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The Conservatives must attack Kyoto: SALT SPRING ISLAND - My friends are obsessed with their health. Like all urbanites pitched up in the country, I guess, first they wondered what to do, now they wonder where the time goes. One place it goes is outside. Nothing gets you higher than a two-hour hike in a mountain rain forest in the dead of winter, or a four-hour ride through same. In the summer, a kayak is the drug of choice. We also love nutritional supplements. A new addition to my pod, is an American with a degree in Oriental Medicine, and we're like kids in a candy store, prying out various bits of knowledge and pawing through her (wholesale) supplements. Last week, she'd sent some artemesium to a friend of a friend who'd spent 25 winters on the beach in Kenya without a hat. Naturally he now has fourth-stage melanoma. He applied the artemesium, and after a day, chunks of tumour began to fall off his head, leaving pink skin behind. Another friend uses bee stings to hold his MS in remission. This is excellent stuff and can form the core of many conversations. Learn to avoid the medical system as much as you can now, is our philosophy, since if we really need it in a decade or two or three, it will not be there. I wish I could say we were special, but we aren't. Everyone with the time and money to do so, is bent on feeling good and strong, and nature keeps coming up with the solutions to illnesses of every kind. Increasingly respectful we are too, collectively, of the ground beneath our feet, the air and water we drink, and increasingly desirous of taking care of ourselves, and not assigning body and mind to the federal government. These days, everyone's an environmentalist. Which is why the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party never mention Kyoto. Canada has only one articulated environmental policy, and that is the policy that leads directly to a dangerous and massive uber-state. Our anti-corporate fervour, the fear of modernism, a desire to return (like the late Victorians) to the Middle Ages, to slow things down therefore live forever, play into the hands of irresponsible fame addicts like David Anderson and David Suzuki. Both travel the country ceaselessly selling shrill and preposterous tales of doom, flooding, mega- extinctions, and poisoned future generations. Both grow more crackpot and divorced from reality by the day. Neither seem to understand science. nevertheless both are supported by our government. Not only that, but they have persuaded other power figures, corporate leaders who should know better, to sing the same song. A Pentagon scenario that was meant as a war game, was reported two weeks ago by environmental groups to state inconclusively that climate change was the number one security threat to the world, even outranking global terrorism. Business is preparing for doom by charging higher premiums. Reuters reported a couple of weeks ago that "the world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making." They can just smell the money. Especially as the premiums can go up, but global warming, as increasing numbers of actual scientists will tell you is not happening. Little wonder everyone is so freaked out. Which is why we could use some clear, strong leadership from the Conservative Party of Canada on this brief. What they've thrown out so far sounds awfully weak and whooshy. Makes me think that if, by some miracle they won, they'd end up taking the advice of that corrupt and expensive bureaucracy already in place. "Oh, that's why we can't do that," I hear them saying. "Oh, OK. Well forget about it." But they can't win without showing some strength on this brief. Stephen Harper's environment policy does have meat. There are specific, useful programs outlined, and a reference to the Liberals' general inefficiency. But there is no wholesale attack on Kyoto, no serious take-down of the increasingly dubious science of Kyoto. Why is that? Is it because the forces arrayed to support and push through Kyoto are so overwhelming? Is it because anyone who challenges Kyoto is immediately branded as a right-wing extremist? I suspect so. Stephen Harper can give a speech on the science of Kyoto and trot out the hundreds of scientists from all over the world who state that Kyoto is rubbish, and it won't even make the back page. A Hollywood star can buy a hybrid car (she has no intention of replacing the Range Rover), she gets Page Three, and all her compassionate idiocy is lovingly transcribed for the ages. Yet without a strongly articulated, activist policy on the environment the Conservative party will lose. And without depending utterly on science, no environmental policy can be articulated. Therefore, any first step must be to show Kyoto to be the fiction it is. Then the gloves can come off. All over the world, for the past 30 years, countries, towns, cities and neighbourhoods have developed co- operative, low- cost, low-impact ways to save their environment, without creating massive bureaucracies. It is there that the successes are to be found, and there are many. Overfishing can be dealt with by leasing the oceans. Ocean pollution can be tracked and prosecuted. Our air is much much cleaner than it was 30 years ago. Clean water for the Third World is far more important than capping energy emissions. Canada alone could have already solved this last problem using all the money the Anderson has hitherto thrown away on Kyoto. Saving local beauty spots is a wonderful thing for a local community to work on together. Populations of birds, whales, fish and mammals come back, all the time. Actual extinctions remain low. Americans use only 6% of their land mass, we use less than 2%. There is lots of wilderness left. It's all good. Repeat after me: Kyoto is rubbish. David Anderson's policies are mad. Stephen Harper and the Conservative party must articulate a clear attack on Kyoto. Then they will win.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.