The Sixth Estate

I’ve finally discovered why National Post “columnist” Lawrence Solomon is such an avid climate change denialist: he’s also and more important, a morally stunted bigot. That’s the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from his inspiring Christams column, “Godless Societies are Unfit for Survival.”

It’s not what you might think at first. According to Solomon, any society that believes in a God — any god or gods, it doesn’t particularly matter — is a superior society. Any society that doesn’t, is an inferior one: either an evil murderous one like North Korea (incidentally, not an atheist country), or a “non-progressing” one (his concept), like the African Pygmies.

I can’t decide whether Solomon doesn’t actually believe in any gods, and just thinks it’s a useful lie that elites like himself should perpetrate in order to maintain social order, on whether he really  is so incredibly, unbelievably, criminally stupid that he thinks religious beliefs have value just because they’re religious.

As a matter of fact, most of the world’s major religions have at some point engaged in vicious and bloody struggles to eradicate the other ones. There are still Christians, Jews, and Muslims who cling to the belief that their God will help them exterminate their rivals and cleanse their holy lands, who will shortly thereafter subject those enemies to an eternal punishment in hell. I need hardly point out that there is something seriously morally questionable about believing that one of these faiths has it right, let alone (as Solomon claims to believe) that all of them do.

No sooner was the metaphorical ink drying on my attack on National Post faux-environmentalist Lawrence Solomon’s paranoid conspiracy theory that climate change is being perpetrated by insurance companies as an excuse to jack up their premiums, that I realized I would have to return to the same deposit of BS and retrieve a sample from his comrade-in-arms, Terence Corcoran. Corcoran usually works the finance beat on the opinion pages, and why he occasionally sallies forth into environmental issues, almost unfailingly very badly, I can’t imagine.

Corcoran’s diatribe picks up on a Solomonic meme, claiming that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for years now has been denounced by the climate change denialist crowd as the Great Satan behind modern environmentalism, is now backing away from its previous claims that human carbon emissions are driving climate change. He has three arguments to support this claim, and they range from the merely preposterous to the unnecessarily deceitful.

The “text” Corcoran is working from, incidentally, is an unpolished final draft manuscript of the executive summary of the real IPCC report, which isn’t due out until next February. We hardly need a better example of why the average contemporary journalist isn’t qualified to report on scientific issues that Corcoran and Solomon apparently feel this is the best imaginable way of commenting on climate change science.

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Lawrence Solomon, the anti-democratic oaf employed by the National Post to make spurious claims about the falsehoods of climate change, has a new and even more bizarre conspiracy theory about climate change. In the past, I have grown familiar with Solomon and his ilk claiming that climate change isn’t real, that socialists are rigging the debate, and even that would-be carbon traders like Al Gore are trying to scam us into making them billions of dollars. But in his latest column Solomon ascends to new heights of paranoia and ridiculousness:

The insurance industry has been behind the global-warming fraud since the 1970s… The insurance industry wants more money to cover its poor stock picks.

The insurance industry is powerful indeed, if it not only managed to get in on the ground floor of the climate change lobby forty years ago (as Solomon claims) but that, still talking forty years ago here, they realized they would be making “poor stock picks” during the 2007-2008 recession and would need an excuse to jack up their rates to restore profitability. And anyways, since when did insurance companies need an excuse to up our rates?

I’ve been wondering for some time now what would happen when insurance companies decided climate change was a serious enough risk to build into their rate calculations. This has been a turninng point in social movements before — in the provision of running tap water, for instance, which had the helpful side effect of creating a legion of fire hydrants. I guess I was overly optimistic. It turns out they just get slotted into their place in the conspiracy. As with the Conservative paranoia about Liberals, we are witnessing the creation of a profound, grand conspiracy theory which has the dual effects of creating a fount of magic knowledge for misguided followers to rally around, and a ready-made tool for instantly (if spuriously) discrediting any criticism.

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In the past, National Post columnist and Energy Probe propagandist Larry Solomon has only rarely crossed the line from odious personal opinion (e.g. young people shouldn’t vote) into blatant falsehood (e.g. that the United Nations claimed in 2005 that most small islands would be submerged by 2010). This week he ventured back into that unfortunate region, and I am beginning to wonder whether the entire Energy Probe organization (which Solomon writes for) is just a front group for grumpy old men with an inexplicable hatred of anything that doesn’t pollute. Seriously.

The subject of this two-minutes’-hate is Solomon’s idiotic announcement yesterday than wind power took another big hit this week in Washington state, where the Bonneville Power Authority has had to temporarily scale back power production from, among other things, the wind power plants. Solomon says that’s because during unexpectedly high wind surges, they have to turn off the windmills so that water doesn’t spill over the hydroelectric dams elsewhere along the Columbia River and hurt the salmon. Um, what? Unsurprisingly Solomon has missed a basic fact:

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Unfortunately, that’s not an option on this year’s ballot. You can vote to defund the CBC — that’s what the Conservatives hope to do with their majority (that and make Terry Milewski disappear, I suspect). But you can’t vote to defund the National Post. All you can do is never give them money or click on their ads, which I definitely advise you to do.

Following up hard on the heels of what easily qualifies as the Worst Column Ever, Lawrence Solomon’s advice that people shouldn’t vote and that young people definitely shouldn’t vote, today the Post brought the crazy in the form of two ludicrous new pieces. In one, Solomon (already on record as a climate change denier) claims that we are in the midst of a spectacular outbreak of “global cooling.” In the other, Bill Morrison says that too many people go to university already, it’s a waste of tax money, and we certainly shouldn’t let the liberal-leftists send any more. And we certainly shouldn’t spend taxpayer money building new universities so people can get educated in their home communities instead of “another part of the country.”

Solomon, as I’ve previously covered, is just an idiot. Morrison’s topic is more harmless (no one turns to the Post for advice on education policy), but it is certainly more hypocritical. You see, I know of Bill Morrison. I know that he most of his entire career teaching as a professor in a publicly funded university, and I know that he spent the latter part of that career in a public university which was specifically built so that people in northern BC didn’t have to travel to “another part of the country” to go to school.

The last week has been very educational for those who believed the mainstream media might have a few shreds of integrity left. The ridiculously contrived attacks published in serious papers against the NDP — that they plan to nationalize the entire economy in accord with a secret constitution, for instance — make the Jack Layton rub-and-tug affair look positively credible in comparison. One of my chief enemies, Lawrence Solomon, takes the cake though. I wondered who would be the first in the mainstream media to actually take the past several years’ worth of apathetic, anti-democratic propaganda to its logical extreme and actually tell people not to vote. Well, that long watch is over. Solomon wins!

Here’s Solomon, demonstrating a remarkable combination of cynicism and paranoia that makes him entry number one on my new blacklist of media commentators too idiotic to reason with (to be followed shortly by Ezra Levant, the Patron Saint of Chainsaws):

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I’ve grumbled before about the decline of Energy Probe from an environmentalist organization into a producer of anti-clean energy claptrap. And about its leader, National Post columnist Lawrence Solomon, whose current purpose in life seems to me to be doing as much damage to the world as he can before passing it on to his kids. Today my respect for this professional oaf sunk even further when I discovered, unbelievably, that his latest gambit to discredit climate change is the claim that in 2005 the United Nations predicted that many “small islands,” including Palau, would be submerged within five years. They haven’t sunk, ergo, no climate change!

Naturally Solomon is not able to provide any support for the rather ridiculous assertion that the UN Environmental Programme actually believed islands were going to sink into the sea in just five years. The UN does some damed silly things sometimes, but I can’t imagine even them actually claiming that sea levels were going to rise by metres per year from 2005 to 2010, which it would have to do to swamp all those islands on the schedule you propose. The “report” he claims was the basis for this estimate makes no reference to islands at all, and isn’t even concerned with 2010, beyond a vague off-the-cuff remark that the number of environmental refugees will probably double between 1995 and 2010.

It is fair to assume that Solomon can read, at least well enough to know that he is badly distorting the truth here.

As part of my thesis research two years ago, I spent quite a bit of time poring over old newspapers in Banff, which spent the 1910s and 1920s exhorting tourists to visit the hot springs because the radiation emitted by the radium in the water was good for you. It was amusing (not least because of the insignificant level of radiation) and, I thought, ancient history. Not so. Today National Post columnist Lawrence Solomon has published an inexcusable piece suggesting we don’t need to worry about people living around the Fukushima reactors (or any reactors) because radiation is good for you. What’s even more unforgivable is that he appears to have lifted the idea for this ridiculous column from American muttonhead Ann Coulter.

Absurdly, Solomon chooses now, of all times, to footnote his column with a bio gloss identifying himself as a director of Energy Probe, which I caught two weeks ago attempting to astroturf a very willing Post. Energy Probe is an anti-nuclear organization, so this is a strange position for them to say the least. Unless of course they’re just energy industry sympathizers who will say any old thing that meets the needs of the moment. Solomon also thinks climate change is a myth, so anything he says should obviously be taken with several heaps of salt.

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I had to think carefully about whether I should write this one. I’m not a big fan of Ontario’s environmental policy myself, and not everything the organization I’m going to attack here is really all that bad (once again, in my opinion). But some of it is, and in any case, once again the National Post has wandered into deception territory by failing to disclose the background of an author of an op-ed. This time it’s Parker Gallant, who has penned a screed calling for the dismantling of solar and wind power programs on the grounds that they are too expensive. Apparently he feels that turning Earth into Venus will be a much greater benefit to the economy. And then there’s the gloss:

Parker Gallant is a retired banker who looked at his electricity bills and didn’t like what he saw.

Well, that part is probably true. The bank in question, by the way, is TD Bank (not that it matters). This is lying by omission. Less than a month ago, Gallant was identifying himself in similar letters (his letter-writing campaign now stretches back several months) as a director of Energy Probe. Oddly enough, the organization’s Board page doesn’t say so. Either he’s a very new one and it hasn’t been updated, or he’s a newly-ex one and it has been updated.

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