Why People Deny Global Warming

Opposition to environmental protection comes, in large part, from proponents of small government who see the environmental issue as a threat to their attempt to reduce taxes, reduce regulations, and reduce government spending.

(If the threat to our country came in the form of a military threat, I'm positive that those same people would be willing to raise taxes, increase regulations, and increase government spending. Just look at recent events in the US.)

The troubling thing is that the opponents of large government do not phrase the environmental debate in terms of how we should respond to global warming; they deny the existence of global warming. Thus we have wasted years arguing about whether there is a problem, and are not making progress on how to address it.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been clear for some time that our pollution is causing global climate change. The most recent IPPC report states that this is "unequivocal". This isn't just a small committee. Wikipedia says, "The report was produced by around 600 authors from 40 countries, and reviewed by over 620 experts and governments. Before being accepted, the summary was reviewed line-by-line by representatives from 113 governments". I challenge anyone who doesn't believe the IPCC to say that they support big government; I don't think any such person exists.

There is a place in the environmental debate for people who are wary of big government. In fact, Canada's Green Party takes a very small-c conservative (even a big-C Conservative) approach to the environment by calling for a new tax structure that taxes waste and pollution. (I think the idea is crazy, as I have said before, on two grounds: (1) the tax system tosses out out the foundation of our current system, that people should pay proportionally more as their income rises, and so will have all sorts of unintended and negative social side effects; (2) their proposed tax system has no hope of being adopted in Canada, so the Green Party is wasting our time having this as the center of their environmental policy when they should be talking about more pragmatic, possible policy.) But the strategy is working for the Green Party - they are picking up right-wing voters.

In Europe, where big government is not such an anathema, environmental issues have been acknowledged and addressed much more effectively than in North America. And, gee willikers, the environmental initiatives haven't created behemoth public corporations, high levels of taxation or crushing regulatory bureaucracy. The free market isn't destroyed by wind power, tighter car emission standards, better urban planning, or better public transit infrastructure. It's nothing new... it's just smarter.

Germany, which is leading the way in environmental initiatives, now produces one-third of the world's wind power. It has the highest targets for cutting greenhouse gases in the EU, and is ahead of schedule. It has pioneered energy-sufficient towns and carless towns. It is the world leader in development of solar power. As one blogger writes, "Bad choices aren't banned outright (you can still buy a Hummer in Germany if you really want one), but better choices are encouraged. Discouragements: $6 a gallon gas, and special taxes on extremely inefficient vehicles. Encouragements: An efficient public-transport system, and compact, diverse neighborhoods." That kind of encouragement is no different from the Canadian government encouraging us to drive cars by paying for hiways but not for rail transit, or by zoning so much low density housing.

Germany is showing us all how to meet environmental targets. It has made huge environmental improvements without curtailing freedom in any way. An example: only one-third of German hiways have a speed limit. Argue that one if you like, but Germans like to drive fast, and they do.

Me, I'm a proponent both of free markets and of big government. In fact, I don't think markets work without a lot of government "interference". Take financial markets as an example - stock exchanges are arguably the most tightly regulated markets going, and that's what keeps them humming. If you lose investor confidence you lose investors. Hence the biggest proponent of free markets - the US - has the most tightly regulated financial sector.

I love government regulation, and I want more regulation and more enforcement throughout society. But I can see that not everyone agrees with me, and I respect that. So let's get down to work here and find a way to address the environmental issue that we can all live with, as Germany has done. Otherwise we're heading for a fall.

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Kitchener-Waterloo's Oktoberfest - Time for a Change

Article in today's Record: Bavarian Festival is at a Fork in the Road.

Indeed. The Oktoberfest festival, which runs every year around the Canadian Thanksgiving, is a travesty. It's all about tackiness and drunkenness. It attracts people who like tackiness and drunkenness - and it attracts a lot of them. There's a tacky beauty pageant, there are crappy beer halls selling mass quantities of cheap beer, there's a parade. I can't comment on the quality of the parade even though it passes less than 100 meters from my home because it starts at some ungodly hour on a Saturday morning (8 am?) and I don't like parades.

Kitchener-Waterloo has loads of Germans and loads of German culture. German culture is fabulous - there's so much we could be celebrating: good beer, German white wine, the wide range of German cuisine beyond the Oktoberfest sausage, Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, on and on and on. What does the K-W Oktoberfest festival celebrate of German culture? Oompapa music, lederhosen and cheap beer. It's not a cultural festival: it's a parody.

A long time ago there used to be an Oktoberfest operetta. I recall a charming performance of Der Rosenkavalier. It was sold out. Why was the operetta cut?

My guess is that the problem with the festival is the management, and a focus on short-term profit instead of building a community organization. For example, the operetta was popular among local residents, but wasn't popular with tourists, which is probably why it was cut - and which is completely wrong-headed. That focus probably also explains why we don't have little independent Oktoberfest events sprouting up around town during the festival: restaurants and community groups would be widening the appeal of the festival if the festival's organizers reached out to the community.

Keep the tacky beauty pageant if you want. Keep the beer halls that sell only Blue or Canadian in pitchers. Keep the early-morning parade. And especially, keep the polka music. All this stuff is wildly popular and it brings lots of tourist dollars to our town. But give us something more. Make it part of the community and something that the community can be proud of. As it is, I try to leave town during Oktoberfest. I think its extreme tackiness and focus on a cheap drunk diminishes our German heritage. It diminishes our whole community.

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Troubled Berlin

Several years ago I visited two civil rights museums, in Birmingham, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee. Both are excellent museums, but very different. The Birmingham museum has a wealth of information about the oppression of Afro-Americans in the US South, but it is an optimistic place that seems to want to bring racial groups together in harmony. The Memphis museum, by contrast, is an angry place. Located in the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, it confronts racism and condemns it.

I was thinking of those two museums when I was in Berlin this week. Berlin's Jewish Museum is another great museum. Housed in a remarkable building designed by Daniel Libeskind, it provides a fascinating view of two thousand years of Jewish history in Germany. As I moved through the chronology approaching WWII, I grew increasingly apprehensive, waiting for the whammee of information about the holocaust. It didn't come. There was the lead-up to the holocaust, and then there was the aftermath. The holocaust itself was barely mentioned.

This is in stark contrast to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which is almost too much to bear. At the end of the exhibits there is a meditation room that I needed to use to recover before leaving the building.

Berlin's recent history is troubled, to say the least, having been the center of the Third Reich until just 60 years ago, and then an occupied territory - divided into sectors that were run by the Soviets, Americans, British and French. There seems to be a general lack of trust in the populace - at least, there wasn't a lot of smiling or friendliness. It's a beautiful place and I'm not sorry I spent a week's holiday there, but it feels alien (unlike Frankfurt and Weisbaden, where I spent the previous week).

My experience at the Jewish museum got me wondering about how Berliners cope with their history. That history is still raw, despite the 60 years since the end of the war. I saw many buildings that had poorly patched bullet holes from World War II. The Kunst Bibliotek (attached to the Gemaldegalerie, an old master's museum) is a mess of bullet holes. The bombing at the end of the war left many buildings patched or reconstructed. (Evidence of the Soviet era is found in the museums of the old East Berlin, which are full of reproductions. My guide book would diplomatically say, "This piece was misplaced during the period following WWII. The original is on display in Moscow.")

After my experience at the Jewish museum, I decided to make a search for public acknowledgement of World War II. My guide book told me of a place called the Topography of Terrors, built on the site of Gestapo torture chambers, but it turns out that public controversy has kept the building from being constructed. There is a temporary open air site (with not even an awning); tellingly, the parts dealing with WWII are in German only, and the parts dealing with trials held after the war are also in English.

There is a small modest memorial to Berlin Jews at Gedenkstatte Grosse, but it contains no information, just a statue.

I visited the Holocaust Memorial, and it is big - a small city block - but there are no signs or any words whatsoever, just hundreds of coffin-shaped concrete rectangles. There is not even a sign saying what it is. While I was there, kids were playing hide and seek among the rectangles.

I went away and did some more research, finally discovering that the Holocaust Memorial has an underground interpretive center. I went back to the site but had some difficulty finding the entrance, and eventually found it only because a school group was gathering at the entrance - which was nothing more than a small hole in the ground and steps, with no signs.

The interpretive center is very impressive. It chronicles the Holocaust by year, and then provides personal information. It details what was done to Jews, Roma, disabled people and political opponents. It tells of the development of the gas chambers, first used on the handicapped. One room contains letters written by victims, some thrown through the slats of boxcars. One contains brief slide shows of dozens of towns in Europe, telling how many Jews lived there in 1933, what happened to them, and how many were left in 1945. It is strange to find this huge archive of material hidden underground.

Coming from a slave-owning Southern family, I have first-hand experience of people being defensive about the horrors perpetrated by their ancestors, and I can sympathise with Berliners to an extent. Most of us have blood on our hands. The colonial era ended just 40 years ago, with horrors perpetrated by colonial powers. Our great-great grandmothers were denied human rights. Our ancestors fought many bloody wars, both for their countries and their religions.

But the negligible public acknowledgement by Germany's capital city of the world's greatest atrocity seems irresponsible and unhealthy. It's troubling. It fits with many other things: war reparations being paid so late, war criminals left unprosecuted for decades. While I was in Germany I read an article about the largest archive of Nazi prison camp records, which has only just been opened to researchers, despite decades of pleading by holocaust victim's families to learn what happened to their loved ones. One sad tale among the millions is of a Dutch man who was arrested for owning an illegal radio. His family, now all dead, was never able to get the archive to give them information about him, despite the archive having his personal effects and a first hand account of his fate.

When we say "never again" to the Holocaust, we should also say "never again" to the way we handle the aftermath.

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