By Kevin Potvin

Al Gore might have said, in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that “It takes time for people to connect the dots and get it,” but holy smokes, he didn’t mean time on the geological scale, did he? Dave Park, Chief Economist at the Vancouver Board of Trade, recently reared up like some bellowing Jurassic monster out of a Japanese horror flick with a letter to the editor of The Vancouver Sun. He was writing to respond to an earlier editorial regarding provincial government plans known as Gateway. “A detailed technical study of vehicle emissions,” the fossil-fuel fan sagely advised, “concludes that the entire Gateway Project [twinning Port Mann Bridge, doubling Highway One, building South and North Fraser Perimeter highways] would increase emissions by 0.3 percent compared with the case if the project does not proceed.”

Happy to add 0.3% to global warming

He wouldn’t use the term “greenhouse gas emissions,” being no doubt a “skeptic” of the science (the science in which there is no one with any credentials who is in any doubt that those human-made gases cause global warming), nor does his letter, as published, specify whether it’s Greater Vancouver’s levels of emissions that would be increased a third of one percent (not insignificant in any event), or Canada’s, or the world’s, which would make Gateway terrifying, even by Vancouver Board of Trade admission.

Nor does he or his colleagues at his trippy anti-reality institution consider the opportunity costs of diverting $3 billion away from sensible transportation projects and into more pavement and cement for more cars. What would be the effect on Greater Vancouver’s emissions of greenhouse gasses if the funding for Gateway were spent instead on electric buses? It wouldn’t increase by 0.3% our contribution to global warming, but it would likely reduce it by an impressive margin. And the neat thing about public transit is, it doesn’t prove useless at reducing congestion a few years later, like every new and expanded highway ever has, because you can simply keep adding to it incrementally when necessary.

But imagine that: the Vancouver Board of Trade’s chief economist coming out to lobby the three levels of government to install a much expanded transportation infrastructure system using buses. As impossible as that is to imagine, it provides the measure of how much respect Dave Park and the rest of the dirty men who populate that filthy soot-coated den deserve from us. Alas, they are not on our side, for they have only their exclusive self-interest in mind, as usual.

Still, how does Dave Park or anyone at the Vancouver Board of Trade sleep at night after they make these mind-blowing remarks, like this one, in the same letter, saying that “There are no substitutes for the Gateway Project and the contribution it will make to the more efficient movement of cargo and travelers.” No substitute? How about a cap-and-trade emissions limit imposed on an industry-by-industry basis that would quickly make electric trains and public buses more economically attractive than diesel trucks and gasoline cars? Doesn’t anyone at Vancouver Board of Trade read? Even Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail has seen the light, and has written of the inescapable future of cap-and-trade greenhouse gas restriction systems for every industry in his column of January 9.

CO2 ‘good’ says National Post

But perhaps the Vancouver Board of Trade knuckle-draggers don’t look past the National Post for their information, where they would have read, on the same day, the unbelievable Peter Foster editorial in the Financial Post section that was that day celebrating its 100th anniversary: “Remember the good old days when using more energy, importing oil and gas, and emitting more CO2 were all synonymous with economic growth and increasing wealth?” You won’t believe what comes next: “Well those days are still with us,” Peter Foster actually managed to scrape on the wall of his cave with a rock. The EU president, Jose Manuel Barrosos, had recently spoken about the need for Europe to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, preferably with Europe-wide cap-and-trade systems. This incensed the oxygen-starved brain of National Post columnist Peter Foster: “Mr Barroso thus demonized rational self-interest as something pathological. But then this is a very necessary step,” Foster wrote, “to justifying the true pathology that climate change injects into policy-making.”

The true pathology of climate change policy? After so many years of so many studies published by so many scientists, and we still have to see the reality of greenhouse gas-induced climate change portrayed as a pathological belief in a national newspaper in an educated democratic country like Canada? Al Gore gives Foster and the rest of these fossil-fuel Neanderthals too much credit. They’re so far from connecting the dots, they don’t even see the dots.

Environmental terrorists

There isn’t the time to wait for laggards to come along and see the light. If anyone or any institution in a position of authority, like Dave Park, the Vancouver Board of Trade, Peter Foster, the National Post, or the Vancouver Sun, don’t get it yet, they will never get it. All these people and institutions are everything they say the Islamist terrorists are: these are the real threats to our lives and our planet, these are the real terrorists. We should be asking every member of the Vancouver Board of Trade, and every editorial board of every media outlet in the country, the same question they asked the world when they realized a serious threat appeared on the horizon: “Are you with us or are you against us?” The same consequences should obtain for the wrong answer.

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