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Conservatives will save the environment: SALTSPRING ISLAND - Is everybody bonkers or is it just me? The long-awaited B.C. election is upon us, and we have been subject over the last month to the blatant collusion of the provincial NDP and the federal Liberals, trying like the very dickens to claw back just a couple inner-city seats filled with trendoids, for our thoroughly discredited socialist government. The form these bribes take is coloured green. And expensive. And while one applauds the saving of the long fought for Great Bear Rainforest, and the habitat of the spirit or kermode bear, not to mention the saving of Saltspring lands, and the long- awaited creation of the Pacific Marine Heritage, one has to laugh. This is the way the left saves the environment: too late, with money that should be going to desperately needed medical system revisions and with complete and thoroughly disgusting cynicism. And a great deal of breast-beating and posturing about how spiritual and good they really truly are. Health, education and the environment will be our priorities, intoned the sanctimonious Ujjal Dosanjh Wednesday, when he announced. Another 10 years of the NDP and we will be breathing dirt. Disgust may be too weak a word, but it will certainly do. My mailbox, when I returned home from a three-week trip, was jammed with magazines the contents of which were filled with barely suppressed hysteria about global warming. Now the science is somewhat more certain than it was 10 years ago, and George W. Bush has correctly reversed his opinion on arsenic in the water, but there is one way the environment will be saved and it can be described in one word: business. People are green when they are rich and can pay for clean water, clean air and organic food. And when they do that, producers and suppliers will follow. Furthermore, people are green when they have no choice. When gas prices reach $3 a gallon in the States this summer, fuel cell technology will seem a lot more viable and desirable. Assuming a certain level of prosperity. But before that level of prosperity, people just want to eat, educate their children and pay for a roof over their heads. That is a real world priority and no amount of protesting in front of democratically elected leaders in Quebec City will change it. In fact, too furious and effective protesting will actually delay the necessary changes to make the world less toxic. If we give the protests too much weight, we will collectively decide that we do not have the will to reduce trade restrictions. Then we really will be breathing dirt. Very few of my green acquaintances walk the talk. No one I know, with one exception, bikes to work, no one has solar panels on his roof, recycling is just a gesture, no one uses their grey water to water a garden, no one has an efficient septic system to recycle waste, and consumerism is rampant. No green I know of, with the exception of David Suzuki, drives the Honda Insight, the gas- electric hybrid car that Honda is selling at a loss of $10,000. Conservatives out-buy the Insight by a factor of two to one, for one reason. They like the technology because it saves them money. Conservatives are sensible, rational creatures, who do not mistake emotion for action. When there is a problem, they solve it. Let me clarify: Until there is a direct financial incentive for people to change their behaviour, no amount of emotional breast- beating, threatening, and whining and doomsaying will work. Which is why conservatives will save the environment. Salted all through industry and the multinationals are individuals, with real power, who are just waiting for the right conditions to launch their technologies. Bill Ford, 43, the new chairman of Ford, and great- grandson of the company's founder, says that "Our goal has to be nothing less than an emission-free vehicle that is built in clean plants, which actively contribute to the environment. It can happen in my lifetime." Some are not waiting. British Petroleum chief Sir John Browne set his company's goal of cutting CO2 output 10% below his 1990 levels. He is halfway there. Bear with me, I know this is boring, but try; it's only one paragraph: Increasingly efficient recycling technologies save money. And new efficient technologies can be sparked by government. Take one packaging company, Green Bay Packaging in Wisconsin. Responding to a ban on all paper in landfills, the company improved its manufacturing processes enough by 1992 to be able to eliminate all the effluent discharge that had been a waste product from making all- recycled containerboard. This reduced the cost of fibre, water, solid- waste disposal, energy, labour, investment and transportation. The company began exploring a nationwide network of similar, regional mini-mills and in its first year, while recycling 200,000 tons of waste paper, the first zero- discharge mill raised the normal- best-practice fibre recovery rather to 98% - - equivalent to saving another 20,000 tons of wastepaper from going to landfill annually, thus becoming the industry's low-cost producer. This is how industry and business are efficient. Contrast this with the gross mismanagement of public money inflicted on the body politic by the NDP government for the past 10 years in B.C. There is no greater record of shame and waste of people's lives than theirs, unless you revisit communism in Eastern Europe. And no holier than thou posturing about the environment will convince me or any other rational creature otherwise.

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