I posted last week about the Rubber Duck awards for achievements in Junk Science, I thought I'd follow up that post with the recipients.
Lifetime Acheivement - Paul Ehrlich
Other Awardees:
Rick Smith and Bruce Laurie - Slow Death by Rubber Duck
John Baird, Tony Clement, Jim Prentice - Government Complicity in Chemophobia
Dalton McGuinty - Nanny Province
Deutsche Bank - Corporate Carbon Raiders
Also deserving of honourable mention are Al Gore and David Suzuki.
Well, Suzuki and Gore are problematic. And Ehrlich's approach to ZPG is unpalatable.
ReplyDeleteStill, in the long run I see gross population numbers as our problem. We may be bigger and more advanced than the people of Rapa Nui, but even we have a finite boundary somewhere and if population grows beyond that point, unpleasant results will ensue.
Baird is my MP, but every time I see him open his mouth, idiotic statements escape. The Harper gov't has an environmental policy which could best be summed up as 'do things that we can use for PR but have no real impact'. I'm not sure whether to applaud this strategy as a way of not implementing massively stupid environmental regulations while still getting some political ammunition or lament it as yet another attempt by government to take the easy and stupid road rather than actually using real science of worth to defend principled political decisions.
On re-reading that last sentence, I laugh. Clearly real science and principles have no place in the political arena.
And I saw a book about Alberta and the Tar Sands whose title involved 'bringing enrivonmental apocalypse to Canada'... and wondered how, even if the tar sands were a mess, this constituted an apocalyptic event for anywhere else in Canada... methinks the author needs to revisit the dictionary or else take some anti-hyperbole pills.
The book:
ReplyDeleteStupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)