003 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 003

Air Date: May 3, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

(Created using AI. Errors may be present)

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Bob Metz: I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing, just right. Yeah, one first thank our operator here is Zoltan. We actually, for operating the show today, we made it to the third show of Just Right. If you want to call in today, it’s 519-661-3600 to join in our conversation.

On today’s show, we want to talk a bit about gas prices, global warming, and maybe a few inconvenient truths also about global warming that you might be hearing from the other side of the issue. Now, if you missed the orientation, of course, that is what I mean when I say I’m not right wing. Don’t worry about that. I’ll review it and remind you very explicitly and unambiguously from time to time over future shows. It does not mean conservative in the way that I look at the right, but that’s something I’ve already discussed on past shows. This show really, what I’m trying to do with it is just get into some frank talk about some of the issues of our day, expanding the base of subjects that you normally hear about on talk shows of this nature. It looks like we’ll be here every Thursday from 11 to noon, so be sure to tune in. And of course, the show is also available online at chrw.ca, I believe it is. And I just found out this morning that apparently I’m on Facebook and you can get a link to the show from there as well. I don’t know anything about Facebook or even how that works, but I’m getting introduced to these kinds of things.

I understand you just look up Robert Metz and you can find a link to the show from there as well. I’m going to get into some of these other issues. It’s been a crazy week these last two weeks, especially with the frenzy on global warming and issues of the environment.

But first, I want to talk about something completely different. Two weeks ago on this show, I did something I very rarely do and that’s make predictions. And sure enough, my prediction has already not come true. And that prediction was that this new show that would be coming out, you heard the clip at the beginning there, that was a clip with Nathan Fillion from the show Drive, which got all kinds of fanfare. It was on the front pages of TV Times, the actors in the show were featured on full page features. And if you’re looking in your TV Times this week, you’ll notice that it is still listed for tomorrow night on CKCO. Don’t bother tuning in, it will not be on.

Just as I discovered it wasn’t on last week Friday when I tuned in to watch the fourth episode, nor was it on on Monday, even though it was listed in our guides all the way through. Now, what I said a couple weeks ago about this show, I said that I kind of expected this show to be on par with Lost and Battlestar and Heroes and shows of that nature. Because I was batting pretty good averages on guessing which shows were going to be a big hit over the last few years. I pegged Lost, the first episode I saw. I remember the first episode of Battlestar Galactica I saw. I remember telling my friends, I said, hey, this show just raised the bar on science fiction.

And it’s going to be a big hit. And of course it was. And then Heroes again, another show I saw, one show of that. And I said, this one’s going to be a big one and it’s the number one. One of the number one shows. But anyways, if you were a fan of Drive, it’s already been canceled. It’s almost the curse of Nathan Fillion, who was at Star and had the same kind of experience in the show Firefly. And that was actually what I talked about a couple weeks ago.

I actually went with a warning. To me, the big surprise about Drive was at least they played the first couple episodes in order, which they did not do with some other shows that really had to struggle. And that was Firefly, of course. And if you think back to the 1960s, the original Star Trek series had the same kind of problem. And you start wondering, here’s the basic problem.

Why did Drive fail? No ratings. And I tend to look at ratings almost as television’s curse. Because many good shows, and I believe you can tell a good show independently of how many people are watching it. I think that’s pretty clear, because ratings, after all, are merely about how many exact numbers of people are watching at an exact moment in time. And if you don’t get the numbers there, even a good show, a bad show, any kind of show, could make it or break it, basing just on that. But if you want people to be watching your show, you cannot be moving the listings around. You can’t change it every other week. Quality and entertainment value are independently measurable. That’s how I look at it. And of course, ratings are really mainly important to advertisers.

But what I found here, take a look at Drive. I only caught the first episodes quite by accident on a Friday night when they were not listed. Because I had a friend call me and say, you might want to check this show out, because they knew I liked the actor, Nathan Fillion.

And so I checked it out and I said, great show. Well, sure enough, trying to find the show later on was impossible. So how can you get ratings when you make it impossible to find the darn show in the first place? And not only that, on CKCO, they put it on the Friday night slot. That’s kind of almost considered a one foot in the grave of the ratings slot when you’re put on Friday night on a TV show. That was actually the same problem the original Star Trek had as well. But then when Fox actually scheduled here, or rather Drive on the Monday night, which is when they had it on, they put it on opposite the number one show.

Heroes, a real heavy hitter program. And you’d think that you’re appealing to the same audience and they’re splitting that audience in two. Politicians always talk about splitting the vote. Well, that’s what you’re doing here. You just split the audience on this whole situation.

And then you wonder why you’re not getting good ratings. So, it’s funny because if you look at the history of some shows that we look at in retrospect, and you just can’t help think of Star Trek. I’m talking about the original Star Trek and the whole Star Trek series. I wonder, I’ve done some reading and we find that it’s still today, believe it or not, the number one basic demographic for television and males aged 18 to 55, which explains why it’s in kind of perpetual reruns, particularly on the so-called male-oriented television networks. But you got to remember, when Star Trek came out in the 60s, it was a ratings disaster from the very beginning. And every year it was being threatened with cancellations and people wrote letters to keep the show going. And eventually that was successful. The show made it to three years in running, which apparently I understand is more or less the minimum you need to get into syndication in a way that you can run enough shows and keep it running without people getting bored with the same episodes over and over again.

And you can do it nightly, which is very important. So they did break that mark. But, today the Star Trek franchise is a perpetual money machine. And it’s based solely on its capital value, since they’re not producing any more shows, of course. And so in many ways it is the ultimate capitalist dream to be constantly running these shows and talking about just pulling in the cash. I was astounded to hear some of the advertising dollars still being pulled in on a single broadcast of an episode that’s as old as Star Trek, made in the 80s, made in the 60s. They average $800,000 per broadcast up to a million if you’re talking Star Trek next generation.

According to an article I remember seeing in the National Post, this was about a year and something ago. So, the money on these shows, I can understand the importance of ratings, of the importance of getting enough people to watch your show. But if you’re going to do things like this, play shows in the wrong order, move them around on the viewers all the time, one of the reasons I think the heroes made it so big in such a hurry was that it was consistently played every week, every time on the Monday night at the same time.

They didn’t move it around, and when they stopped for about five or six weeks for a break, they told you in advance, they told you when they were coming back, I’m going, wow, this is real progress for the geniuses down there in executive land, at TV land there, actually putting a program on at the same time. It’s pretty tough enough with all the competition out there. They’re also dealing with the internet, people can download these shows at any time they want. So, surely you’ve got to make it easier if you want to keep that television market going.

Just to make it easy for us viewers and us fans, people who even want to watch the show, we can’t watch the show because we can’t find it, and then you tell us you’re not getting the ratings. Come on, give me a break. Anyways, when we come back after this set of breaks, we’re going to switch gears a bit and talk a little bit about gas prices, and I think that’s going to also segue into the whole issue of global warming. Once again, if you want to reach us here at the station, it’s 519-661-3600. We’ll see you on the other side of this.

Lots of that six-dollar-gallon and ten-dollar-gallon. You can get, if you put the price high enough, you’ll find that the supply just may increase, because somebody might produce more gas, and that’s really the secret behind gas prices. Everybody’s complaining about gas prices these days. You can’t look at a newspaper, turn on any radio station. Talk shows are just going nuts with this right now. And it happens every time gas stays up over a bit over a dollar for a while. Don’t know if you’ve visited boycottgas.ca run by organizer Wanda Hollis. And I heard this lady on some of the talk shows constantly repeating the same thing, that she’s sick and tired of seeing gas prices, quote, fluctuate every day.

Well, fluctuation is not a problem. I mean, if you want the price fixed, which is what the Competition Bureau would consider criminal, the Competition Bureau investigated the oil industry and the gas industry at least half a dozen times, never found evidence of price fixing, which is what they’re looking for. But the irony is that price fixing is what most people who are complaining about gas prices want.

And that’s really a double whammy. You’re going to reduce the supply of gas if you’re going to fix prices, because it just doesn’t work that way. Look at some of the comments that I hear. I just glanced at some of them jotted down the general comments that I would hear from people on the whole gas issue. That kind of reveals to me a tremendous lack of understanding of what’s involved in the whole process of getting gas from the ground into your car. You hear, often here, I heard a couple times, why is gas five or six cents cheaper in Sarnia, but it’s about five in London? Or as one caller I heard on one station saying, hey, it’s 33 cents a gallon in the mid-east, but look what we’re paying. Well, look, if you want to drive over to the mid-east and fill up over there and then come back and use your gas and figure out how much that’s going to cost you by the time you get back here, the dollar and something a liter for the gas you’re paying is going to seem really, really cheap.

It’s disturbing too when you see organizers of something like Boycott Gas.ca say things that they have these preconceptions of how gas prices, quote, should be, and that there is no reason for gas prices to fluctuate. Well, of course, there’s always a reason and it’s the same reason all the time, supply and demand. When the supply goes down relative to demand, the price has to go up. If the demand goes down relative to supply, the price will go down and you never hear people complaining about prices going down when they do.

If you want to see prices go down, you’ve got to produce more, but it doesn’t look like that’s the future in store from us, let’s see what some people are talking about this. Some people think it’s outright robbery. I heard that comment made many times. Some people think government and oil companies are in on a conspiracy. I heard some people even suggest, oh, they’re implementing Kyoto early.

And boy, if you don’t like what you’re paying for gas now, what are you going to feel like once Kyoto is implemented? And this is a very interesting logic I heard from one caller and I’ve heard it expressed in many ways. One fellow said, one oil company has a shortage. I think he was referring to the one that had the fire and the refineries and stuff. But you couldn’t understand why all oil companies would raise their prices.

And he sort of compared it. So, sears burns down and then Zellers jacks up its prices. Well, if there was only one sears and one Zellers, that’s exactly what Zellers would do if sears burned down. They would jack up their prices if they were selling the same thing that the other store was and the demand remained the same. It’s not like companies are not apart from each other when it comes to the marketplace. And I think perhaps that’s why so many people think there’s always collusion and that there’s something going on out there that they can’t see. But it’s right under your nose. If you’re out in the marketplace, even when you sell your house, you look around and you see what other people in your neighborhood are selling their houses for. You didn’t pay anywhere near that for your house. Any more than anybody wants to make money on something, but you’re going to have to sell it for what it gets.

And it works the other way around, too. You might lose money on your home if the neighborhood that you are in doesn’t command more than what you want for your house. I hear complaints like, oh, we’ve got to cut back on consumption. Well, that’s completely backwards. What we need to do is produce more. Populations are going to increase, and even if we do cut back on consumption, we still have to produce more. Another interesting comment I heard from someone said, hey, milk prices don’t fluctuate. Why do gas prices fluctuate? Well, just in case you haven’t heard, milk prices are regulated by a marketing board and they’re fixed. And they’re fixed at a very high level, higher than you would have to pay. If we allowed fluctuations in milk prices, the price you’re paying now would probably be at the top end, generally speaking.

And, I remember seeing all these stories in the past news stories where they’d be flushing milk down the drain because they have oversupply. Because if the price is high, you’re going to produce a little more than needed, and so it has to be regulated in secondary ways. Now, of course, the real problem in North America is that we’ve had no new refineries built for over 30 years.

It’s unbelievable. Here we are, this gas guzzling society, and we’ve got no new refineries. Plenty of oil out there, but we cannot refine it, process it fast enough. I understand one of the refineries, they’ve got a backlog of oil. It’s like a dam, and they’re just waiting for it to go through the refinery. But the demand on the other end is far greater than what they can produce.

And so we’re walking an edge right now, folks. We haven’t put any new refineries out there for quite a while. And so I think it’s about time we start thinking about that, because people always complain about pricing being free, but that’s the true democracy. When you see those prices out there, don’t believe for a minute that oil companies can control them. They can set a price. Everybody wants to fix a price for something they own. But if the market hasn’t got the money, if the ability of the marketplace to pay is not there, they cannot sell their product. And it’s foolishness to think that a company is happy by jacking its price up to price it out of the reach of consumers, which is almost the mentality you think that some people are working on. It just doesn’t make sense. If I’ve created a widget and I want to sell it to you, and I have to charge $1,000 because that’s what I need in terms of my cost, the profit I want, and you don’t have $1,000, you’re not one of my customers, but I’d like you to be.

So the only way I can get around that is make sure you make over $1,000 or have $1,000 to pay for it, or I drop my price. But, that’s the whole thing. Liberal MP Dan McTeague was doing rounds on this one talking about how these gas price increases are completely unjustified, were his words. And he cited a handful of companies in Ontario who he said, quote, do not compete.

And he particularly targeted Shell, Petro-Can, Sunoco, and Esso. But here’s an interesting thing he said. He said, we need more players. And then I thought for a second, wow, he’s getting the idea.

We need more competition out there. And then he said, but we don’t have to produce more energy. Hmm.

Now, does that make sense to you? Okay, so we’ve got this fixed amount of energy. Four players right now. If we had 10 players selling the same fixed amount of energy, do you really think the price is going to go down?

It’s going to go up. Because each of those players has their fixed costs, has their overhead, has inventories they’re going to have to keep independently. What you have to do, yeah, have more players, but also produce more. Don’t expect the players to be dividing up the same size of pie.

It’s just unbelievable that somebody would say something like that. Declining inventories in the US is basically the problem right now. And I can see it out on the road today. There’s a lot of more people out there on the road than there have been for quite a while. But really, and you hear people who are a little cynical about the whole oil situation, they say that we’re addicted to oil. It’s a little bit like saying we’re addicted to food, isn’t it?

You can’t do without it. The idea that oil is no longer a necessity in our life is we’ve passed that point a long time ago. If we suddenly cut off the oil supply tomorrow, that’d be about the same as cutting off your blood supply.

Because it’s absolutely important that oil keeps flowing. Just on the last, I want to refer to John Stossel in this regard. He wrote a brilliant piece on this in his Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, a book that was released in 2006. It’s really funny.

You ought to read this book because this book, All the Stupidities, and Insanities, you basically read about in the paper from day to day. But basically, he’s dealing with the myth that gas prices are going through the roof, and of course his contention is that quite to the contrary, gas is a bargain. And this is his argument.

This is John Stossel talking, and I will quote him here. Quote, The media are saying that gas prices are at record highs for one simple minded reason. They are economically illiterate, so they do not account for inflation. That makes the numbers look bigger than the costs actually are.

Such reporting is silly. Not adjusting for inflation would mean that the movies meet the Falkers in Rush Hour 2, Outgrossed Gone with the Wind. At the time I’m writing this, says Stossel, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. is $2.26 a gallon. A little higher than what we heard from Paul Rodriguez at the opening of the show there. Once you account for inflation, that means that gas today is 67 cents a gallon cheaper than it was in 1922, and 69 cents cheaper than in 1981. In March 1981, by the way, the price was $3.12 a gallon in the U.S. By failing to account for inflation, people get so alarmed they just don’t think about it. So Stossel went out and he would ask customers at a gas station, he says, what costs more? Gasoline or bottled water?

And of course the answer you got from almost everyone was gasoline. Quote, at that very gas station, water was for sale at $1.29 for a 24-ounce bottle. That’s $6.88 per gallon, three times what the station charged for gasoline. We should marvel how cheap gas is. What a bargain we get from oil companies.

After all, it’s easy to bottle water, but what does it take to produce and deliver gas? Oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean. To get to the oil, the drills often have to bend and dig sideways through as much as five miles of earth. What they find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or four different formulas of gas, transported into trucks that cost over $100,000 a piece, then your local gas station has to spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don’t blow yourself up. $2.26 a gallon, of which $0.46 is taxes in the US, that’s a pretty good bargain. So I guess we just have to understand that gas production and consumption is flowing like a steady river. It’s not like a low-demand static commodity sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Right now, there’s a dam up at the refineries with unprocessed oil starting to back up simply because they can’t keep up with the demand. Now, is that really so hard to understand? Bruce Cran, head of the Consumer’s Association, can’t seem to understand it. He says it doesn’t matter what the reasons are.

Well, what’s he saying? It doesn’t matter. How can it not matter what the reasons are? If you’re going to solve a problem, if you want to address it, aren’t the reasons paramount? Aren’t they absolutely important? And then you’ve got this whole Steven Harper government subsidies to purchasers of hybrid cars and somebody who calculated it out to work out to over $14 per liter in subsidies and that money comes out of all the pockets of millions of Canadians who are supposed to have all this cash to go green. If it weren’t really so sickening I think I’d be laughing about this but it’s really not that funny. Anyways, you want to join in on the conversation. It is 519-661-3600.

And we will after when we return I’ll be back with more on global warming and the whole environmental frenzy that we find ourselves in the midst of today. Of course tomorrow they’re going to be releasing the next report on the IPCC report so expect that. On the other side we’ll be talking about flicking off your lights, about light bulbs and a few other things regarding the comments of Elizabeth May.

Flickle your zillman or rather flick off which is the campaign, one of the many campaigns that have come out of this what I call environmental frenzy. 519-661-3600 if you want to join us here. Good morning, I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM.

We’ll be here with you till from now till noon. Environment, yes. Environmentalism, no.

That’s my basic stand on this whole thing. There’s more to understanding global warming than just the science of it. You’ve also got to understand the philosophy and the politics of it. I honestly believe and I just can’t help but put it any other way that we’re witnessing an indoctrination here of the way people think about, just even the way they think about issues generally. This unrelenting what I have to call irrationality of the environmental is wearing a lot of people down. I know it is and I know some of their resistance is waning.

Talking to a friend of mine the other day, he says you just can’t take it anymore. He’s listening to all the stuff he says. It’s just depressing. The stupid idea is never-ending, he says.

They’re selling solar panel farms that are producing electricity at 46 cents per kilowatt government subsidies to car buyers. He just can’t take it anymore and I’m thinking, well, that’s a bit part of the plan really. They’re going to keep wearing that. Tomorrow’s the next report that’s going to be coming out, which has all been planned years and years in advance. If you really stop to think about it, I’m almost starting to think the green movement itself has been misnamed somewhat. Because greening of the planet, they’re kind of opposed to it. That’s what CO2 does to the planet. It greens the planet. What they really want to do is cool the planet so it will have more snow and more ice packs because they seem to panic whenever they see a ice shelf fall into the sea.

In this regard, maybe the green environmentalists should actually be called the Snow Whites because they’re all flakes as far as I’m concerned and I think this whole movement is really a snow job. It’s just unbelievable. But we’ve had some very interesting developments on this whole thing in the past week or so, and not the least of which, and everybody has been talking about it, is the comments of Elizabeth May. It’s ironic this is the month of May.

Will this be her month? It’s an interesting thing. I always hear criticism about the religious right. I think what you’re seeing here is a bit of a taste of the religious left. And, the London Free Press quoted her as saying, and I quote, we’re playing with the forces that led to creation. We’re nearing the edge of the life force and we’re still playing around.

We have a moral obligation to our Lord and Father to ensure we will not destroy the creation that was given to us, she says. Well, that’s certainly not science and it’s certainly not a reason that I would be looking at to do any of the kinds of things that they’re planning to do with Kyoto and all those other things. I don’t even know what the two have to do with each other. But playing with the forces that led to creation, if you believe in creation, well, that’s fine.

I think existence has always existed. And we’re playing with and we’re not playing. We’re using nature to survive. It’s called just using nature. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, as Francis Bacon said. And so if we want to survive on this planet, and that’s what they generally don’t want to talk about, is what man’s requirements. We have to do, we have to quote, exploit the planet.

What else are we going to do? But of course, the big issue that got her into trouble was not so much those comments as her reference to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler during the last war. And of course, there’s been the response from the Jewish community outraged at her comparing global warming to the Holocaust. All very interesting, but kind of beside the point to me.

It’s really a great irony if you think about it. When you think that the Green Movement is such, and I’ve done my research on this, it’s a direct consequence and descendant of the German Volkisch movement that was advocated by Adolf himself. He was a great environmentalist and his philosophy of environmentalism was perfectly consistent with his philosophy of politics. So if we’re going to talk about appeasement, I guess in effect Chamberlain was appeasing an environmentalist if you want to look at it that way.

But consider the background of all this. What have we been calling all the people who do not share this global warming pathology? We call them deniers, don’t we? Isn’t that the word we use? Isn’t that the word we’ve been using? Isn’t the obvious association to Holocaust deniers?

Hello. The National Post even has a regular feature. They got a series featuring many qualified scientists and they run them under a column called Deniers.

They’re denying, you know? And it’s all kind of very hitlerian, isn’t it? I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth on the weekend.

If I have time to get to that, I’m going to tell you what I saw there. But, even right after talking about hurricanes and tornadoes in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he starts referring to, quote, another storm in the 1930s of a different kind and makes the same reference that Elizabeth May does. In fact, I was quite astonished when I was watching An Inconvenient Truth, how much to the script that Elizabeth May and David Suzuki and the rest of them actually follow almost verbatim what is in this movie. If you haven’t seen this movie, even if you don’t agree with it, I would almost recommend you watch it because, boy, it’ll teach you a lot about where many of these ideas are coming from. But, Gore in his movie even says after talking about the storm in the 1930s, which is completely false thinking.

You cannot compare weather storms to the kind of, quote, storm and, quote, the human beings created. They’re two totally different things. Philosopher Novelist Ayn Rand used to always call that confusing the metaphysical with the man made. That means confusing natural things with things that man does and then treating them as if the same things. But, after saying this, he goes on and just one rambling disjointed set of arguments talking about Churchill, some period of consequence.

Suddenly, Florida is too close to call. Insurance claims are up in the book of revelations all in one run on argument that I just couldn’t make sense of it. I kid you not. But let’s face it, the whole green movement has been framed in this outrageous and offensive garb. It, they want to instill a sense of fear and terror and irrationality in people, always smiling faces, of course, because there’s the idea that you cannot disagree or you’re a denier or you cannot disagree or you’re not on God’s side or the Lord, the father and all this stuff. It’s outrageous. You just can’t go around saying things like that.

Haven’t we developed beyond that by now? There’s another irony here too. Elizabeth May has accused Harper of being an appeaser.

The real irony is that she’s right. He is an appeaser. To environmentalists like her, like Suzuki and Gore. And I think it’s his appeasement to them and what they’re doing that’s responsible for his drop in his party’s poll ratings with subsidies to a select few who get these fuel efficient vehicles. He’s joined the banning the light bulb crusade. He sounds to me like one of the people in the green movement. Why would he want to associate with these ideas? So what he’s done is positioned himself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he did say in the past that he believed Kyoto and other initiatives of this nature were just these socialist plans to transfer wealth from the West to the other parts of the world.

And now he’s on board. So he’s probably upset both sides and either side believes him. The people that supported him suddenly see him betraying them, quote, going over to this whole green movement.

And the people who are environmentalists are probably looking at Harper and not really believe in him. They don’t really trust him. They say, well, look, you said this, how come you’re saying this now? And what are you going to say when you get elected next time? So you can say what you want about that, but they’re all on board. You can flick Elizabeth May off if you want.

And that whole campaign is another ridiculous thing. Switching off everything. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do if you’re looking to save power. On this flick off campaign, of course, it got all its attention because of its similarity to another F word. And it’s just hilarious watching our politicians out there arguing about this and making issues of it. Turning off everything every time you go in another room is not necessarily an energy saving thing. I learned this in electronics quite a while ago. You turn on a regular bulb for a short period of time, it takes more energy to start that bulb up in the first few seconds. And it does to keep it running for depending on the rating of the bulb, but I’ve seen up to an hour, a few minutes to an hour. So if you’re going in and out of a room every four minutes and turning the light on and off, you’ve just used about eight hours of electricity, particularly true as well of television sets and electronic equipment that really shouldn’t be turned off, on and off, on and off, on and off. They’re meant to be running quite frankly full time, but you don’t want to do that all the time. They have all kinds of energy saving devices in them. I remember going through all of my appliances and VCRs and things like that. You’d keep the manuals and you see how much power they use.

The power consumption on these things has dropped from 100 and something watts just a few years ago to DVD players almost immeasurable in those kind of terms, in terms of how much power it uses. So, I live in an apartment building too. It’s really funny and in the laundry rooms, they’ve already got these new lights in there. And when you first step in the room and you go to turn the light on, you could be standing in the dark there for about 30 seconds while it’s trying to warm up. And so when it finally warms up, it gets going, you step out and then some kind person while you’re gone has come in and turned the light off. And, I was only planning to leave the light on for an hour or so, which I think would be less power than clicking it on and off a few times and forcing it to go through that extra charge up period.

So, it’s not always as simple as it looks, even in the science of it, in the way things operate on energy. So, it’s just another one of those fads that they’re getting us into. And anyways, more to say on that after we get out or come out of this set of ads and we will continue on the other side with a little bit more of a few inconvenient truths about the environment. See you on the other side.

And I suppose that includes an inconvenient truth as well. Of course, that was Captain Dylan Hunt from the spaceship Andromeda, which is quite a philosophical show if you’ve ever listened to it, and quite a bit about how starting, trying to start a government up from scratch in a funny sort of way. But anyways, I did the dirty deed on the weekend. I sat down and I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Someone lent me a DVD of the show. I understand it won some awards. And so I sat down and took some notes.

When you have a DVD, you can actually freeze, stop it, and write down the stats that are passing by you very quickly that you might not be able to do otherwise in the theater. By the way, if you want to join us, we’re at 519-661-3600. I’m Bob Metz, and you’re listening to Just Right here on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you just for a few more moments, till the top of the hour. So basically, I’ve got about three or four pages of notes here. I’m not going to get to them all, not a chance of comments and observations that I made about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. This is truly, whatever you may think about it, it’s a truly influential piece of our time because so many people are being influenced by it. Governments are being completely taken over by the ideas in it, not necessarily Al Gore himself.

But some very interesting comments and observations that I made. But basically, if I was going to zero in on what was the basic point that Al Gore is trying to get at, besides to me, of course, I regard the whole thing really as propaganda in so many ways, because really what he’s after is a form of government control over the marketplace, over science, over technology, over industry. That is really what the whole movement is about. And it’s interesting because here’s how Gore positions the whole situation.

I’m quoting him here. We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the earth. Now, that sentence alone bothers me. A collision between civilization and earth.

I’ve got to give up being civilized or have the earth. What kind of equation is that? That just doesn’t make sense. But anyways, he says there’s three factors causing this collision. And basically, their population, science and technology, and thinking.

Now, what do those three things all have in common? Well, they’re people, aren’t they? People are the population he’s talking about.

He’s not talking about polar bears or animals. Science and technology, that’s a product of the human mind. And thinking itself is a process of the human mind. So basically, he’s saying that we’re the problem because we basically exist. And in order to even survive, we have to do things to the earth to, quote, disturb nature as though we were something unnatural on this planet. And he points out about how the population’s increasing exponentially, he says, quote, so if it takes 10,000 generations to reach 2 billion, and then in one human lifetime hours, it goes from 2 billion to 9 billion, something profoundly different is going on right now.

Well, I don’t know that it is. Seems like simple math to me. If you start with one, and then you double it, and you get two, and you double it, and you get four, and you double it, and you get eight, and you double it, and get 16, and so on.

Eventually, when you got 2 billion, if each of them have three kids, you’re going to get to 9 billion pretty fast. That’s not kind of hard to figure out. Is it? But of course, that’s not, that’s just the math of it. That’s, you might want to ask, well, why didn’t we get up to these numbers in years past? Why didn’t we hit the 2 billion or 10 billion mark a thousand years ago, or at the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago? Because there is something different that has occurred in the last century or two, and that is the socioeconomic system known as capitalism, and that’s what gave people the wealth, the knowledge, the experience, the power to resist nature, which was killing them at a rate that was unbelievable.

If you look at life expectancies in the past and life expectancies today, you can see what science, technologies, and thinking has done in order to improve mankind’s life. But, Gore looks at our existence as quote, putting pressure on the earth, putting pressure on the earth, which just basically means nothing, really, because of course we’re going to put pressure on the earth. We eat what this, we breathe the air, we exhale into the air. We’re part of this planet.

We’re not something different from it. But it’s interesting when I looked at his statistics. Now, talking about strictly CO2 now, okay, he points out who are the biggest culprits in the CO2 thing, and here’s how he has broken them down. We’re doing pretty good up here in Canada. We only account for 2.3%, even according to Gore, in terms of CO2 production and things of that nature. But USA 30%, Europe 27%, South America 3%, Africa 2%, Mideast 2.6%, Soviet Union only 13%. China and India 12%, Japan 3.7%, Australia 1.1%.

Definitely the two biggies on this list are USA at 30.3%, Europe at 27.7%. Well, that’s very interesting because in another section of the show, he points out that, and I quote, almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the atmosphere comes from forest burning, and then he shows us these maps. And guess where all the forest burning is? 75% of it’s in Africa, 25% in South America. And yet, if you go to the other chart, Africa only accounts for 2.5%, and South America 3.8%. Yet, these forest burning also count for 30%. If you actually add up all the percentages, they do go over 100 by quite some considerable amount if you take it through everything he says in this movie.

So there are so many contradictions, even on that level that make you scratch your head. There’s also the gas burning in Siberia, which we’re showing in yellow areas on the map that he was talking about. And that was huge, but he didn’t say what percentage of CO2 was coming from that.

Apparently, still the Soviet Union is down at 13.7% or something like this. So, the contradictions were amazing. Other issues I saw again too that, one of the biggest things, of course, everyone wants to know the answer to this, he refers to these as misconceptions, and he says, of course, isn’t there any disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? And he goes, no, not really. We checked out 928 articles, and out of those articles, you know how many of them actually denied or doubted the cause of global warming, he says? Zero, he says.

Zero out of 928. And then I’m wondering to myself, well, has he ever heard of the Oregon Petition against Kyoto signed by over 17,000 plus scientists? And, this speaks to an issue of consensus in politics as well. I know when Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, he was not in the popular consensus of the scientific community, and he was actually, through some kind of formal hearing, this was brought up to him once. They said, Mr. Einstein, do you not realize that 90% of the scientific community does not agree with your theory of relativity? And he just replied, he says, but Mr. Speaker, he says, it only takes one person to prove me wrong. Anyways, that’s sort of the situation with the whole global warming thing.

Just touched on the tip of it. This issue will not go away. We’ll be talking about it again, obviously, a lot more in the future.

You’re going to be hearing more in the papers about it tomorrow as well, and then surely over the weekend with the release of the final IPCC report. But in any case, I’m Bob Metz. This is just right. We’re going to be back here this time next week. If you want to join in the conversation again at that time, or even bring up things I brought up this week, please feel free to do so. And until next week, remember, stay right.