YNoKyoto

Saskatchewan – where every hour is Human Achievement Hour!

The David Suzuki Foundation has placed Saskatchewan and Alberta as the highest greenhouse gas emitters in the country.
In its 2012 ‘All Over the Map’ report, the organization indicates that Saskatchewan tops the list at 71 tonnes per capita with Alberta following at just over 63 tonnes per capita.
“The leadership of the Saskatchewan government has really lagged behind other provinces in the country when it comes to addressing climate change,” said Ian Bruce, climate change specialist at the David Suzuki foundation.
While most of the other provinces showed fluctuations over the years, Saskatchewan has had little change since the same study was conducted four years ago.

SDA gets results!

Alberta’s Tories Are as Red as the Grits

Alison Redford has been very open with promising billions of Alberta taxpayer dollars in order to buy the upcoming election. What Premier Mom hasn’t been very upfront about is where her true political stripes lie. Lorrie Goldstein’s new column casts a much needed spotlight on Redford’s facade:

It’s time for Progressive Conservatives across Canada to admit what they really are. Which is Liberals. The problem with Progressive Conservatives is they aren’t really Conservatives. In fact, they secretly (and often not so secretly) yearn for the approval of Liberals.
The problem with seeking the approval of Liberals, as conservative blogger Kate McMillan notes at the top of her popular blog, smalldeadanimals.com, is that “pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends.”
All it does is tell people that if you’re prepared to stand for everything, you’ll fall for anything.

h/t Syncrodox

Is Inequality Really a Top of Mind Issue for Most Canadians?

Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent thinks so. But SDA regular ‘nv53’ has a very different take:

“The gap between the rich and the rest of us has reached 1920 levels.”
“We asked Canadians for their views on whether the growing gap between the rich and everyone else is a problem and the response is conclusive.”
Note the irresponsible juxtaposition of “the rich” and “the rest of us” or “everyone else”, as if there is a 1% class earning millions and a 99% class earning slave wages. This is an appeal to envy, to the thoughtless desire for the unearned by some of the lower specimens of humanity, and nothing more.
Incomes fall on a smooth curve with one peak in what we call the “middle income” range – not two. There is no “gap”. That is, there is no income level that no one earns but that a few above and many below do.
Income inequality is not a problem per se. Every individual is different – How’s that for “diversity”? They differ in their intelligence, their skills, their ambitions, their choices, and their luck, and undoubtedly many other characteristics.
In a free market capitalist economy, there should be a fairly standard distribution of incomes. Government intervention in the economy can make it difficult for businesses to operate and create jobs properly. Most social policy, including the “social programs” that Broadbent calls for more of, has this unfortunate result. In many cases, that’s the goal – to make things more difficult for business. Many of the phony “human rights” cases at the kangaroo courts fall into this category. Persons at the upper income level often have extra ways to look after themselves, and may well have “connections”. The vast majority do not, and they take the brunt of the assault on business that derives from irresponsible government spending and regulation, among other policies. The anti-capitalists will generally favour the policies that fill up the rosters for social programs, rather than allow job creation.
The nations that are much closer to having a 1% class and a 99% class are those that have adopted the vicious, immoral socialist ideology of Ed Broadbent: North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and the former Soviet Union. In those nations, a small parasitical elite that takes power, seized and maintained by violence, has a high standard of living while the average person suffers through being exploited. How often do Ed Broadbent and his ilk speak out against injustices like these?
As for his poll, I’d like to see the actual questions it asked. I’ve answered phone polls over the years and a lot depends on the wording of a question. Often, I can barely begin to explain my stance on an issue given the multiple choice options. It’s easy to ask questions that appeal to the envy of thoughtless people. I suspect there’s a 95% probability that’s what Broadbent’s poll has done.

Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Greenland Ice Sheet

If 1 Gt of ice has a volume of 1 km^3 and the current volume of the Greenland ice sheet is ~5 million km^3 and Greenland continues to melt at a rate of 230 km^3/yr over the next 90 years… The Greenland ice sheet will lose a bit more than 0.4% of its ice volume.~230 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year equates to about 0.005% of ice mass loss per year. At the current rate, it would take 1,000 years for the Greenland Ice Sheet to lose 5% of its volume.

Wildrose Country

Naomi Lakritz, a columnist for the Calgary Herald, epitomizes the totalitarian “progressive” group-think of your intellectual & moral betters (self-declared) amongst the Far-Left in Canada. Case in point is her latest screed vilifying Conscience Rights. Here’s a snippet:

For how can it be anything but wrong to discriminate against other people, to treat them as though they were much less than equal to others, and claim that your conscience somehow declares it right?
It can’t — and yet, the phrase “conscience rights” is being used to describe, for example, the refusal of a marriage commissioner to treat gays and lesbians the same as anyone else, and marry same-sex couples. It is also being applied to the case of a pharmacist who may not want to dispense the morning-after pill.

Lakritz would be a good apparatchik in the Obama regime, who recently declared there to be no problem forcing Catholic churches to betray their own core tenets regarding birth control.
For Lakritz and her ilk, there appears to be no limit to the amount of control the state can impose upon a religion or religious person. Such was the case in the Soviet Union and still is the case in Communist China.
A most interesting question to be posed of both Lakritz and Alison Redford would be this: “Do you support the Wildrose’s contention that Conscience Rights be paramount in Alberta or would you, for example, use the power of the state to force the Muslim owner of a private hall to hold a lesbian couple’s wedding reception, even though he initially refused their business? As another example, suppose that owner was Jewish. Would you force her to rent the hall out to a Neo-Nazi Party convention?”

The Sound Of Settled Science

Uh oh…

49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.

“The government you elect is government you deserve”

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Cecil Roberts, president of United Mine Workers of America “This rule is an all-out, in my opinion, decision by the EPA that we’re never going to have another coal-fired facility in the United States that’s constructed…”
Cecil Roberts, president of United Mine Workers of America … the United Mine Workers of America likely won’t actively oppose President Obama’s reelection bid.

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