The Kyoto accord and Canadian families

You may think that global warming or, better, the ratification of the Kyoto accord that our Leader, Jean Chrétien, the head of the Liberal Party of Canada, threatens to have passed by Parliament before Christmas and to ram down our throats will have little impact on you or your family. You would be seriously wrong in thinking that.
   Gwyn Morgan, president and CEO of Encana Corp., stated in a letter to Jean Chrétien that the Kyoto accord is "one of the most damaging international agreements ever signed by a Canadian Prime Minister." (Follow the link to the first of the three Globe and Mail articles identified at the end of this article.)

The damages that worry Gwyn Morgan will affect all Canadians but most of all, and most seriously, Canadian families and their already stressed and over-taxed providers.   Fortunately, what worries Gwyn Morgan and other Canadians with respect to the Kyoto accord is a problem that will affect only Canadians and is entirely made-in-Canada.   If you are not Canadian and don't pay taxes- or don't live in Canada, count your blessings.

Prof. Daniel Amneus, author of The Garbage Generation, often stated that the easiest way to destroy the institution of the family is to remove its weakest link: fathers. For more than 30 years our federal government has done more than its share to contribute to and to drive the planned destruction of our families, but the ratification of the Kyoto accord would take the cake.

Aside from destroying families by expunging fathers from their families through judicial tactics employing judge-made laws that marginalize fathers and families, there is another, far more effective way to penalize fathers and their families, and to eradicate all or as much of the incentives to have families as is humanly possible. That is to implement family-hostile, punitive taxation for income earners that support families, especially if they are old-fashioned enough to believe that the single-income-earner family is the best time-proven model for raising children. According to the Fraser Institute, the tax penalty for Canadian families whose single-income-earner brings home $50,000 per year is an extra $4,000 compared to families earning just as much but having two income earners bringing home the bacon.

Punitive taxation is only one of a variety of ways by which to destroy families through adjusting the economy so as to disadvantage family-income providers. Another is to increase their cost of living, that is, force them to spend an escalating portion of the disposable incomes required to maintain families, to house, feed and clothe them, and what else it takes to keep a family alive, healthy, happy and thriving. Another is to reduce the number of jobs available to men. That is quite simply done by putting a damper on the economy.

Men are the first hit by lay-offs. Men comprise most of the unemployed. If men are laid off, those who are family providers and especially those that are the sole providers will feel the pinch the worst, and so do their families.  Certainly, there will without a doubt be single-mother households whose members will suffer as well. All single-mother households will eventually suffer when the reality sets in that an economy in the throes of a recession in a country that is deeply in debt cannot afford to shell out much money in the form of guarantied incomes to single mothers.  Recessions cause welfare cut-backs.

That's where the Kyoto accord comes into play.  We are expected to reduce our CO₂ emissions by 20 percent.  For most of us that means that we have to cut back on our driving.  It is not very practical to cut back on heating our houses or apartments.   Even if we can put on winter clothing to keep from freezing our butts off, it is not very practical to do that with our plumbing systems, small children or the elderly.

So, to reduce the average fuel consumption by 20 percent, we may simply have to quit going to work on a regular basis and go instead only every second day.  At the very least, that's the only choice for people who can't use public transportation or for whom it will be a very long walk to go to work.

Besides, such things will not be a matter of choice for many.  They will quite simply be unable to afford the increased fuel costs, given that Canadians presently spend more than they earn and are stretched far beyond the limit already.

According to estimates based on the federal government's very own figures, the damper that the Kyoto accord will place on the Canadian economy will cause a 40 percent increase in fuel costs, a ten to fifteen percent increase in the costs of consumer goods (+GST and PST), and the loss, or lack of creation, of 450,000 jobs in Canada over the next ten years. For what?

It will be to help countries like China and Russia, who are right now installing additions to coal-fired power plants. Much of the equipment for that is being shipped to them, for example, from German coal-fired power plants that are being dismantled, ostensibly to help fight global warming. Much of that equipment has already been dismantled, crated, shipped to its destinations and been put back into operation down-wind from Western Europe.

The coal-fired power plants in the former Communist countries in Europe are producing power at a rapidly increasing rate for the environmentally-friendly Western European countries that didn't have the foresight to install sufficient alternative, cleaner power-generating sources.

A large and growing portion of Germany's electric power is being imported from the former Communist countries to whom Germany is shipping its polluting power plants that were taken off line. The equipment taken out of production in Germany is being shipped east and re-installed there because those countries can't keep up with the demand for electric power from Germany and much of Western Europe. Another large portion of electric power for Germany is being generated in France and shipped to Germany. Approximately 80 percent of France's electric power is being produced through nuclear power plants, and France produces too much electric energy to keep consuming all of what it can generate.

Much of Europe has a deregulated power market and about 780 sources of electric power to choose from, many of whom are in Eastern Europe, as far away as Romania. That is what Canada's contribution to the Kyoto accord will subsidize, at very high costs to all of our families.  Ross McKitrick, professor of economics, specializing in studying the impact of the Kyoto accord on the Canadian economy, calculated that the federal government's Kyoto agenda will add about $3,000 a year to the average Canadian family's living costs.

Those developments will place additional stress on all families and cause those already stretched to the breaking point to tear apart.  It is a false hope to expect that income derived from unemployment will provide a better life for our children.

Walter

_____________________
For additional information relating to global warming and Canada's faint or non-existent hope to do anything about it at terribly high costs to be spent on half-baked or, more correctly, non-existent plans, read the following:

Interestingly, only the first of the three articles mentions - in passing - one of the most important events in the global warming debate fueled by fanatical, professional environmental activists such as David Suzuki and other Greenies:

Tonight at the Palliser, 400 oil-patchers have paid $250 to the conservative Fraser Institute^[*] to listen to Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The book has instantly become the new anti-Kyoto Bible in Calgary. Even Mr. Lougheed's reading it, even though it's by a European.

[* The Fraser Institute may be considered to be conservative, but only relative to the goals of Liberals who wish to turn our country into a socialist regime in which all economic activity is centrally regulated and dictated - much like that which caused the collapse of the former USSR.  In contrast, the Fraser Institute considers itself to be a free-market think tank. That has little to do with conservatism and more with common sense, something the Liberal Party of Canada seems to have lost decades ago.. —WHS]

Mr. Lomborg is a contrarian: He purports to prove, via statistics, that the world is in better shape than fear-mongering environmentalists claim. "You have to be courageous to challenge the dogma of the professional environmentalist," he says, and gets a big hand.

Even more interestingly, out of tens of thousands of current news articles produced by 4000 news-sources in the World accessible through http://news.google.com/, the first of the three Globe and Mail articles identified above is the only one that mentions Bjorn Lomborg's name.
   However, searching the Internet for Bjorn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist will provide you with much information that will permit you to become more objectively informed about the Kyoto accord and other issues relating to the falsely alleged impending fatal and catastrophic degradation of the global environment.

Why is Bjorn Lomborg not mentioned in the news? The news are being censored, not merely by the publications that report them, but even by google.com.  Why else would an article published on the Net by the Report Newsmagazine or others who write about Bjorn Lomborg not show up in a search using http://news.google.com/?   Don't rely too much on the daily papers for the truth regarding global warming. Virtually all major dailies in the Western World are owned or controlled by Liberals. They promote not so much measures to control or reduce global warming (nobody really has a clue on what to do about it, practically and affordably – as long as we have no possible way to control the state of the Sun, which is what controls our climate) as they wish to install global income- and asset transfers so as to bring about global income equalization. That will be done in Canada at the expense of seriously and quite possibly even fatally affecting our economy and thereby the existence of our families.

The Scientific American raked Bjorn Lomborg over the coals, in an unwarranted vicious attack.  Bjorn Lomborg tried to respond, but the Scientific American was consideraby less than generous in permitting him to do that and gave him very little space, insufficient space, to fully explain himself. Having no other viable alternative, he put into circulation a 32-page refutation of the 11-page criticism that the Scientific American had published.  Of course, that would not have been read by as many and certainly not the same set of people who read the original criticism.

There are alternative sources of information that are more likely to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. One of those sources is the Report Newsmagazine.

The calculations done by General Circulation Models (GCMs) are the main source of the information that fuels the global warming hysteria.  Nevertheless, not one of them comes acceptably close to accurately calculating what the climate presently is at any location, let alone of the whole Earth.  Not only that, but all of the GCMs differ widely from one another as to what the climate was in the past, and as to what it is supposed to be in the future.

Therein lies the problem.  No one in his right mind will base any decisions about the future on tools that cannot determine with acceptable accuracy what the present is and the past was.

• Reality check: UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature variations since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites.

For more information relating to the state, trend and sources of global warming, refer to the Global Warming web pages of the Bruderheim Rural Electrification Association. 

If you have concerns about these and other issues related to the condition of seniors, visit, contact and perhaps even join:

SUN — Seniors United Now

The up- and coming, rapidly-growing advocacy organization for seniors (55 years and over) in Alberta

There are in the order of about half a million or more people of age 55 and over in Alberta. If all of them were to join SUN, they would become the most powerful advocacy organization in Alberta; and seniors would no longer be robbed of their comforts and otherwise ignored.
   At the price of one package of cigarettes seniors will be able to gain a voice that will be heard by a government that otherwise can and will take from seniors what they worked for all their life to enjoy in their old age.

If you are concerned about how seniors are affected by the planned, systematic destruction of our families and society, a search at google.com (for elderly OR seniors OR grandparent OR grandfather OR grandmother site:http://fathersforlife.org) will provide you with the links to about 80 web pages at Fathers for Life that will be of interest to you.

Walter H. Schneider