PRIZE FOR IDIOT COMMENT OF THE WEEK:

PRIZE FOR IDIOT COMMENT OF THE WEEK:


Goes to senior environment minister to George Bush, James Connaughton, who stated on Tuesday, August 14, 2007:



“The emerging consensus is that the solution to climate change is the advancement of technology. And there is also consensus that you need growing economies to pay for that technology. These are not a trade-off: if you don’t have a growing economy, you don’t have resources to pay for the new technologies.”



In other words, we need to build a new expanded medical facility to treat all of these increasing numbers of lung cancer patients. To do that we must rely on the tax revenue from a healthy growing tobacco industry. There is no trade-off here.



In fact, pushing Connaughton’s logic further, shouldn’t World War 11 have been prolonged to protect jobs in the munitions factories? Shouldn’t drinking and driving be encouraged to protect jobs in pubs? The notion that the “environment” is something external to us that we can only “afford” after we achieve a certain level material prosperity is a concept straight out of time capsule from the 1960s. Yet it is still the apparent guiding force of government policy.



Should governments continue to promote economic growth, which is a function of population and consumption growth, just to “clean up” the environment while it is destroying the environment in the process?



This latest White House exercise in double-think recalls General Westmoreland’s strategy of saving Vietnam by destroying it. Save the environment by destroying it with growth. It is beyond my comprehension that more than four decades later, these cowboys are still running the world.





Tim Murray

Quadra Island, BC

Canada