On July 10 earlier this month, an unprecedented march took
place on Parliament Hill. Between 500
and 1000 scientists protested in white lab coats against cuts to a number of
scientific programs in the federal government.
The protest was presented as a funeral march dubbed “Death of
evidence”. It received wide media
coverage locally
and nationally.
It used to be generally accepted that governments need
scientific evidence to support policy decisions. They need to know how much coal, uranium or oil
we have in the ground to plan future energy policies. They need to monitor the health of our rivers
and lakes to see what long-term impacts certain man-made stressors will have on
their viability. And they need to keep
track of how our atmosphere is changing to make sure that the health of
Canadians is protected. A good example
of that was when it was first noted that the ozone layer was becoming
dangerously thin, allowing more harmful cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to
penetrate our atmosphere. This led to
the 1989 Montreal Protocol
which banned the use of chemicals such as chlorinated fluorocarbons used in
refrigerators that attack the ozone layer.
Another example was the successful identification of the acid rain threat,
largely produced from coal burning power plants in Canada and the US, which was
killing life in our lakes. This led to a
successful air
quality agreement between Canada and the US in 1991 to reduce sulfur
emissions in the atmosphere. This
resulted in a measurable reduction in the acidification levels of our lakes. These policy actions would clearly not have happened without supporting scientific
evidence.
The recent cuts by the federal government to a number of
research centers and programs that collect baseline data on the environment has
been criticized nationally and internationally. These actions are cutting off
vital scientific information that provide the critical data on which policy
decisions can be made such as acid rain or ozone depletion. It so happens that many of these cuts are
focused around the environment. The
result is to choke off ongoing reliable information related to climate change, atmospheric
pollution and water ecosystems. In other words, the current federal government
is eliminating scientific evidence that would help us determine how we are
harming the environment and accelerating global warming, so we don’t have to
worry about it. To borrow from Al Gore, they
are destroying the evidence that would point to the problem or to the “inconvenient
truth”. That’s definitely one way of
slowing down or stopping the transition to a sustainable society. And that’s what inspired the “Death of
Evidence” protest .
Two other recent examples come from the increasingly
polarized US political arena. A recent
US Geological Survey study showed that the eastern US ocean coast is more
vulnerable to rising ocean levels from climate change than other areas. This caused obvious concern in businesses located
on the seashore in North Carolina. But
their concern was not from the potential risk from rising ocean levels to their
businesses. It was prompted by the
additional costs that would inevitably arise from the anticipated new state
government zoning regulations to restrict growth of their coastal businesses. This is based of course on the false belief
that climate change is hogwash and increased ocean level due to climate change
is total fiction. So they successfully
lobbied the state legislature to prohibit any future ocean level projection
that would include climate change as an
explaining factor. Henceforth, all
future ocean-level studies have to be based on purely historical data. Outcry over the proposed legislation resulted
in minor changes. The
new version now places a 4-year moratorium before planners can draw on the most up-to-date climate
science. But that is a second way of denying “inconvenient truths” – you
simply legislate against it.
Another example is a piece of legislation
passed by the Alabama Legislature that forbids any policy regulation or funding
that would support the UN agenda 21 passed in 1992 at the first Rio
conference. The concern here is that Agenda
21 acknowledges that commercial use of private property can sometime result in harm
to the environment, and that these harmful uses should be controlled. And our good Republican friends believe that
private property rights are absolutely sacred and cannot be influenced without
“due process”. The actual law specifies that
“The State of Alabama […]
may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or
inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process,
as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to
"Agenda 21," adopted by the United Nations in 1992 at its Conference
on Environment and Development.”
With regards UN accredited environmental NGOs and
inter-governmental organizations (e.g. ICLEI) that lobby or try to influence
private property usage, the state “may
not enter into any agreement, expend any sum of money, or receive funds
contracting services, or giving financial aid to or from those non-governmental
and inter-governmental organizations as defined in Agenda 21.”
What Alabama says is that initiatives attempting to restrict
the use of private property especially if
they originate from a non-elected body such as the UN are in fact
anti-constitutional and should be banned.
Here is a third way of stopping change – you legislate against some of
the basic principles that support a new economic order, e.g. that land should
be used sustainably, essential to the transition to a sustainable society.
As we said in our original “Making
it happen” report, government leadership is one of the essential components
to making the transition to a sustainable society. What we are seeing in these three recent and
disturbing examples is active government action to impede this transition.
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