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Copenhagen blog: Signing off

Submitted by Caroline Lee

copeblogsigningoff.jpg

Saturday was the last day of the negotiations, and emotions were running high. The night before, the Canadian Youth Delegation held a wrap-up meeting, where we contemplated accomplishments, failures, and personal reflections from the past two weeks.

Members of our group, who I now consider to be like a new family to me, expressed common messages of disappointment and frustration in working within this machine of the international negotiation process, coupled with a government that continues not to represent the voice of young people.

We have been calling out loudly, and in the past few weeks, have worked ourselves to fatigue, to tears, to severe demoralization, towards the culmination of a highly unsatisfactory outcome at these negotiations.

With that, I also heard strong messages of inspiration and persistence.

So rare is it that young people with a common goal to realize change in a certain way, get the chance to deliver to decision-makers our message, with the entire world watching. So rare is it that this group can be so informed, so passionate, have such a diversified skill set, and be so effective as what I have experienced here.

These past two weeks have seen us tell the government, straight out to “represent us or go home” and to “stop tarring our image.”

We staged a sit-in within the conference, with the message that we would not leave until a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty was reached. We showed the world Canada's unacceptably obstructive conduct during these talks, as evidenced by the Colossal Fossil award yesterday. And we sent these messages back home through all kinds of media routes, to communities reaching all corners of the country.

Many tears have fallen in the past 24 hours, though only as a testament to the incredible amount of heart that has been poured into this movement by an extraordinary group of 35 young Canadians.

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Comments

Perry

London

[ "Many tears have fallen in the past 24 hours, though only as a testament to the incredible amount of heart that has been poured into this movement by an extraordinary group of 35 young Canadians." ]

Don't cry little kiddies . When you grow up , you'll will have learned that you were just a few of many who were taken in by one of the largest hoaxes in the history of the world .
Hopefully , many of your adult leftist handlers will grow up along with you .
( but don't hold you breath )


Posted December 22, 2009 07:17 PM

Todd

sask

Canada should not have went in the first place
Just a waste of time.Boys and Girls you and many others have been duped.Read the Emails if your minds can see even a sliver of light.You may direct your passion and enthusiasm to putting these crooks in jail.
Thank you.

Posted December 23, 2009 02:34 AM

James

Victoria

More deniers with education levels below grade 12. Have fun drinking, eating and shopping your way to a better future guys.

Posted December 23, 2009 04:17 PM

Alex

Toronto

Hey Todd and Perry,
good thing we don't have ideologues like you running our country. Otherwise our government wouldn't be doing anything about the very real threat of human-caused climate change that all of the academies of science in the developed world tell us is happening.

Oh, wait - we do have ideologues like you running our country at the moment. That's why nothing is getting done. Time to kick the minority Harper government to the curb along with hardcore ideologues like Todd and Perry.

Posted December 25, 2009 10:05 AM

Ted

Milbrook

" global warming "
" terrorism "
" pandemics "

What we need is global governance to protect us sheople from these nightmares .
It's very scary out there !

So what if all three are just " the end justifies the means "
It is not what is real , it is what has been placed in the minds of the people to appear to be real .

ps.
there's very little differnece between poltical parties . Even a child should have learned that .

Posted December 30, 2009 07:42 PM

Simon Leigh

Toronto

OPEN LETTER

Dear Prime Minister,

I’m a 71-year-old former Business professor with three questions and a request.

1. Would you agree that there is a conflict of ideas between the “Greens” and the business world, that may be slowing any decision on action?

The Greens keep pointing us towards scientific articles predicting a bleak, even disastrous future for Canada unless we pollute less, and cut CO2 and other emissions by curbing the steady increase in our energy use and consumption.

To save Canada’s environment, the Greens insist that the doctrine of unending growth must be stopped. All that is needed is the “political will,” that is, the courage of our government to do the right thing, ignoring what so many Canadian voters might want. Most Canadians now give the environment a rather low priority. And, given a referendum, most would likely vote for lower taxes, lower energy prices, and perhaps for the return of capital punishment. Politicians must lead, not follow.

On the other side, the business world, politicians, many Canadians, and all our political parties accept the need for continuous growth in production, consumption, energy use and population, native and immigrant, to boost “The Economy” (which always seems to need boosting), to fill the need for skilled and unskilled workers, creating more well-paid jobs to raise consumption, profits, and tax, to fund our mounting costs for health care, pensions, the armed forces and so on.

The two sides are in conflict, but they’re both being short-sighted. A moment’s thought will reveal that our rising population must prevent either Greens or the business world from reaching any of their goals.

Yet strangely there has been no public debate on business versus the birthrate. It’s as if we prefer not to think about the issues. All Canada’s parties, even the NDP and Green party favour increasing immigration.

2. Would you agree that reducing our birthrate and rate of immigration tend to be left out of discussions of the environment and of combating global warming?

Nobody proposes a Chinese-style One Child Policy (though that has actually worked ). Many Greens suggest encouraging and offering free access to non-coercive contraception (and in some cases, abortion). They point out that women who are free and educated, no matter what religion, have fewer, and happier children. Unwanted children are trouble. “Every child a loved child” would be a worthy goal.
But this is not enough. Immigration, too, must drop. According to an Angus Reid poll, 41% of Canadians feel that legal immigration is not having a positive impact on our country. In this case they are right, particularly about the impact on the environment. An immediate halt on immigration, though hugely unpopular with business, government, and potential immigrants, would immediately begin to slow the rising rate of obvious destruction of Canada’s environment: our air, water, seas and soil and probably our climate too (though scientific predictions of the future climate are, like all predictions, not exact).
At the recent Copenhagen summit, population control was not debated and barely mentioned. Money was. Some major polluters see American-style “Cap and Trade” (instead of, say, “Cap and Fine”) as a promising new business opportunity: a way to save millions by buying licenses to keep polluting, or to earn billions by selling hard-to-verify CO2 reductions at some distant location. These “growthists” and “deniers” scorn the Cassandra-like warnings of so many scientists and thinking citizens.

Still, Copenhagen’s non-result did show some awareness that cleaning up the environment will cost money—a lot of money. “Sustainable development” is wishful thinking. So is the thoughtless notion of a profitable growth boom in new “green” technologies and power sources, leading to even more production and consumption with, somehow, less total pollution.

We all love the idea of protecting the environment, preferably at no cost to ourselves. But while the Greens want less, the businessmen and developers want more: profitable new “green” technologies, new hybrids for all, more, bigger and more efficient airliners, and for Canada to be a proud leader in Kyoto too. But Lifestyle changes, even if we all agreed to make them, cannot possibly preserve our environment. We have to reduce our population. Numbers count. To think that, say, road congestion can be solved by adding more and more smaller cars is absurd.

Equally absurd is our understood policy of permanently putting the economy first, as if, say, we are promising to quit smoking as soon as our lung cancer improves. The notion that the economy, the sum total of each individual act of pollution, from lighting a cigarette to building a house, is the enemy of the environment, is too unbearable to speak.

But for many Greens and businessmen, the notion of a smaller Canada with a declining birthrate and reduced immigration feels so strange that it’s almost too painful to consider. It just feels wrong. Businessmen and politicians rationalise that reduced immigration would lower Canada’s status in the world, cut their profits and shrink the tax base—ignoring the evidence that first-generation immigrants are expensive.

3. Would you agree that endless growth in Canada’s population must end in disaster, no matter how deeply each Canadian’s environmental footprint is reduced?

My suggestion is that we move beyond what feels right and towards clearer thinking, by becoming aware that our feelings are not rational; they’re a result of evolution, of how we humans are hard-wired. Our Green side takes pleasure in the thought of lush green pastures and plenty to eat. This is why many of us feel pain at seeing our endless expansion, suburbs metastasising over good farmland, deforestation outstripping tree growth, air and water pollution from factories and vehicles, our oil sands producing more and more oil to be sold and burnt, and so on.

We hear scientists proclaiming that soon it will take three more planet Earths to feed us all. They may be wrong; it may only be two.

Non-Canadians are less worried. Half the world, it seems, wants to come and live in “undeveloped” Canada, boosting their environmental footprint and energy use to our staggeringly high levels.

Meanwhile, our Growth side takes pleasure in our rising population, endlessly expanding our “tribe” as we have evolved to do. We humans were designed to conquer the animal kingdom and fight for our territories. As Canadians, we like our own tribal values, and resist pressures –from invasion or out-population—to abandon them. This is usually labelled racism, but might equally be called patriotism.

In a word, let’s move beyond how it feels to keep doing what we are doing. What does the future hold for a Canada that is already overpopulated, in the sense that its resources are steadily failing? Not by 2050 but by next year. Naturally, most of us feel optimistic because, like all animals, we have evolved as optimists. But we also have the rational power to allow for our innate feelings, while implementing the best solutions to problems that feel so painful to face. Canada needs a hero.

4. Would you please do everything you can to have major debates on the link between population growth and climate change, with the aim of doing what needs to be done—now—for Canada to remain a pleasant place for Canadians to live?

Simon Leigh

Posted January 21, 2010 05:58 PM

Arnie M

Manitoba

The Global Warming fiasco is falling apart and bleeding all over the place. Even the UN is backpedaling furiously. NASA is coming clean about false information. The scientist who predicted the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 has admitted he lied "in order to get funding". The sceptics are being proven correct.

WHY IS NONE OF THIS BEING COVERED BY CBC ???

Is CBC being complicit in the coverup?? Start covering it or I will go to the CRTC and the CBC ombudsman.

The world has been suckered by Al Gore and the UN.

Posted January 24, 2010 03:46 PM

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