April 24, 2024 - "An old-growth logging protester and deputy leader of the federal Green Party has been sentenced to 60 days in jail for her role in the Fairy Creek protests. Angela Davidson, also known as Rainbow Eyes, was convicted in January of seven counts of criminal contempt for breaching an injunction covering the Fairy Creek area and breaching her bail conditions for incidents spanning from May 2021 to January 2022.
"Davidson was initially arrested after blocking a road by chaining herself to a gate in the Fairy Creek injunction area. She was released on condition that she not return to the area. The subsequent offences involved returning to the injunction area, ignoring the terms of her house arrest.
"Davidson, 38, was sentenced in Nanaimo Wednesday to 60 days in jail, minus 12 days for time served pre-trial, and 75 hours of community service.... Green Party Leader Elizabeth May ... who sat next to Davidson’s parents during the hearing, said she was horrified by the length of the sentence.
"Davidson was appointed deputy leader of the Green Party in early 2022 by then interim leader Amita Kuttner and reappointed by May when she replaced Kuttner.
April 25, 2024 - "Angela Davidson — also known as ‘Rainbow Eyes’ — was convicted in January of seven counts of criminal contempt for breaching a court injunction and bail conditions for a series of protests at the Fairy Creek logging camp on Vancouver Island in the spring of 2021. On Wednesday she was sentenced to 60 days and 75 hours of community service for her role in the protests near Port Renfrew that saw more than 1,000 people arrested at the Teal Cedar Products logging camp where it had licences to cut old-growth timber.
"After her initial charge, Davidson was subsequently arrested six more times for returning to the area when she had been ordered not to and for breaching the terms of her house arrest.....
"In response to the sentence, May accused the courts of protecting corporate profits over the public interest. In a statement she said the party stands 'in solidarity with our brave deputy leader Rainbow Eyes who is to lose her freedom for the "crime" of trying to protect the old growth forest the provincial government had said it would protect from logging — and then did nothing.'” Read more: https://www.westernstandard.news/bc/green-partys-may-distraught-over-deputy-leaders-logging-protest-conviction-jail-time/54097
Thanks to an unidentified Liberal cabinet minister, foreign-funded eco-activist and serial blockader Muhammad Zain Ul Haq aka Zain Haq avoided being deported from Canada this week.
April 23, 2024 - "For years, every time a port, highway, work site or rail line was blockaded by B.C. activists, there was a good chance Zain Haq was not too far away. A Pakistani national who first came to Canada in 2019 on a study permit, he’s been arrested at least 10 times [and] convicted of mischief charges, and has been pretty open about his role in leading a foreign-funded 'rebellion' against the Canadian government. And now, after a years-long effort by the Canada Border Services Agency to secure Haq’s deportation, the 23-year-old’s removal was stayed at the 11th hour, potentially due to the intervention of the Trudeau government....
"Haq had been scheduled for deportation by no later than Monday, April 22 — and a last-minute appeal had already been rejected by a federal judge. But on Friday, Haq received a cryptic call from the office of .. the Liberal MP for his riding ... telling him to stay by his phone. He was soon contacted by a CBSA case officer telling him he could stay in the country.
"Haq’s lawyer, Randall Cohn, told Glacier [Media] that he suspected someone in the federal cabinet was 'listening and paying attention to the timing and decided to step in.'
"Haq wasn’t facing deportation because of his arrests or conviction.... Rather it was due to violations of his study permit. Haq was away from class for long periods, and at one point was put on academic probation by Simon Fraser University.
"Over the last five years, Haq has been at the centre of two of the province’s most extreme environmental groups: Extinction Rebellion and Save Old Growth, of which he’s a co-founder. Between them, the groups have been the singular cause of activist-led disruptions throughout the Lower Mainland through their chosen tactics of blockading roads, bridges and other infrastructure. They also both carry demands that cannot feasibly be met. Extinction Rebellion demands the immediate abandonment of all fossil fuels. Save Old Growth demands the immediate suspension of all old-growth logging.... The 'no old growth' demand, in particular, has been denounced by B.C. First Nations who say it ignores Indigenous land-use rights....
"A mischief case brought against him in 2023 detailed Haq’s central role in extended closures of bridges, intersections and — in October 2021 — a two-hour blockade of Vancouver International Airport. In July of that year, court documents said that Haq helped organize a road closure that 'interfered with emergency vehicles trying to access St. Paul’s Hospital.' 'Mr. Haq has shown disdain for the rule of law and he has publicly encouraged others to break the law while publicly celebrating his arrest,' read a 2023 decision convicting Haq of mischief. Although prosecutors sought a 60-day jail sentence, Haq was instead given 61 days of house arrest....
"Haq has routinely acknowledged he was breaking Canadian law and threatened to continue doing it until his demands were met. 'Every single day we will be disrupting the highways in multiple locations, both on the Island and in Vancouver,' he warned British Columbians at the start of the 2022 summer travel season.... In a 2020 Extinction Rebellion statement, he was quoted as saying 'occupying private and public spaces is an essential step towards truly understanding what a democracy looks like.' He added, 'it is impossible to frighten people who have declared a non-violent rebellion against the government.'
"He’s even admitted that his actions were foreign funded. In a 2022 New York Times interview, he said he’d received $170,000 from the California-based Climate Emergency Fund....
"Haq’s wife ... has applied to sponsor Haq for permanent residency, the CBC reported. However, it remains unclear how long he may be able to stay in Canada."
February 5, 2021 - "Over the past year, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to people’s lives. Discussing whether draconian policies are effective, or whether there may be other ways of managing the crisis, has been muted by angry ripostes – you will be branded a ‘denier’ or a ‘granny-killer’. To disagree is to have blood on your hands. But surely, despite these tensions, most people want the whole thing to be over? It doesn’t seem so. One tendency seems to hope that lockdown is just the dawn of an age of confinement. Greens, after a year at home on full pay, believe this is the beginning of a bright new era of global environmental consciousness and good international governance, in which lockdown will be the norm.
"The question at the centre of this bizarre, anti-human dystopianism is, ‘Will Covid help us save the planet?’. That was asked by last Sunday’s edition of the BBC’s Big Questions. spiked’s Fraser Myers, outnumbered by George Monbiot, Extinction Rebellion activists and neo-Malthusian population-obsessives, appeared on the show. He was interrupted every time he tried to counter the greens’ celebration of locking people in their homes....
"For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true. If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home....
"People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus.... Rather than seeking to allay unfounded fear, and despite their putative emphasis on ‘The Science’, lockdown hawks capitalised on this overestimation of risk to fuel their cheap, utilitarian moral arithmetic. This may have been effective during this pandemic, in which threats are perceived as immediate, and the lockdown is presented as an extraordinary measure with an end in sight. But a climate lockdown would be forever. And in order to sustain it, the green misanthropes would need to take even greater liberties with the facts and stats.
"According to Monbiot, ‘billions’ of people will soon suffer from climate change. But in reality, ... [a]ttempts to measure fatalities attributed to the consequences of climate change have been beset by radical, historically unprecedented improvements in society. If there is a link between climate change and fatalities, then it is only possible to conclude that climate change has saved countless millions of lives. In order to sustain the notion of climate change as a grave risk, researcher-advocates have had to invent counterfactual worlds, in which there is no global warming, to claim that risks in this, the real world, are indeed increasing, despite material evidence to the contrary: the fact that we are living longer, healthier, wealthier lives.
"It is the ‘wealthier’ part that really bothers the greens. ‘There’s all this conversation that assumes that we can have whatever we want and make tiny little changes in our lifestyles and that will be enough’, said UCL population ethicist Karin Kuhlemann on The Big Questions. ‘I do not think people will change their relationships to the natural world. They won’t restrain consumption willingly. We need to dramatically reduce our impact on this planet ’.... So, whereas Covid lockdowns are intended to contain a virus and prevent it from overwhelming the NHS, climate lockdowns are intended to constrain human reproduction and consumption, to prevent us from overwhelming the planet.
"Some greens have been excited about how great lockdown is since last March. They wrote, from the comfort of their nice homes, on their full pay, about how fresh the air was, how clear the skies, and how prominent the birdsong. It was Kuhlemann’s colleague at UCL, Mariana Mazzucato, who in September really spelled it out: ‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat and impose extreme energy-saving measures.’ In order to save ourselves from this fate, ‘we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently’, she claimed....
"The obvious consequence of Covid and climate lockdowns ... would be to reduce our ability to respond to actual emergencies, to spend on healthcare and public-health measures. It seems clear that green thinking is first and foremost driven by authoritarian impulses, which are subsequently given only a superficially plausible rationale. That is to say that the desire to reorganise society, which depends on hollow critiques of consumer and corporate capitalist society, exists prior to the facts, and yet are traded in the public sphere as obviously true, unimpeachable facts. No doubt, there are problems.... But the idea that they have driven us to the point of material crisis – from the weather, from diseases or from Gaia herself – is simply bullsh*t. Despite Covid and despite climate change, we have never been so safe, and the world has never before seen as much progress as it has since 1990.
"Seen from this perspective, green demands for climate lockdown should be viewed as a greater risk to us than infectious diseases and extreme weather.... Society has failed to grasp the extent to which green imperatives are ideological fantasies. Green claims are routinely taken at face value, rather than interrogated, to see what kind of world greens really want. One thing we can be sure of now, however, is that as soon as the climate lockdowners get what they want, they will simply move the goalposts. In December, the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, claimed that, despite nearly a year of grounded flights, immobilised cars, a loss of 10 per cent or more of GDP, and a record plunge into further debt, lockdown had not done enough and was ‘too short to reverse years of destruction’. Now we know what lockdowns look like, it should sharpen our minds to the danger not from climate change, but from environmentalism."
October 10, 2017 - "In the climate change controversies, the Left ... overwhelms with data, models, and prognostications warning of environmental disaster because atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased.... The Right is skeptical of the data and how they’re gathered, ... and ... accuses the Left of ignoring ... causes having nothing to do with human activity. But most of all, the dispute is about increasing government power.... The battle lines have been drawn along ideological lines, with science — both good and bad — playing second fiddle: most people just don’t have the knowledge or critical skills to evaluate the methodology and all the factors, conclusions, and opinions.
"Fortunately, there is a third approach, one that relies on the Hayekian insight that markets are much better at analyzing all available data than any one individual, institution, or government (and I would include computers in that list) could possibly be. This is the approach taken by PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, a libertarian thinktank dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets.
"It makes little difference whether the United States remained in or left the 2015 Paris Climate Accords: the agreed upon CO2 reduction levels were minimal, unreachable, and unenforceable. And ... solving the perceived problem of climate change on a global scale would be economically devastating, politically unattainable, and practically impossible. So PERC’s latest report focuses on adaptation, a concept heretofore deemed either taboo or irrelevant....But adaptation is the name of the game, and market forces are already at work — and have been for a long time, even though they’re seldom heralded by the media. As the latest PERC Reports (Vol. 36, Issue 1, Summer 2017) puts it:
Market prices send signals about local conditions that no central planner or scientific expert could possibly know. Property rights give resource owners the incentives necessary to adjust to changing conditions. If sea levels rise or crop yields decline, property owners have good reason to act — whether to invest in protections or innovations....
"PERC ... is to environmental policy what the Cato Institute is to political and economic policy. All of PERC’s scholars are well-placed experts with impressive credentials.Two of its resident scholars are Liberty editor Randal O’Toole and water policy expert Terry L. Anderson, director of PERC and also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Anderson is the author of a groundbreaking book, Water Crisis: Ending the Policy Drought (1983).... "
"Other PERC reports focus on how privately organized, ground-up, rights-based fishing groups have evolved in Fiji, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Northern Australia, Belize, and other places, protecting near-shore fish and near-shore fishermen’s livelihoods. There are PERC articles assessing the runaway costs of the federal government’s wild horse program, and showing how human-wildlife conflicts were mitigated when elk were reintroduced into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One fascinating piece ... is a contrast between the policies advocated by such environmental organizations as the Wilderness Society and the Audubon Society and the way in which they manage their own properties.
"PERC’s analyses focus on politically achievable and practical ends. The organization’s style is thinktank noncontroversial. The appeal to libertarians is clear."
July 18,2017 - "Here are the conditions under which natural rights libertarians should support a carbon mitigation policy.
The actions of human beings generate carbon emissions significant enough to pose a non-trivial risk of violating property rights (in one’s body or external objects) of persons whom the state has a duty to protect.
A carbon mitigation policy (CMP) will provide an effective protection against the risk.
The CMP will not in itself violate property rights, or take an excessive risk of violating them, because it will generally be targeted at persons or groups that generate problematic carbon emissions (and persons don’t have rights against restraints upon their rights-violating actions), where: a. The CMP coerces the smallest number of people sufficient to deter the emissions; b. The CMP is the least coercive means of deterring the emissions.
No non-governmental, non-rights violating alternative to CMP is socially or politically feasible....
"A complication with condition 1 is that no one person or small group produces enough carbon emissions to pose a non-trivial risk to legitimate property holdings. But this did not prevent Murray Rothbard from arguing that ... these threats should be handled through class-action lawsuits. But appeals to Rothbard aside, it’s clear enough that libertarians should be prepared to hold large, diffuse collectives accountable for property damages....
"Condition 2 is critical because the coercion involved in imposing a CMP can only be justified if it actually protects property rights. Condition 3 is critical because natural rights libertarians are not consequentialists. You cannot justify violating John’s property rights in order to protect Reba’s property rights more effectively.... Condition 4 is critical because if there is a non-coercive, non-governmental solution to a negative externality, the natural rights libertarian will hold that this solution is morally superior to a CMP.... .
"But how can ... anarchist natural rights libertarians, support governmental action to do anything? Well, in lieu of abolishing the state, presumably libertarians ... will insist that states be as just as possible. So if justice requires protecting people from negative externalities, then states should act to protect people from negative externalities....
"I fully acknowledge that a CMP will be imperfect. But the mere fact that it will be imperfect doesn’t mean we should forgo our libertarian duty to support policies that protect property rights, a duty we have even if the costs of protection are large....
"[A] CMP has to impose no greater burden on people, and on no more people, than is required to prevent the rights violation. And it is a virtual certainty that the CMP will be either too stringent or too lax. But that again is not a reason to not have a CMP, any more than the fact that the police are usually too stringent or too lax is a reason not to have them stop thieves and killers....
"However, there is an alternative to a CMP: geo-engineering, such as cloud-seeding with sulfuric compounds, diamond dust, or calcium carbonate, which can prevent rising sea levels by reflecting more sunlight from the Earth. These solutions are in principle far less economically costly than any proposed CMP and are much easier to coordinate (the US could do enough cloud seeding for the whole world all by itself). Moreover, while many climate change activists don’t take geo-engineering seriously and few support it, it is not obviously infeasible that the way in which Rothbardian mass-class-action lawsuits are. Most importantly, geo-engineering solutions appear to violate property rights less in comparison with CMPs....
"Geo-engineering is seriously problematic for lots of reasons. But there is nonetheless still some case for qualifying support for a CMP by making it conditional on the infeasibility or excessive risk of geo-engineering solutions that violate property rights less (if there are any)."
August 8, 2017 - "Blunderdale, a fictitious village located on a river bank, decided to build a levee to save its people (and their homes and businesses) from the devastation of flooding.... [S]cientists informed the flood task force ... that a 4’ levee would be required for protection against most floods, but that an 8’ levee would be required to ensure village safety against all floods. Armed with this sobering advice, the village leaders ... decided that a 2’ levee would be their goal [and] hammered out a plan to construct one from costly and unreliable materials instead of much cheaper and much more available proven materials.... When completed, the exorbitantly expensive structure would be 0.17’ high. Having bamboozled the credulous villagers, they celebrated their victory.
"Most of us would call such leaders despicable morons; in Blunderdale, the village leaders are the village idiots. After all, they are almost as underhanded and scandalously stupid as the world leaders (from 195 of the world’s 196 countries) who concocted the Paris Climate Accord....
"Climate experts (particularly those who support the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]) ... informed them that, on its present course, the earth’s temperature is expected to rise to something in the range of 4.0°C by the end of this century. Some authors insist that an increase of 8.0°C is possible. Even a 2.0°C rise, which many believe is already baked into the climate cake, will soon inundate low-lying population centers (cities such as Miami and nations such as Bangladesh) and create tens of millions of climate refugees....
"But let’s say that mankind implemented ... the Paris Accord. And let’s say that it was scrupulously executed — that is, the emissions reductions pledges of all 195 nations were fully met, annually, through the end of the century. What would be the cost? According to Bjorn Lomborg, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 trillion. This staggering amount includes lost GDP growth, increased taxes (e.g., $3 trillion to pay for subsidies over the next 25 years), and higher household electricity expenses. A Heritage Foundation study of the effects of the Paris agreement on only the US economy, and only through 2035, found that there would be an overall annual average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs (200,000 manufacturing jobs), a total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four, an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion, and increases in household electricity expenditures of between 13% and 20%.
"What is the expected effectiveness of the plan?... An analysis by Lomborg found that fastidious adherence to the agreement, maintained throughout the century, would reduce the global temperature rise by 0.17°C. An MIT analysis found a similar result, 0.2°C. Thus, if the end-of-century temperature rise is the mass extinction-causing 4°C that the signatories believe will occur without the Paris accord , then, with the Paris accord, the end-of-century temperature rise will shrink to only, well, a mass extinction-causing 4°C.
"With full knowledge that their plan would have absolutely no influence on diminishing catastrophic global warming, the leaders from 195 countries signed the Paris accord. Having surreptitiously united the world behind a $100 trillion scheme that would be of no help to Mother Earth, if she even notices, they celebrated their achievement."
June 17, 2017 - "On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement.... Unfortunately, the PBS documentary neglected to mention that in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake – and it cost millions of people their lives....
"According to Carson, children suffered sudden death, aplastic anemia, birth defects, liver disease, chromosomal abnormalities, and leukemia – all caused by DDT. And women suffered infertility and uterine cancer.... Carson made it clear that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen – she was talking about something that had happened.....
"In May 1963, Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a 'Pesticide Commission' to regulate the untethered use of DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately banned DDT....
"Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed – and continues to kill – more people than any other: malaria....
"Since the mid 1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use.
"Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed.... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented – far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place....
"In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease."
June 12, 2017 - "Because the inaccurately named Center for American Progress has chosen to defend the impediments that government places in its own path regarding public works, it has done [Philip K.] Howard the favor of rekindling interest in something he wrote in 2015....
"In September 2015, Howard, founder and chair of the reform advocacy group Common Good, published a paper 'Two Years Not Ten Years: Redesigning Infrastructure Approvals.'
"In it, he argued that
America could modernize its infrastructure, at half the cost, while dramatically enhancing environmental benefits, with a two-year approval process. Our analysis shows that a six-year delay in starting construction on public projects costs the nation over $3.7 trillion, including the costs of prolonged inefficiencies and unnecessary pollution.
This is more than double the $1.7 trillion needed through the end of this decade to modernize America's infrastructure.
"The nation that built the Empire State Building in 410 days during the Depression and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime recently took nine years just for the permitting of a San Diego desalination plant.
"Five years and 20,000 pages of environmental assessments and permitting and regulatory materials were consumed before beginning to raise the roadway on New Jersey's Bayonne Bridge, a project with, as Howard says, 'virtually no environmental impact (it uses existing foundations and right-of-way).' Fourteen years were devoted to the environmental review for dredging the Port of Savannah....
"In 2011, shippers using the inland waterway system of canals, dams and locks endured delays amounting to 25 years. In 2012, the Treasury Department estimated that traffic congestion wasted 1.9 billion gallons of gasoline annually. Diverting freight to trucks because of insufficient railway capacity quadruples fuel consumption....
"Twenty months after Howard published his article, the CAP's response shows how far we have defined efficiency down: It celebrates the fact that federal environmental statements average only 4.6 years.
"Actually, that would be bad enough if such reviews were all or even most of the problem. Actually, there are other kinds of reviews and other layers of government involved, as with the Bayonne Bridge – 47 permits from 19 federal, state and local agencies."
February 26, 2017 - "Trump did the U.S. as well as the rest of the free world a favour in dumping the Trans-Pacific Partnership.... Obama wanted TPP as a legacy issue partly to fetter the free market and partly to establish his 'Asian pivot,' a dubious project involving the abandonment of allies elsewhere in order to bring China to heel....
"Obama ... was merely echoing his 2015 National Security Strategy that affirmed that trade deals are often motivated more by foreign policy considerations than economic benefits.... America’s free trade agreements ... have typically been motivated more by geopolitical than economic considerations, whether to bolster an ally’s economy, as was the case with Israel, or to secure co-operation in the fight against terror, as with the Bahrain, Morocco and Oman FTAs. They serve a foreign policy goal of locking countries into the U.S. sphere of interest.
"They also serve economic goals, allowing them to be sold to the public on their economic merits, and justifiably so. The deregulation, lower tariffs and expanded markets that trade deals usher in generally create more winners than losers. Obama’s TPP version of free trade, though, was different. While it would have delivered the goods by lowering tariffs and vastly expanding markets — TPP would have encompassed countries representing 40 per cent of the globe’s GDP and 33 per cent of world trade — it also would have bound the parties to policies and philosophies anathema to true free-trade regimes.
"'TPP puts American workers first by ... requiring all countries to meet core, enforceable labor standards as stated in the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work,' the Obama White House announced upon reaching agreement on the TPP’s terms.... Under TPP, the trade advantages developing countries now offer in the form of lower wages and informal work environments would have been undercut by their need to conform to ILO requirements on minimum wages, hours of work and unionization....
"The economies of developed countries such as Canada, too, would have been undercut by TPP through 'the highest environmental standards of any trade agreement in history,' as the White House announced.... This, along with TPP’s high-sounding provisions to 'promote sustainable development and inclusive economic growth' creates openings to arbitrarily attack resource projects, as Canada has learned to its sorrow through economically senseless restrictions on oilsands and pipeline developments.
"In cancelling TPP, Trump cancelled the TPP’s ability to undermine the free market and the sovereignty of countries representing 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. That’s a blow against the regulatory state and for economic freedom, one no free marketer should lament."
January 28, 2016 - "It is the season for American film awards, and the glitterati are all abuzz with adoration for The Revenant, which won a Golden Globe for best picture and is nominated for 12 Oscars. As usual, Hollywood’s stars are using their work as a platform to bash capitalism. The Revenant director Alejandro Iñárritu stated in a Guardian interview that his film attempts to portray the roots of capitalism, about the single-minded attempt to profit from the cutting of trees and the killing of animals and exploitation of the natives. Still further, according to Iñárritu, the early 19th century frontier life is the foundation for many of the ills of contemporary capitalism: 'This is the seed, for me, of the capitalism that we live in now: completely inconsiderate of any consequences for nature.'
"Leonardo DiCaprio (who stars as the film’s protagonist) ... used the stage to decry corporate exploitation of native people. Ravina Bains, associate director of aboriginal policy at the Fraser Institute, has written ... about DiCaprio’s comments, and suggests that we might more profitably begin by considering the [lack] of private property rights [for] native populations, rather than corporate exploitation.
"Capitalism is an economic system that depends on institutional arrangements, namely the rule of law and private property rights (there are others, but those two are foundational). Early 19th century America had neither of these things in the way we think of them now. The frontiersmen preceded the rule of law (or its enforcement), and it was unclear precisely how to think of Native American property rights. The vast tracts of land were thought of as limitless resources owned by no one....
"Indeed, the absence of private property rights ... creates a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario where no one is motivated to protect resources and everyone is motivated to get as much as they can before others. This is quite graphically portrayed in The Revenant, with groups of trappers sitting amongst piles and piles of bloody beaver hides... [I]t was the absence of property rights and a lack of respect for the native’s property rights (not 'capitalism') that resulted in the massive overkilling. (Similarly, the burning of the Amazon rainforest for cattle ranching and farming can be better explained by the absence of private property rights than a sort of 'capitalism gone wild.')
"One of the fictions about Native American Indians is that they lived peaceful lives with no notion of private property before the arrival of western Europeans. But war amongst native tribes was common, and we know that the supposed collectivism was a myth. Native Americans had personal property rights (in artifacts such as weapons and clothing) and land-use rights (for farming, hunting and fishing) even if those rights were sometimes seasonal and based on a nomadic lifestyle.
"Native people and those struggling in poverty in the developing world are done a great disservice by DiCaprio, Ińárritu and others who trot out the tired (and wrong) clichés about capitalism. For, as Richard Pipes, Thomas Bethell and Hernando de Soto (amongst many others) have argued, it is capitalism (and its attendant institutions of private property and the rule of law) that can best improve their lives."
"Who's the greatest polluter of all? The oil companies? The chemical companies? The nuclear power plants? If you guessed 'none of the above,' you'd be correct. Our government, at the federal, state, and local levels, is the single greatest polluter in the land. In addition, our government doesn't even clean up its own garbage! In 1988, for example, the EPA demanded that the Departments of Energy and Defense clean up 17 of their weapons plants which were leaking radioactive and toxic chemicals -- enough contamination to cost $100 billion in clean-up costs over 50 years! The EPA was simply ignored. No bureaucrats went to jail or were sued for damages. Government departments have sovereign immunity.
"In 1984, a Utah court ruled that the U.S. military was negligent in its nuclear testing, causing serious health problems (e.g. death) for the people exposed to radioactive fallout. The Court of Appeals dismissed the claims of the victims, because government employees have sovereign immunity....
"By turning to government for environmental protection, we've placed the fox in charge of the hen house -- and a very large hen house it is! Governments, both federal and local, control over 40% of our country's land mass. Unfortunately, government's stewardship over our land is gradually destroying it."
February 6, 2014 - "The Canada Revenue Agency is currently conducting extensive audits on some of Canada's most prominent environmental groups to determine if they comply with guidelines that restrict political advocacy, CBC News has learned.
"If the CRA rules that the groups exceeded those limits, their charitable status could be revoked, which would effectively shut them down.
"Many of the groups are among the Conservative government's fiercest critics. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty signalled clearly in his budget of 2012 that political activity of these groups would be closely monitored and he allocated $8 million to the effort. The environmental organizations believe they have been targeted with the goal of silencing their criticism....
"CBC has confirmed that at least one group, Environmental Defence, has received its report back from the CRA and they are appealing it. Sources said their report threatened to revoke their charitable status....
"Most groups on this list would not talk on the record, but sources say executive directors of these groups are meeting regularly by phone to discuss a united response to the government."
September 9, 2013 - "'Most of us don't trust the environmental movement because they've cried wolf forever and ever,' Wisconsin Libertarian Party chair Paul Ehlers told a surprised local media over the weekend. 'There are all kinds of philosophical disagreements, but at the end of the day this was pretty much a no-brainer.'
"Ehlers was discussing his party's endorsement of a proposal by local clean energy group RENEW to enable the state’s electricity customers to lease solar panels and other domestic-size renewable energy generators.... RENEW Wisconsin spearhead The Clean Energy Choice Initiative, which argues that most energy customers in the state cannot afford to install solar panels, and is calling for third-parties to pay for their installations and sell the energy produced to the customer.
"In a state where the government is Republican-controlled, the backing of the Libertarians could help such a green proposal gain traction. 'What we’re proposing doesn’t involve a new mandate or an extension of existing mandates,' said RENEW Wisconsin’s program and policy director, Michael Vickerman. 'It’s not in any way related to existing or future subsidies. It’s not an intrusion in the marketplace. It’s actually a liberation of the marketplace. So we felt this issue should fit in their wheelhouse.'"
