Climate Change: The Problem’s Not Ottawa
However, the bottom line for all levels of government is to deal with climate change, and the ends must justify the means in all decision-making. This includes the goals of urban intensification, building public transit systems and improving our active transportation networks. We need to recognize that encouraging vehicle traffic is contradictory to our commitments (both from the city and NCC) to reduce the effects of climate change, which is the challenge of our time.
Bay Councillor Theresa Kavanagh
We’re approaching climate change from an ideological viewpoint but not a practical one.
Ottawans are not thinking this through.
If ever there were a summer that screamed climate change, it is this year. Raging forest fires, smoke, tornadoes. The Bible’s Job would recognize the scenario. We’re burning this planet up. Welcome to Venus.
However wonderful as it might be that Ottawa could change this process, what we do here in Canada’s capital means absolutely nothing to solving climate change.
Well Lookie Here … Watson At The Courthouse
Riding your bicycle, for most, is good for your heart spiritually and physically, but it makes no difference to climate change. We could eliminate all our greenhouse gas emissions (including major emitters politicians) and we’d not even be a rounding error in the global problem. Our emissions mean nothing. Were the whole world creating as many greenhouse gases as Ottawa, there wouldn’t be a climate change problem.
Kavanaugh, and most climate activists, don’t get it. They have weaponized this issue for their own set of beliefs rather than the greater good. And they are not very good at what they do. These activists can’t build a light-rail system successfully. They purchased $1 billion of ebuses in the most anti-democratic of ways, with a badly damaged procurement (according to the auditor general) for a means that won’t work. It was stomach-turning watching councillors Jeff Leiper and Shawn Menard chortle on the sidelines watching the anti-democratic ebus purchase at committee. The lightening-speed approval and process was due to getting a huge cheap time-limited federal loan for the buses that are unlikely to work in Ottawa’s climate.
It would have been interesting to see the two politicians throw tantrums were the shoe on the other foot. Democracy when necessary but not necessarily democracy.
Rather than dealing at great cost for hard-pressed taxpayers on climate change, let’s turn our attention to the real culprits in global warming … China, India and southeast Asia. They are the furnace for climate change.
And global affairs is not a municipal responsibility. A billion dollars in the municipal sphere is hideously expensive. We all share a very thin atmosphere around this planet and the people destroying it do not live in Ottawa.
So we punish ourselves through massive tax draws in Ottawa when we are not the problem. But as long as politicians and staffers can convince us we are the problem, they profit from our ignorance.
Canada (and the western democracies) can do precious little to influence China, India and southeast Asia. And leading by example is not even noticed by those carbon factories.
We are destroying this lovely precious planet and there’s very little we can do about it.
Ottawa, The Town Caution Built: THE VOTER
When the offending countries realize that catastrophe is in the offing (if they ever do), it will be too late to solve climate change. The horses will have left the barn.
That’s the legacy we leave to future generations, what few of them there might be.
What we do in Ottawa on this file simply doesn’t matter. But it might serve the political purposes of Leiper, Menard and Kavanaugh to continue the myth of local climate efficacy … if they realize the myth at all.
Enjoy the climate while you still can.
Ken Gray
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How many freedoms have been lost, taxes raised, billions of dollars wasted and hundreds of millions of people killed over the centuries when a politician tells us that the ends justify the means particularly when they have combined it with a blind ideology. Enjoy your freedom and independence while you can.
Andrew:
It was a bad choice of words.
cheers
kgray
Andrew, my reaction to Councillor Kavanagh’s comment to the effect of the end justifies the means was similar to yours (perhaps not as over the top in the examples you cite but …). However, I do not fully endorse Ken’s thought that it was merely a bad choice of words.
The Councillor did not speak these words and thus could claim that she did not chose her words well in the heat of the moment. She wrote them. She had ample opportunity to carefully reflect on her choice of words and she chose not to edit those specific words. Is it because she doesn’t understand the philosophical question, the answer to which you gave so clearly? Or, is it because she actually believes that as long as the end is acceptable to her, the means is justifiable? My concern is that she actually believes that any collateral damage inflicted on the bystanders is acceptable (the results of the means) because her intentions (the end) are sincere.
I trust that the Editor in Chief and Grand Poobah of the Tea Committee at Bulldog World Headquarters would grant the good councillor ample space to expand on her thoughts regarding the end justifies the means. Over to you Ken, and Theresa.
Ron:
Grand Poobah … I like it.
I’m going to change my business cards.
cheers
kgray
Ron:
On further thought … Grand Poobah In Chief.
cheers
kgray
Climate change is something I began giving thought to after watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary. After watching Gore’s take on the subject I got to thinking: what would happen if the earth was to shift on its axis by, let’s say, 1/4 of a degree? Things would certainly heat up, that’s for certain. Should human beings be beating ourselves up on climate change issues? Maybe yes, maybe no. Perhaps the warming of planet earth is part of its natural evolution. I would direct all brave readers of The Bulldog to Youtube where you can watch one of the great social commentators of our the baby boomer generation, George Carlin, discuss global warming in his own inimitable fashion (there are many to choose from, pick one). Due to language issues that Tipper Gore would definitely frown upon, it is unlikely the “Carlin commentary” will ever appear as a “click me now to play” in this publication..
Sisco:
Well now, my friend, I’m proud to side with Tipper Gore in not allowing coarse language on this website.
After decades in newsrooms where a sentence can’t be said without a four-letter word (and oh god I do swear … I’m sorry), we did have strict policies on foul language being used in the paper.
Call me old-fashioned but I don’t want swearing in The Bulldog. Hopefully, it’s a family operation.
(and by the way, today it certainly my day for criticism. Even the mild mannered Ron Benn is criticizing me. Sheesh.
cheers
kgray