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Opinion piece by Owen McShane
14 January 07
Local
Government - thoughts for the new year
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CLIMATE
CHANGE
This year is
shaping up to be the year of climate change – the year in
which the general climate of opinion on “climate change”
will itself begin to change as the whole “global warming”
scenario begins to unravel.
There are
several signs already.
·
First, the hysterical announcements from the
hysterics are becoming even more hysterical. The Editor of The
Canadian has just announced that the population of the world
may fall to 500 million by the year 2012. That’s right –
4.5 billion of us may die from global warming over the next
five years. To read the whole happy story click
here >>>.
·
Second, even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change - for information click
>>>) is starting to hedge its bets. The draft of
the latest IPCC report, due out later this year, reduces the
most likely scenario for sea level rise by the year 2100 from
80 cms to only 35 cms. Someone should tell Al Gore, whose
predictions of 7 metre rises begin to look a bit flaky.
Someone should also tell the retiring Parliamentary
Commissioner for the Environment whose latest newsletter tells
us that Al Gore has “an impressive grasp” of the science
around climate change and endorses Al’s recommendation that
we should revise sea level rises over the next 50 years (not
100) to several metres. So it seems Al Gore knows more about
the science than the IPCC– or perhaps he has access to
top-secret information.
·
Third, other groups are starting to hedge the
bets too. While some media alarmists rush to tell us that the
Australian drought and bush are caused by global warming
official sources are much less confident and express their
reservations more frequently by the day.
·
Finally, members of the general public seem to
be less convinced of falling skies than mainstream media
editors believe. The NZ
Climate Science Coalition continues to have difficulty
getting its skeptical views reported in the mainstream media.
But when Scoop
(bless their heart) runs the Coalitions contrarian views,
these reports immediately rise to the top three or four
positions in the Scoop
readership rankings – even beating out videos of executions.
Once
people begin to lose money on their “green” energy
investments watch the pack of cards truly tumble. Anyone like
to pick the next dot.com or tulip boom?
P.S.
Some may have picked up that NIWA is blaming New Zealand’s
cooling temperatures on El Nino, while their American
counterparts are blaming America’s warm winter temperatures
on the same El Nino. The “little boy” works in mysterious
ways.
SMART
GROWTH – WHO WANTS IT?
Like
most of you, we have Sky television at home, and hence we have
access to about 130 channels broadcasting a huge range of
programmes covering news, sports, history, art, and of course
the lifestyles of the rich and famous and even the not so rich
and famous.
Many
of these programmes tell us about the delights and travails of
people moving to some new home in search of a better life. We
are introduced to people seeking a “Place in the Sun”, a
more “sustainable” lifestyle, returning to their
“roots”, or generally seeking peace and quiet and privacy.
In every programme we have watched, these people all share one
thing in common. They are hoping to find an affordable single
family home on its own piece of land, set on the coast or in
the countryside. These eager migrants are leaving the city and
congestion and noise to find peace and quiet and privacy and a
piece of land on which they can grow their own fruit and
vegetables. Some are even willing to raise their own hens,
pigs, sheep and other livestock.
Yet,
if the Smart Growth planners are right, these stories are
hopelessly biased and misleading. After all, we have pointed
our remote at channels high and low, but have been unable to
find a single programme promoting the delights of moving from
the suburbs or countryside into a city apartment next to a
railway station or bus depot and the consequent joys of using
public transport. Not one home seeker in the programmes we
watch gives such pleasures even a passing thought!
Given that
council planners everywhere assure us that their plans for
urban intensification, growth management, and Smart Growth and
public transport use are based on public transportation and
enjoy strong “ community support” we have to accept that
we do not subscribe to the right channels or that there is
some conspiracy among producers and programme buyers to
conceal the obvious truth.
So there must
be some programmes out there which would balance this obvious
bias and distortion. Can someone please tell us where to find
them?
After all,
those of us who know what is really the correct way people
ought to live should be concerned. Even though the bias in
these programmes should be self-evident to all right-thinking
people, eventually the power of television and film must
surely persuade many people a place in low density self
sustaining environments, with peace and quiet and home grown
produce, is an acceptable way of life.
And we can’t
have that, can we?
In the name of
“sustainable urban form”, we must all call for a ban on
such programmes or at least have them relegated to late night
viewing only – along with junk food advertisements, porn
movies, people who don’t cry on camera, and other
“inappropriate” viewing. (As Thomas Sowell reminds us,
isn’t it time we renamed “Ivan the Terrible”, “Ivan
the Inappropriate”?)
REDISCOVERING
O’ROURKE
This year is
surely the time to re-read P.J. O’Rourke’s All
the Trouble in the World – the lighter side of famine,
pestilence, destruction and death, and send a copy to your
local MP and Mayor.
I decided to
browse through this old favourite over a coffee in the sun,
and was surprised to find it was published back in 1994 –
which seems sufficiently long ago to qualify as “the good
old days”. I am normally skeptical of long range forecasts
but given P.J.’s opening paragraphs I would give his crystal
balls more credit than most. For example:
“Writing
this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To
them goes the credit. I’ll take the money. Writing this book
also required an enormous amount of help from enemies.
Particularly, I’d like to thank Vice President Al Gore for
being the perfect straw man on such subjects as the
environment, ecology and population. Sorry Al, for repeatedly
calling you a fascist twinkie and intellectual dolt. It’s
nothing personal. I just think you have repulsive totalitarian
inclinations and the brains of a King Charles spaniel.”
And
later:
“Fretting
makes us important. Say you’re an adult male and you’re
skipping down the street whistling Last
Train to
Clarksville
. People will call you a fool. But lean over to the person
next to you on a subway and say ‘How can you smile while
innocents are dying in
Tibet
?’. You’ll acquire a reputation for great seriousness and
also more room to sit down. … Worrying is less work than
doing something to fix the worry. This is especially true if
we’re careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry
about. Everybody wants to save the planet; nobody wants to
help Mom do the dishes.”
If that
doesn’t persuade you to re-read this classic, surely you
must revisit any author whose frontispiece reminds us that F.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in The
Great Gatsby, published in 1925:
“I read
somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said
Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going
to fall into the sun – or wait a minute – it’s the
opposite – the sun’s getting colder every year.”
There really is
nothing new under the sun.
LONG
TERM PLANS
As part of its
plan to promote central planning everywhere, the Government is
encouraging Local Bodies to engage in “long term
planning”. The main lesson our leaders seem to have learnt
from the Great Soviet Experiment is that five year plans were
just not long enough. Ten year, twenty year, and even one
hundred year plans are now the rage. We should remind these
“intellectual dolts” that it’s not just than we cannot
predict future knowledge about science and technology that
makes such long term planning useless. We are even less able
to predict future values and attitudes.
Only forty
years ago, I joined the Auckland City Council where one of my
first tasks was to joint the team taking a second look at the
proposal to raze to the ground all the dreadful slum housing
in Freemans Bay and Ponsonby. Fortunately we challenged the
conventional planning consensus of the time, and the rest, as
they say, is history. The same planning profession has now
decided that these areas are now Heritage Zones, which must be
protected from damage by the same private citizens who rescued
them in the first place.
They forget the
only time these houses were ever under threat of destruction
was from town planners promoting “slum clearance”.
Just as we
should not trust computer models of the future which cannot
even explain the past, we should not trust a profession with
such short memories to plan anything beyond next week.
P.S. My
apologies for insulting King Charles spaniels.
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