Prevention VS Correction

I was hoping to make this a short one today but then I got typing…

I just read the following on AP:

Associated Press

March 10, 2009 at 10:16 AM EDT

COPENHAGEN — Top climate scientists meeting in Copenhagen say sea levels could rise twice as much as previously projected.

They added that low-lying coastal areas housing one-tenth of the world's population would be flooded unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed substantially.

A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a sea level rise of 18 to 58 centimetres by the end of the century. But experts at a three-day conference said that sea-level rise could exceed one metre and is unlikely to be less than 50 centimetres.

The conclusions of the conference will be presented to politicians meeting in December to discuss a new global agreement on emissions.

Uh, yeah… All I can think of this: “How much would it have cost the US economy to have regulated the financial system so that recent meltdown didn’t occur?”

It’s not like there weren’t people in the industry warning people at the top about it, we’ve been seeing one after another appear on shows like 60 Minutes since October 08 (and people like Niall Ferguson and recent Canadian MP Garth Turner even wrote books about the coming financial crisis years ago). So what would it have cost the US taxpayer and the US economy to have put those regulations and such in place BEFORE there was a problem?

I’m going to be generous here and say it would’ve been a virtual figure of around $100 Billion. Now that sounds like a lot and just running around during the hey day of the wealth boom screaming “Do this and you’ll cost us a hundred Billion dollars in lost revenue!” probably would’ve been enough to keep any Bill passing into Law, certainly with the robber barons of the Bush/Chenney White House in charge.

But the cost of doing nothing until its too late is already at $3 Trillion Dollars, which is just for America, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work or get the economy moving again. The final bill could be $10 Trillion because really, you know some of what they're trying isn’t going to work because no one has ever had to kick start an economy so badly broken as the current US/World economy.

And that brings me to my point. Liberal leader Stephane Dion was soundly rejected in the last Federal election. Now admittedly a lot of it was self-inflicted because let’s face it the guy was at best a substitute teacher and at worse a weenie. But the issue the Harperites focused on the most was the Green Shift/Carbon Tax. As though shifting our economy toward something that punished polluters was going to cost the Canadian taxpayer $100 Billion.

Meanwhile we’ve just had a winter, from coast to coast, that has been filled with inconsistencies and brutal reminders of the power of mother nature. And anyone tracking weather trends lately will tell you that we’ve had more and more unstable weather. Unstable weather doesn’t just ruin our day, or screw up our vacation plans, it also makes agriculture really hard. Shorter growing seasons affect yields. Planning for normal patterns and growing wheat but getting weather better suited to strawberries when that’s not what you have in the ground is very bad for us.

And it’s not just Canada. The whole world is facing a growing food crisis.

Then there’s the coastlines. Interesting other bit of intel I can share with you is that last year Denmark earmarked 160+ Billion dollars to raise up their shoreline. That’s the country that has reclaimed countless hectares of land from the sea by building dikes and because they’ve realized the big polluters aren’t going to reform quickly enough they’re taking steps NOW to ensure that the looming disaster of rising tides is something they can deal with.

But Denmark only has 7,500 kilometres of shoreline. Canada has some 243,000 kilometers of coastline! And more than 10 percent of our population is living in coastal areas. Areas that could find themselves under a meter of water! Which doesn’t seem like much until you step out of bed one morning and get a soaker AND YOU’RE FIVE KILOMETERS FROM THE COAST!

And I recall at least twice in the last five years now that the Red River in Manitoba has flooded. Big time flooding. I mean, they’ve had systems in place for years to deal with the flooding and those were overwhelmed!

So I can’t help link the two thoughts and ask you this. When we’re paying triple for food because the farmers can’t get yields, or when we’ve got to rescue and relocate nearly 3 million refugee Canadians from the coast won’t the 100 Billion dollars the fear mongers/anti-environmentalists warned us about seem like a hell of a deal?