005 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 005

Air Date: May 17, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

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

Bob Metz:
Good morning, London. It’s Thursday, May 17th. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. I want to make sure you’re making it clear it’s not right wing, it is just right. First of all, I’d like to thank Peter and Ira for kindly operating the show today. And write this number down, 519-661-3600 if you want to tune in and call into the show. You might want to wait till about the quarter hour because we have a guest today. Our guest is, I guess what you could call a blasphemer, a denier on global warming.

Who will be joining us live from Ottawa? And just as almost a follow-up to the whole global warming issue that we dealt with last week. Last week also, I just want to do a follow-up as well. I did a primer on the whole left-right situation, what I consider left wing, what I consider right wing. And one thing I forgot to say is that I expect you guys to hold me to it. If you think that I’m doing something that is inconsistent with the principles that I have laid out for you, I certainly expect you to challenge me and maybe you never know. I’ve had people challenge me and I’ve gone right along with them and said, hey, no, you’re absolutely right, I was wrong on that issue and I interpreted incorrectly even by my own principles.

But nevertheless, that’s just something to keep in mind over the whole concept of the show. It seems to me that just last week we were lucky we missed apparently a London Free Press strike by the editorial staff. I was going to mention this last week we didn’t get time because of the callers. Of course, one of the issues, we don’t hear much about this because it’s the Free Press reporting on themselves. But again, when I heard about this the first time, I was going to say they’d be out of their minds if they went on strike because with the competition that’s out there, the way the markets are today, and the idea of job security in an industry like that is kind of almost a funny thing really because they admit the paper has a declining circulation and as do many papers and one wonders if the circulation dropped to zero. Should they all still have their jobs? No? At what level of circulation do you lay off people?

Who decides and how? Anyways, the strike was avoided and we have, you can still get your TV times. I don’t think that would have been an issue in any case because I think the paper would still have been produced. Certainly the London Free Press of today is not like the London Free Press was of many years ago. It’s almost not a London paper anymore. Just as much of our media is. Channel 10 is basically not the original kind of station independent that it was way back when. But nevertheless, we have avoided this strike and the paper continues to come and you can get your TV times.

A couple weeks ago as well on the show here. Actually, I’m going to get to that a little bit later. First I want to deal with something else that came up this week. I want to really tip my hat to city councilor Paul Van Meerbergen for this silly racist policy thing that’s going on at City Hall again. He seems to be the only one on council who has correctly observed that the city’s extra effort to attract job applicants on the basis of skin color of all things.

Is an affront to visible minorities. I have to ask myself is that something they already ask on the job resume? Do they ask you your race?

Do they ask you what the color of your skin is when you apply? Because it certainly seems to be implied by the whole debate here. I mean, citing that there’s no evidence or discrimination in practice. And that’s what I believe to be the case.

I haven’t heard any and I haven’t heard any evidence being provided by the people promoting this. Van Meerbergen knows that we already have an open and diverse society. It’s founded on merit, talent and qualifications. And I’m a little disappointed on the other hand, you know, by Harold Usher and even all the other councilors who went along with this and pleading ignorance to any of the issues raised by Van Meerbergen. And even on the very heart of the issue itself. On another radio interview I heard Usher say that he wasn’t sure what Van Meerbergen meant by that statement that it wasn’t affront to minorities. And he said it was too low to reply to, not worth responding to. Well, I think it is worth responding to.

I think it sends a message that, you know, that first they’re not being treated equally if that’s true. It should be proven and if that’s a case, then you do have a case, but that’s not the case being made. The case being made is one based on statistics, arguing on one hand that the city has an 11% visible minority population, whereas only 8% of municipal employees are visible minorities. And I don’t see that as a big discrepancy, but of course Usher argues that that figure is skewed by including the Dearness Home workers. And although we don’t know what the ratio is there, he doesn’t tell us, does that mean that there are 100% minority groups and therefore they skew the whole issue.

I know workers at the Dearness Home who aren’t minorities, so I don’t know what the percentage is there. But the big issue that everyone seems to be avoiding and avoiding with a great passion is that, you know, they all say, we’re in favor of equal opportunities. And, you know, that may be the case. Maybe that’s what’s motivating them. I’d like to believe that is what is motivating them. However, the fact is that when you get the law involved on deciding and trying to, you know, funnel a certain group of people into certain areas, there is no other way but by some form of quota that has to be used.

I mean, can you think of one? I heard, here he is, he’s an equal opportunities advocate and he’s talking about screening resumes, you know, on the basis of getting people in on skin color. Now that to me means we have to start collecting that information just like the census does. And if once you start collecting that information, hey, that’s, is that just not another, you know, another word for racism? So anyways, a tip of the hat to city councilor Paul Van Meerbergen and shame on the rest of you because you may be against racism, but this is how it manifests itself, you know, you go to some of the countries that are, you know, like Pakistan and some of the Middle East countries, they’re all just mired in this racism and religion and favoritism and government and putting, you know, it’s all about money and jobs and property and land and that’s what it all boils down to. And so anyways, it’s a tremendous step backwards, I think, when we’re starting to think like this again.

I don’t really think it’s the proper way to go. Now one last thing before we go to the break and bring our guests on afterwards, I just want to do a follow up on last week’s show. We had a caller Marcel and most of our show today is going to be on the theme of global warming because I think it’s a big issue, global warming, and that it is the issue of our time. So, and also the issue about global warming is that I don’t really think it’s about the environment and global warming per se.

I think a lot of that is just a deflection from the real issue. But nevertheless, I think I owe Marcel from last week, I owe him two responses, I think. He’s a little too impatient to hear what I had to actually say to answer his questions because he was very concerned about a number of things. But basically, I really think that maybe some of the rest of you are wondering what my position is on pollution and the environment. And secondly, why you don’t hear me harping about them as an issue per se? And the reason is because, you know, even as I mentioned last week, I really haven’t seen a political party or anybody in any office that is in favor of pollution.

That’s an absurdity. You know, whether you’re talking NDP, Liberal Conservative Freedom Party, you name them, the Green Party, of course. I don’t think you’re going to really find them, anybody opposed to the environment.

The issue is that I think the only solution to environmental issues and to mankind living coexisting with the environment is technology and a healthy economy. That’s where it starts and that’s where it ends and that’s where we have to go. And what is there to harp about? You see, what could I campaign about on that?

I don’t have an ism that I would attach to that particular rational belief that technology will take care of things. So, in any case, you know, the most interesting point, though, raised by Marcel last week was not so much his concern with the environment and all the questions he asked, but of course his concerns with industry technology and a host of other non-environmental issues, at least what I would consider environmental, ranging from Chernobyl to Three Mile Island to China’s industrialization, which is by the way now feeding the millions who were formerly went hungry. But, you know, every time I would answer one of his questions with a single sentence, he would move to another subject, all with the objective of trying to impress upon me just how serious and urgent he regarded the issue of the environment. So, anyways, I regard that issue seriously as well. And when we return after these breaks, we hope we’ll be in touch with Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project in Ottawa, Tom Harris. See you in a moment.

Audio Clip (from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, featuring Don Adams):
And that man over there is obviously a bigot, a racist, and a hate-monger. How can you tell? Well, look at that sign he’s carrying. It says, I’m a bigot, a racist, and a hate-monger.

Audio Clip (from John Stossel report on global warming):
Send as generous a gift as you can afford. This has become a huge industry, and its biggest scare now is global warming. The claim that man with all this cars and factories will overheat the earth.

This is Armageddon. This is the final battle. We all know that global warming is happening. All the mainstream scientists in the world know that global warming is happening.

We all know it because we read it everywhere. Scary weather, meltdown in the Antarctic. It’s going to fry the earth. And the media imply that almost all scientists agree that terrible things are happening. But do they agree?

Time magazine says it’s a greater threat than anything, but nuclear holocaust are getting hit by an asteroid. You’re laughing. Pulp fiction.

Bad pulp fiction. I think that’s absurd. Sally Baliunas is a Harvard astrophysicist. Richard Lindzen of MIT, Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, and John Christy, who measures the earth’s temperature for NASA, are members of the IPCC too. They say there’s no consensus that warming will be harmful. You may have heard that 1600 scientists signed a letter warning of devastating consequences. But I bet you hadn’t heard that 17,000 scientists signed a petition saying there’s no convincing evidence that greenhouse gases will disrupt the earth’s climate.

Bob Metz:
Well, you would have heard that if you’d been listening to this show in the past, because it’s a statistic I’ve referred to a few times, but everyone else seems to want to ignore that statistic. Welcome back to the show. It’s Just Right. I’m Bob Metz, and you’re listening to CHRW Radio 94.9 FM here in London. You can call to join the conversation if you’d like. The number is 519-661-3600. I am joined now, live from Ottawa.

Hopefully all the lines are connected and everything’s working well. By executive director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which you can reach online at www.nrsp.com to find out what they’re all about. And the executive director is Tom Harris. Tom, are you with us there? How are you this morning? Well, welcome to London. Well, listen, I got to be honest with you.

I never even heard of your group until just a week or two ago, and I thought I was pretty up to date on everything going on in the club in this whole debate. So it’s implied by what you’re saying that the science we’re hearing now is fake. Is there such a thing as fake science, or what are you implying? That’s interesting that you call it one of the most complex sciences. I think that’s almost something that seems to make it attractive to politicians, isn’t it? It’s interesting. Now, these extremists to which you refer, I suppose they might describe themselves as groups that want to force government to deal with climate change, and yet that same phrase is on your own website.

But obviously the two of you must mean something very different by it. Now that, of course, assumes a continuance of global warming, so to speak. Now what is actually your take on that? Is the planet cooling, warming? I mean, I was on the show a couple of weeks ago and I read an article from, I believe it was Newsweek magazine. It was printed in 1975, 76 thereabouts, and at that time all the experts were saying the planet was cooling. But some of the urgency about it was that they even suggested throwing black soot over the continent of Greenland to help the polar ice caps melt. Now one of the pieces of evidence I’ve heard that were not that responsible for the global warming is this statement that we hear.

And I’ve heard this as long as eight years ago, that the sun was acting up and in fact that the polar ice cap quote on Mars is melting and that some of the other planets have been observed to have slightly warmer than previously known temperatures. Is that the case? You know, when I heard that I thought, well, if that is true, it’s either true or it’s not, okay? I listened to that, I said, okay, if this is not true, somebody’s going to come out and say, no, the polar ice caps on Mars are not melting, and here I can show you that has not happened. So that if it is true that the sun is doing all of this, isn’t that just an open and shut case? Shouldn’t we be closing the door on this issue? Well, they’re discovering more and more every day apparently.

That was going to be my next question to you. Yeah, that couldn’t even be called an average then, could it? You know, one would think that and I would like to think that when a rational idea is approached, you know, it’s like, I believe Einstein said, you know, but sir, it only takes one person to prove me wrong, you know? Right, and so it’s always, we’re always talking about a consensus and a scientific consensus. If these are indeed the facts, how can you have so many people who are committed to supposedly objective principles of science come up with such differing ideas and what’s really behind that? Because it sure leaves a lot of people confused. Almost a complete self-referential system.

That’s interesting too. I have been noting and people have brought it to my attention that if you go visit David Suzuki’s site, there is not much there on science. It’s all about consensus. And this brings to mind this Oregon Accord, which apparently 17,000 scientists have signed, saying exactly what you’re saying.

How do you hide something like that so well and keep it out of the media? Well listen, can you stay with us till after the ads? Because I think I want to ask you a few things about the bigger picture. Okay, we’ll come back after the ads. And folks, if you want to call in, it is 66136, of course, area code 519. See you after this.

Audio Clip (from John Stossel report on Hollywood and environmentalism):
It’s hard to have a rational debate about the costs and benefits of tampering with nature because pop culture is brainwashing us. Hollywood constantly sends out dire warnings about pollution, global warming, the evil that man does to the earth. The future.

The polar ice caps have melted, covering the earth with water.

In the Kevin Costner movie, Waterworld, future earth has been flooded because of global warming. Costner and the good guys are on this boat, chased by villains and an old oil tanker, which is later revealed to be the Exxon Valdez.

Audio Clip (from Harding College 1948 animation on “isms”):
It’s terrific. It’s tremendous. Once you swallow the contents of this bottle, you have the bountiful benefit of higher wages, shorter hours, and security. Enormous profits, no strikes. Remember, you’re the big boss. Government control, no worry about boats, name your own salary, bigger crops, lower costs. Why, ism even makes the weather perfect every day.

Bob Metz:
Yeah, ism even makes the weather perfect. What ism are you into when it comes to weather? Welcome back. It’s Just Right with Bob Metz here on CHRW Radio 94.9 FM. You can call 519-661-3600 if you want to talk to either myself or to my guest who is live with us from Ottawa, Executive Director Tom Harris of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. Please visit his website. There’s a lot of good stuff there, including some of the articles he’s written, other conversations he’s had in the media. It is www.nrsp.com.

Welcome back, Tom. Literally using it without reprocessing it in some other way first. Yeah. Well, maybe not. If you told me this just out of the blue and you said natural gas, used oil, I would think right off the bat natural gas is cleaner. Am I not right in that?

Or am I? Well, certainly if you meet environmental standards and regulations and things like that. I’m curious, what is the ministry’s policy now if they’re going to ban disposing of this used oil this way?

What is their way of disposing of it? It’s funny, you know, because you’re almost looking at a green market imploding on itself because the government’s getting involved. Well, maybe the question that Begg’s asking now is, okay, which company is being favored?

Who’s making these fluorescent light bulbs? What’s the story behind that one? That just doesn’t ring right to me in so many ways. I’ve never seen that on that. Now, that’s interesting you say that. I spoke at length on this, but I may have said something incorrectly.

I’m not too sure. But is it true that when you first turn a light on or almost, I certainly know it’s true of mechanical things like air conditioners, you get that real drain on power just when they start up? Right. Now, is that taking more power than it would to run the bulb itself?

Okay, because I have heard from people that that is the case when you that the distress on these things is always at the point of turning them on and off as it is with your TV set and almost anything electronic. And isn’t there also a danger that when you legislate certain technologies that newer technologies have a greater difficulty in advancing themselves against one that is already legislated and sort of entrenched in place? Well, it sounds like it’s kind of political.

Listen, when we come back from the ads, I’ve got another question for you more about this banning technology issue and more of how it relates to Al Gore and his inconvenient truth. But folks, you’re listening to Just Right. We’re on CHRW 94.9 FM. You can call 66136 to join us if you would like. And we will be back right after this break.

Audio Clip (from Glen Foster stand-up comedy routine):
Oh, what a day. What? I did the laundry. I cleaned the house. I did the dishes. I don’t have a woman to do these things because I’m married. I love the progression of that joke for women. I was like, well, no, there’s a modern enlightenment. What a jerk that guy. I never liked him.

Audio Clip (from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson):
Last year, the women’s liberation group and the gay liberation front tried to solve their differences. Only to find out there were none.

Bob Metz:
Welcome back to Just Right here on CHRW 94.9 FM 519 6613600. To join in the conversation, I’m Bob Metz and I am joined today. Very kindly putting up with us for the whole hour today. Executive Director Tom Harris of the NRSP.com. And Tom joins us live from Ottawa. Welcome back, Tom. Now, just before the break, we were talking about bans on technology and et cetera, et cetera. And a couple of weeks ago, I did mention that I had done the dirty deed and actually sat down and watched An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.

It is somewhat painful, especially if you’re looking for critical information that you can decide on. I mean, the rest of it was a bit to me like a religious revival meeting. But nevertheless, I got the impression from the notes I made and I was watching them talking about technology.

Have you seen the movie, I assume? Well, you recall that, what do we call it, an equation that he put up there? I don’t have it exactly, but it was something like old ideas plus old technology give us what we have, whereas old ideas with new technology. Did you notice that equation?

Oh, well, I just couldn’t believe it. And I got the impression more than wanting to ban technology per se that the movement, however you might want to define environmentalism, wants to control it, limit it. Or, you know, because if you listen to Gore, he sounds like, hey, yeah, I think modern technology is good because he can’t deny, in many ways, that technology is the ultimate solution to so many of our environmental problems. And I think the bigger factor is you cannot predict what technologies will be around the corner. I already know of a few just hearing in the grapevine that could change everything we’ve just talked about.

A clean burning truck apparatus. They actually remove real pollutants from the that produces smog and acid rain and particulates and stuff like that. However, like anything that you put on a system, it actually takes a bit of energy to run it. So it produces a bit more carbon dioxide again. And so in 2002, the Alberta Transportation Association said to the federal government during the Kyoto hearings, look, if your focus is going to be CO2, then we’ll have to take all these clean burning truck apparatuses off our trucks.

What should we do? So the government just ignored them as far as I can tell. And so this is the trouble. It’s not just that it’s a waste of money trying to control CO2 because it’s undoubtedly not driving climate change significantly.

Not only that, I have never heard of any harm related to CO2 per se.

No, in fact, CO2 is the stuff of life.

And that’s what, that was my impression that if you have more CO2, you have more life. When you look at the, correct me if I’m totally off base here, but when I, when I just look at my basic science, my understanding always was that about 78, you know, 78% of the atmosphere we’re in is nitrogen. About 21% is oxygen. And all of the other chemicals combined, we talk about comprise that other percentage or so.

Yeah, that’s right. So it’s all a trace gas.

So even as it’s, was that word trace?

Yeah. And in fact, the interesting thing is that plants evolved at a time when carbon dioxide levels were around 1000 parts per million. Right now we’re almost at 400. So many scientists are claiming that in fact plants are CO2 deprived right now. If we go too low in CO2, plants will start dying. And with it, of course, all life on the planet.

So I mean, plants also create the oxygen, correct?

Yeah, exactly. They are our source of oxygen along with the ocean.

Now I read in another paper, I’m not a scientist, I’m just giving my lay layman’s interpretation of these things. But apparently trees, trees convert CO2 into oxygen.

That’s right. Yes.

And that is an apparently in great greater quantities. I guess I don’t know how you put this is more oxygen coming out than CO2 going in sort of. Yeah. And is that the sole source of our oxygen on this planet? So we’ve got this tiny little percent of CO2 that has made it possible for us humans to live because trees put out like, you know, 21% of the atmosphere is oxygen.

Yeah, we get a lot of oxygen from phytoplankton in the ocean, which of course single celled microscopic motion plants. So plants indeed are the source of oxygen for the planet. And that’s why we better be careful not to reduce CO2 too much. I mean, if you get down to like 120 parts per million, plants will die. So we’re really talking about something here that is the key ingredient for life on the planet. And in fact, if you think about it, what do they pump into greenhouses to make plants grow faster? It’s carbon dioxide.

I was just going to point out, you know, I have a couple of relatives that use dryers that apparently put out carbon dioxide. Yeah. And near the exhaust, you will find the vines and the plants out in the garden just luscious.

Well, you know, the only effect they can see from orbit due to the slight increase in carbon dioxide, about 33% over the last century and a half, the only increase they or only change they can actually observe base is that there’s actually more dense vegetation in the forests in North America and Europe. That’s the only real direct provable effect. And that is not bad to me.

No, really. No, we just got a couple minutes left. I talked to you off the air before about some other related subjects regarding the whole global warming issue. And one of them that you raised that really piqued my interest, because it’s an area I want to go in in the future, is this concept of you were talking about there’s more to the environmental issue than just the environment. It’s about government and globalism in some sense. What were you getting at in that sense?

Well, while I believe that most environmentalists actually have at their heart a desire to protect the environment, they’re simply misinformed on this particular issue. You know, lots of other important issues they work on, but this one, they’re just mistaken. They’re just off base.

They’re not up to date on the recent science. The leaders of the movement in some cases have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with the environment. You can think that the Kyoto Treaty and other treaties to supposedly stop climate change have at their heart the control of energy. And if you can control energy from a central body on the earth, you’re effectively taking a step towards world government. Because in fact, energy permeates all of our society. If you control energy, you basically control a lot of society.

And controlling energy means rationing, doesn’t it?

Yes, it means rationing and setting prices and determining who gets it and who doesn’t and what sources of energy you’re using. So in fact, many of the people you find that are pushing Kyoto that actually lead the movement are very much in favor of world socialism and particularly centralized control of energy. So what this is doing is it’s actually a step towards world government, which some of the people who lead the movement greatly support. And you have to say, well, why would they support world government? What’s the sort of advantage to socialism on a worldwide basis? Well, of course, the advantage is that they can then redistribute the wealth of the Western world to the rest of the world.

Well, now you’re sounding a bit like Stephen Harper before he got elected.

Yeah, exactly. He certainly changed sides, didn’t he? He certainly did. Yeah, it was very sad because I mean, I think right now the conservatives are making a big mistake. They’re going to alienate a lot of their base in the effort to get the mushy middle. But the mushy middle may not even vote a lot of them. And I think it’s very simple to do the climate change thing. I don’t know how much time you have, but if I can just give you…

You’re at about 60 seconds. Okay, here’s the solution for the conservatives. It’s very straightforward. They should simply say, look, we’re not climate scientists. We don’t know the future of the climate, of course, not just the climate scientists, but we don’t know who’s right in the climate debate. So we’re going to hold open, unbiased hearings in which scientists on both sides of the debate have the opportunity to speak. And then when all the testimonies are over, we’re going to have a special inquiry in which we actually look into it and then we’ll see what’s made in the thing. I must say, though, at the same time, it attracts people like me to an issue. When somebody tells me, I can’t know something, that’s when I want to pull that door open. Oh, sure.

That just sets up the flags. Listen, Tom, we’re running out of time. I want to thank you for joining us and enlightening us here in London on some of these issues. We hope we can have you back again sometime in the future. And we’ll be with you every Thursday. We’ll be back next Thursday just about getting ready to wind down. Just one little closer, totally unrelated to anything we’ve been talking about today. I don’t know if you recall, a few weeks ago I put out a call, if anybody knew anything about turtles, I read this article just very quickly, I heard turtles do not age, literally, they do not age.

And I have found out what that is. Believe it or not, if you look up in the June 2003 edition of Reader’s Digest, they tell you that indeed no one has ever known of a turtle dying of old age. In fact, they exhibit what is known as negligible senescence, that’s S-E-N-E-S-C-E-N-C-E. And they actually do not continue to age biologically once their bodies reach maturity. And although they’ve been known to live beyond 150 years without any signs of old age, and some fish can do this, the only thing that kills them is injury, predation, and disease.

Well, I put the call out again, we’ve got to set up those turtle institutes across the country so we can figure out what makes them live forever, maybe we can catch on to that. Anyways, till next week, this is Bob Metz signing off for Just Right, and we hope you’ll join us next week. And in the meantime, make sure that you too do stay right. Take care.

Audio Clip (from Glen Foster stand-up comedy routine):
China’s part of the UN. How does China get to be a… I will say this though, you got to mess up big time as a government before China gets to criticize you about anything.

They must just love when a Saddam Hussein comes along and they just can’t wait to jump into the… We will not stand for this oppressive regime. Thank you for Olympics. China gets the Olympics. Let’s put the finish line on the Chinese border and see how many golds they take. Here comes the relay team now, Bob. Way more people than usual. No baton, just running, running, running, hang gliding, some kind of exhibition sport this year, I suppose.