It’s opera. My wife is listening to opera while jogging. The heroine will, one assumes, come to a tragic end. But the batteries won’t, because she’s using a digital player. On which, I trust, I can record the sound of environmentalists applauding the technological advances capitalism brings. Strange. I hear nothing. But I’ll keep trying. For like most journalists, I tape things a lot. That once meant a “tape recorder,” huge wobbling inconvenient piles of cassettes or microcassettes and a pile of batteries to warm the heart of any pink mechanical bunny. Not any more. Now my digital devices record MP3 files I store on my computer, and their batteries recharge right through the USB cable while I download.

Searching an MP3 file for a clip is much faster than rewinding a squealing microcassette. MP3s don’t snap at bad moments and are way, way easier to make backup copies of, with no loss of sound quality. It’s also way easier to search one CD or DVD than three dusty (my wife’s word) desk drawers full of cryptically labelled tapes. And because they don’t have to drive a tape around a spool, digital recorders use a lot less power so you don’t have to lug 10 extra batteries up, say, the Golan Heights so your tape deck won’t die at a bad moment.

They’re also cheaper for much the same reasons. You don’t have to keep buying batteries, tapes and furniture to store the tapes in. Did I say cheap? I just bought an external sound card for about 70 bucks that lets me digitize all my old tapes and chuck them. And an inexpensive scanner lets me preserve documents I accumulated in half a lifetime of pack-rattery before, in a similar process, going digital with my letters and file storage. The stuff I keep may still be rubbish, but it won’t fill a dump. PDFs, like MP3s, should bring a smile to the face of any environmentalist.

Permit me, then, to wipe it off deftly by pointing out that self-interest is what’s driving this greener technology. Most of us value the environmental benefits to some extent. But for all of us, digital technology means going green without suffering. Which will displease some in the organic-hair-shirt crowd.

It will upset others that companies are succeeding where governments often fail. The European Union’s environment commissioner just admitted that biofuels promote rainforest destruction. Legally mandated efficient light bulbs may give some people skin problems. The failure of governments to build nuclear plants has contributed massively to greenhouse-gas production. But over there in the private sector, it’s just progress progress progress. Wretched, isn’t it?

The progress is enormous. That digital dictaphones use less power not only means fewer dead batteries full of weird metals chucked into landfills, it also means fewer new batteries manufactured then schlepped about using fossil fuels. The DVDs we store MP3s on require far fewer resources to manufacture, and generate far less trash when they’re history, than LPs, spools or the aforementioned three drawers’ worth of microcassettes. (And just wait until I discover external hard drives.) Fourth, a subtle refinement, early digital dictaphones required proprietary software CDs and connection cables that also had to be manufactured, transported and, one day, discarded; newer ones send standard files through standard USB ports or wireless. Fifth, we e-mail, FTP and stream this stuff instead of couriering or mailing physical copies.

If you’ve ever been in a darkroom while “film” was being “developed” (Google it, kids) the stench of sodium thiosulphate tells you instantly that digital photos convey at least equal benefits. (And how, incidentally, do you dispose of old photos you no longer want? Landfill? Burn? Yuck. Whereas now it’s right-click, delete, empty recycle bin, goodbye ex-mother-in-law.)

Some greens advocate going back to a time when the human “footprint” on the environment was smaller. But we actually have to go forward, technologically speaking. The “footprint” of a portable cassette device was far larger than that of a digital player, while a medieval monk would have had to lug some nit with a lute on his back to enjoy Greensleeves while he jogged, to say nothing of plucking geese, skinning sheep and mixing who knows what gunk to write down the sheet music.

True, he would have heard something less appalling than opera or rap; technology can’t make moral or aesthetic choices. My wife is, as I noted, listening to opera and I can’t fix that.

Oh wait. I can. Press one little button and it’s all erased, leaving lots of room to record the stormy applause for capitalism I expect to erupt among environmentalists. My finger’s hovering over the record button. Yup, any moment now …

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And you don’t have to go all the way back to the Danegeld to get the experience. Try this Monday’s release of the latest report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. At the risk of seeming weird, I should explain that on the weekend while clearing atrocious junk out of my attic, I wound up digitizing some old cassette tapes including, it turned out, a 2002 Citizen editorial board meeting with the NRTEE. On that occasion, they told us global warming was a crisis, urgent action was needed, there was substantial scientific and corporate consensus and market mechanisms were needed but they hadn’t yet worked out the details.

Fast forward six years. Monday, January 7th, 11:00 a.m., the National Press Theatre. Key members of the NRTEE told us global warming was a crisis, urgent action was needed, there was substantial scientific and corporate consensus and market mechanisms were needed but they hadn’t yet worked out the details. I recognize that I personally may, when in my cups, repeat anecdotes. And I know environmentalists favour recycling. But this is ridiculous.

If you’re a climate skeptic, then you have horns and a tail. No, sorry, I mean you’re happy enough to sit through this presentation every six years. But what if you really believe we have one decade to solve the climate change crisis, which has been the orthodox position for the last 15 years? Does it not disturb you that we just spent six years running in place?

Of course you’d have to know about it first, and it wasn’t prominently featured either in the NRTEE presentation or in subsequent coverage of same. Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail did observe that “the NRTEE’s message repeated the obvious, since even the Harper government and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives accept the need for a carbon-emission trading market.” But why say “even the Harper government?” I remember when it was a distinguishing mark of the right-wing lunatic to think market methods had something to contribute on environmental problems.

It was in the early 1990s, when I worked at the Fraser Institute. In a familiar pattern, the idea provoked ridicule, then hostility, then agreement, at which point its origins were quietly forgotten. (See also “let’s measure health care waiting lists.”) Indeed, that incentives matter, in environmental and other areas, is now so broadly accepted that it’s hard to believe it was once routinely denied in principle or that it’s still so widely ignored in practice. In intellectual matters one does see movement in this country. Policy is another matter.

Here I would also like to remind you that in 2002 (Sept. 4, to be exact), in this newspaper, I dismissed environmental hopes and economic fears about the Chrétien government’s decision to ratify the Kyoto Accord. I said there would never be a plan, that the government “will never even try to implement the treaty.” I also said tradable emissions permits were theoretically sensible, but stressed how difficult it would be to work out the details.

I don’t want to rehash the scientific arguments about global warming, or more precisely the refusal of its advocates to argue the science. Been there, done that. But I do want to rehash the serious problem of governance in Canada in which a lot of high-flown rhetoric about consensus and compassion and crisis accompanies failure to come to grips with practical details, on issues from the gun registry to rebuilding the military to reforming health care to Kyoto.

The NRTEE (you can find them, and their latest report, online at www.nrtee-trnee.ca) are clearly not fools. But something is seriously out of whack when all that energy and intelligence goes into a cycle of planning to have a plan (see especially page 47 of their latest report). At Monday’s press conference Brian Lilley of CFRB radio pointed out that the price of oil tripled in the last decade without causing consumers to conserve energy and asked whether a carbon tax wouldn’t have to be pretty onerous to make a difference. The answer he got was that a computer model says it would all be OK.

If true, the NRTEE, or their computer, must know what could be done, in detail, and what would then happen. So why doesn’t somebody do it? Six years ago I was recording on environmentally unfriendly, energy- and resource-intensive microcassettes. Today I’m clean, green and digital. But in 2002 the government was planning to have a plan and in 2008 it apparently still is. Six long years out of the only decade we then had left.

Oh well. See you all in 2014 for the NRTEE press conference where … you know.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Today’s column is about global warming. Sitting down to write it made a nice break from all the hard physical chores we’re tackling thanks to the unseasonably cool weather.

Yes, unseasonably cool. As the July 16 Citizen reported, “Ottawa’s summer was supposed to be sticky and dry, and June passed the test with flying colours. But now the hot weather has taken a summer holiday of its own, with clouds and rain seemingly stuck in a holding pattern over the city.” In addition to almost constant rain, the paper added “Vacationers and cottage-goers might disagree, but July temperatures have only been slightly below normal. The average high has been 24 C; the average low, 13.4 C. Both are just two degrees cooler than usual. June was scorching by comparison. Eight days of 30plus temperatures were recorded, topping out at 34.2 on the 26th.”

I’m trying to be level in head and tone here. June was hot, July was cold, the predictions were wrong and as a result we know … not much. Other than that weather, like climate, fluctuates in weird ways because it is complex. A cool summer no more proves the Earth is not heating up or that humans are not causing it than a warm decade in the 1990s proved it is and they are. So I consider it unfair that when temperatures are “just” two degrees above average Al Gore starts holding rock concerts, David Suzuki is all over the billboards and arcane computer models acquire a degree of infallibility at which the Pope can only gaze in envy. But when they’re down by that much, an Environment Canada meteorologist dismisses the variation as “not extreme” and says, what the heck, computer models aren’t that reliable.

It’s also unfair that almost every story on global warming ratchets up the alarm. I’ve previously cited Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute, who says that “It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always ‘bad’ or ‘good’; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science.”

A case in point is the new study saying that global warming will make places that are too wet even wetter and those that are too dry even drier. Maybe it will. But is that really what the record shows to be normal? Or, like historians and social scientists who seem to discover in any place they examine at any period in history that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, is it just what you know they’d say regardless?

I take a similarly skeptical view of widespread insistence that a warmer Earth must spell disaster. Again, maybe it will. But our limited reliable evidence, from history, not fanciful cybernetic projection, is that it didn’t 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended. And we know that the last time global temperature rose, in the “Medieval Warm Period,” (a) man didn’t cause it and (b) the effects were for the most part beneficial. That doesn’t mean it would be this time, let alone that we should encourage or ignore it on that basis. It means that claims to know the opposite so strongly that you refuse to tolerate dissent are hysterical and obnoxious.

OK, that was a bit snarky. So let me say on the other side that for skeptics to whine about the cost of fighting global warming is feeble-minded. The Klingon proverb that only a fool fights in a burning house goes double, in my view, for trying to turn a profit in one. (You might, after all, fight to get out of the house, or for that matter fight the fire.)

I concede that if global warming is as bad as they say, if humans are contributing seriously to it and if Canada meeting its Kyoto commitment would help significantly, then almost no price is too high to pay. But in return I ask that we be permitted an intelligent, courteous debate on all three links in that chain of argument, including what constitutes solid evidence.

I note that Environment Canada forecast a singularly hot dry summer across Canada in 2004. That August their senior climatologist, David Phillips, said “Never have we been so wrong for so long in so many parts of the country.”

Then it predicted it again, and again. Of course if weather is variable and you keep predicting the same thing you will be right about half the time. But reasonable people won’t treat your predictions as useful evidence.

Look out the window and tell me, are you cool with that?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]