of you who are against “saving the world.”

There are the usual rote denials from Gore about a further run for the presidency. But now he’s riding the thermal drafts of undreamt-of popularity. He has the approval of all right-thinking people. Hollywood loves him, Cannes gushes, Larry nods.

The only thing between him and a clean shot at the presidency as the Democratic nominee is the ice queen of American politics, Hillary Clinton. And what chance has an ice queen against the Pied Piper of a warming world?

Hillary may want to take a look at
An Inconvenient Truth
. Some truths are more inconvenient than others. The verity offered for her digestion is that Al Gore is back.

Which city is more scrupulous in enforcing its pollution bylaws: Glasgow or Toronto?

No, this is not a thought experiment. In Toronto, during the manically hyped International Film Festival, the Iraq reporter and sometime actor Sean Penn lit up a cigarette during a press conference at the Sutton Place Hotel.

There are bylaws in Toronto against just this sort of thing, and they carry heavy penalties. I’ve seen postings in elevators warning of $5,000 fines.

There are bylaws in Glasgow, too. I haven’t had a chance to peruse that city’s elevator literature, but I’d wager it features equally big fines in similarly small print. In Glasgow, it was Keith Richards who lit up in a public place.

Perhaps, because it is Keith Richards we’re talking about, I should be more explicit: he lit and smoked a cigarette. Whether Keith was, himself, lit up, is irrelevant. He wasn’t at a news conference—nor, it might be helpful to add, was he up a palm tree.

He smoked, on stage, during a Stones concert.

Here in Toronto, the result was interesting. Sean Penn escaped any penalty. But the Sutton Place Hotel, the venue of the press conference, got hit with a $605 fine. This doesn’t seem fair. The hotel wasn’t smoking. But, evidently, the hotel’s staff had neglected to convey personally to the intrepid Mr. Penn the many prohibitions of the Smoke-Free Ontario Act.

The Glaswegian authorities were more merciful. Neither the company that operated the stage, nor the Great Inhaler himself, Mr. Richards, was fined. In Glasgow, they made a judgment of Solomonic finesse: a “stage” was not an “enclosed public space” in the meaning of the bylaws. Scots are nothing if not subtle. David Hume was a Scot, and he could unravel cobwebs—with his teeth.

It is useful to add that Mr. Penn’s defiant fumigations caught the attention of no less a marplot than Ontario Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson, who allowed that Mr. Penn was a “great actor” but, notwithstanding the comforts his great art has brought the world—I’m paraphrasing here—he was not above the law, and that “he could be charged and he should be charged.” He hasn’t been, and he won’t be.

Film festival officials grovelled in perfectly toneless and abject prose: “The festival and our hotel partners make every effort possible to ensure that our guests are aware of and respect Ontario’s Smoke-Free Act. We apologize that our moderator did not address the issue during the press conference.” I hope none of the PR people are writing movie scripts.

So, Toronto takes its bylaws very seriously. And so does the Ontario government. When a minister scolds a widescreen demigod, you know it’s serious. The environment is a big issue in this province, as I hope this comparative study illustrates. Those Scots may be slackers, but Ontario is the dour jurisdiction when it comes to its air.

Just as it’s big on global warming. Or so I thought. This is a province in love with blue boxes and a house of great crusaders against the tobacco menace—which no less an authority than Al Gore has recently linked to the global warming phenomenon itself. Except when it comes to areas larger than a pop star’s studied show of trivial rebellion, or something a little more drastic than parking the liquor empties in the right-coloured bin.

Consider the statement this week of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Rona Ambrose, the federal environment minister, has been talking of imposing fuel-emission standards on automobile manufacturers. Here’s Mr. McGuinty: “The one thing we will not abide is any effort on the part of the national government to unduly impose greenhouse-gas emission reductions on the province of Ontario at the expense of the auto sector.”

This is the same premier who recently welcomed the news that government-subsidized GM plants would soon be the home for the manufacture of the new “muscle car,” the gas-guzzling Camaro.

Fine a hotel for one star-lit cigarette, but welcome the manufacture of thousands of environmentally retrograde muscle cars. And promise not to “abide” any effort to “unduly impose greenhouse-gas reductions.” This is a parable of the entire global-warming debate. Those who accept the science of the climate-change projections, who profess to be most anxious over the “greatest crisis” of our times,
will say every right word, and pursue the most trivial acts of symbolic environmentalism. But when it comes to action that has any real cost—political or personal—they are as hard-line an opponent to any change in the status quo as the most relentless climate skeptic.

It really is time for those who say they accept the crisis represented by climate change to live up to their professions.

The skeptics can always retire to Glasgow. And contemplate the Scottish understanding of an enclosed space. While having, if it pleases them, a smoke.

The Stern Review on Global Warming was released this week, and once I’d had the chance to catch a few of the headlines it inspired, I thought immediately of Joey Smallwood.

Mr. Smallwood liked big numbers. Especially big numbers preceded by dollar signs. If a road somewhere on the South Coast was about to be paved, a new trades school built, or a new industrial project launched, Joey would wind himself up and find a microphone. “This new road/school/industry is going to cost NOT 10 million dollars, NOT 20 million dollars, but
FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS
!”

He could find nearly infinite rhetorical variations on a simple number (breaking it down into its constituent “hundreds of thousands”; pluralizing—50 millions of
dollars—etc., etc. and etc.). The trick was to bludgeon Newfoundlanders, not accustomed even to the sound (never mind the actual possession) of great amounts of cash, into a state of catatonic awe at the nearly inconceivable heaps of money this project or that was going to cost.

The trick grew stale. After a while, being told how many twenties were in a stack of 50 million dollars became tedious, and the long tease of “not 10, not 20, not 30 but … X millions of dollars” became a risible bore. Another failing of the technique was the fading power of the word “million.” By the end of his fractious reign, the campaign speeches rang with allusion to hitherto unapproached altitudes of “billions of dollars.”

When arithmetic is rhetoric, each new speech must have a bigger number. Let us call it Smallwood’s Law.

The Stern report on climate change illustrates Smallwood’s Law in a way that would make the old conjuror proud. It projects a cost to the world, if measures are not taken to mitigate or halt global warming, of
seven trillion dollars
. Even in these days of Enron-scale frauds and income trust cancellations, a trillion dollars is an astronomical number.
Seven
trillion summons the galaxies and all their wheeling stars.

I look at that number more as an instrument to arrest attention than as a real figure. If Sir Nicholas Stern had said nine trillion or six trillion, would he have been pounced on by accountants and academics the next day saying, “He’s up by two trillion, or down by one?” I don’t think so.

When we enter the area of projecting costs in the trillions of dollars, based on the wild variables of planetary weather patterns over the next forty-five years or so, and speculations on the industrial growth of 162 nations over the same period—a marriage, let it be noted, of two roulette tables: weather forecasting and the stock market—any claim of exactitude is at best a mirage, at worst a carny’s bark.

I know that skepticism over global warming—or, as it has been more tactically rebranded, “climate change”—is less and less a popular stance. In some quarters, it even approaches being socially unacceptable. On the not-so-far fringes of Gaia-consciousness, to mark such disapprobation, the phrase “climate change denial” is being tested out.

It is a worrisome development. The ardent advocates of climate change are more than a little imperious in their certitudes. Every counterargument or qualification to their view of things is discounted as being “paid for” by the oil industry. Or, it is labelled as being a denial of “the science.” They cast yesterday’s hurricane as “evidence” of extreme weather brought on by greenhouse gas emissions in the full knowledge that what we now call one “weather event” is, or can be, proof of nothing.

In my view, it cannot be emphasized sufficiently that the climate-change movement is at least as much a subcategory of rhetoric—the art of persuasion—as it is a branch of science. It is at least as much a partisan exercise (partisan in the sense of supporting a cause) as a harvest of neutral experiment and observation.

The science is not complete. The models are not perfect. The projections, economic or meteorological, over the next fifty to two hundred years are most unobligingly and massively complex. Prediction on this scale is necessarily wildly fallible.

Journalistic skepticism on climate change is a rare orchid indeed. Too many journalists are advocates, and that—whatever the cause—is a fatal mixing of mutually exclusive categories.

Most pernicious in this context is the attempt to declare, “The debate is over.” It isn’t over. That declaration is unsupported assertion. It is rhetoric’s oldest trick. Just as declaring the arguments of those who see things differently as being corrupted by other interests is not a counterargument but a commonplace
ad hominem
evasion.

It is in this same territory that I place the Stern review’s $7 trillion warning. It is not a number. It is just a gorgeous and late-blooming illustration of Smallwood’s Law. How Joe would have worked it—a seven and then that whole mile of zeros.

I can, alas, hear him now.

It’s not just the planet that’s warming, it’s the rhetoric on the subject of the planet’s warming.

Elizabeth May, the Green leader, in a sermon preached this past weekend in London, Ontario, invoked the words of an activist British journalist who has likened the governments of Tony Blair, George Bush and Stephen Harper and their respective responses to global warming as worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis. May cited his words, but now claims on the Green website she did not compare Nazi government and the Holocaust to any current issue.

In a purely literal sense, perhaps she did not, but if you are preaching a sermon in a church and global warming is its theme, you are not chatting loosely with friends in a coffee shop. Furthermore, invoking Chamberlain and appeasement in reference to those who do not share your views makes it fairly clear you also wish to invoke the unqualified moral authority of what followed appeasement, the Holocaust, on your side of the rhetorical ledger.

Another noted environmentalist, Prince Charles, has been standing on this same tricky ledge. The Prince has claimed that urgent action is needed on climate change and likened the struggle to do something about it to Britain’s battle against the Nazis in World War II. These are not the only occasions. The more fervent advocates of global warming are also far too fond of calling those who disagree with them “deniers,” trying to colour a policy difference with the brush of Holocaust denial.

It is a despicable tactic. There are a number of problems with injecting the Holocaust or its shadow into the current
political debate on global warming, and the separate debate on what to do about it. For the West, the Holocaust is the absolute standard of evil. It was—maybe the reminder is necessary—the deliberate, conscious torture and inhuman murder of six million people, men, women and children, by the Nazi government because those people were Jews. It is also a historical fact, something that dreadfully has really and already happened. Aside from the most pathetic anti-Semites, no one can or does dispute it.

Political policy on global warming is a choice, from a range of possibilities about what to do in the face of some very serious arguments that mankind is influencing the global climate. Advocates on either side may be claiming absolute certainty for their positions, but precisely
because
we are dealing with the future, approximated by models and estimates, neither side can possess such certainty. Invoking the Holocaust is wrong first on logical grounds. It
has
happened. We
know
it. Global warming policy is an attempt to meet a future contingency. The tactic is also wrong on a much higher level, for it is an attempt to claim, or associate with, the absolute moral authority that belongs to the Holocaust and all who were victims of its torments, and to transfer that absolute authority to the advocacy of a current and contentious issue.