December 16, 2002
Last week I wrote about how the media covers environmental issues and how generalizations are made, either with no facts or with facts not given in context. On December 4, CBC aired a segment of The Fifth Estate entitled "Hot Air". With all the arrogance of a liberal media elite, host Bob McKeown proclaimed that the program would enable viewers to better understand the process of climate change that is behind the Kyoto Protocol. All the show managed to do was to illustrate the doom and gloom scenario that those on the left so love and to bash the oil industry and Alberta.
Although some of those interviewed to describe the complex process of climate change were scientists, many were not. A woman in the U.K. who belongs to the environmental group, Friends of the Earth, was interviewed and asked her opinions on environmental matters. Being a member of an environmental organization doesn’t give a person any expertise to provide informed scientific opinions, any more than a non smoking activist is necessarily qualified to talk about the medical effects of second hand smoke.
U.S. author Jeremy Rifkin was also interviewed and was identified by McKeown as "an author who specializes in trends that will shape the future". While Rifkin, a darling of the left, is no doubt an original thinker with interesting ideas, his degrees in economics and international relations hardly qualify him as a scientist. What the CBC did not say about Rifkin, who is known in some circles as a professional scaremonger, is that he is anti-capitalism, anti-globalization and most importantly, anti-technology. Much like CBC, he does little to hide his biases. If the people’s network was really concerned about Canadian content, they would have interviewed Naomi Klein instead. The program stated the pessimistic prediction that the earth’s temperature may rise 5 degrees Celsius, by the year 2100. By having an anti-technology guru like Rifkin on the program, the possibility of great changes in technology in the next hundred years, did not have to be considered.
But at least there was some Canadian content. A representative from the insurance industry spoke about heavy losses the industry incurred in the late 1990s including a record $5.5 billion for the ice storm in 1998. The representative went on to say "we think that’s a sense of the future--that those large losses in the late 1990s are going to happen more often in Canada." How’s that for furthering the understanding of climate change? He is, of course entitled to his opinion, but that’s all it was. It hardly helps those who are trying to understand climate change.
The real gist of the program was not Kyoto, but to allow CBC and host McKeown to vent their anti-business, anti-oil and anti-Alberta rhetoric. When Alberta’s Environment Minister, Lorne Taylor stated that the South Saskatchewan River ran dry in 1862, long before global warming, McKeown snottily stated, "That’s what you might expect to hear from a province that has become Canada’s richest, thanks to the oil industry". There was not even an attempt to hide an extreme left wing bias. Where does McKeown think his salary comes from?
President George W. Bush was described as "oilman George Bush" and when a group of Alberta oil industry executives met with the prime minister last September, it was described as "a posse of oilmen" descending on Jean Chretien. A posse! Do you think for one moment that CBC would ever describe a meeting between socially assisted women with children and a government member as a posse of welfare mothers? Of course not.
With a puzzled expression on his animated face, Bob McKeown asked Environment Minister David Anderson, "If the oil and gas sector is NOT going to be significantly affected [by the implementation of Kyoto], individual consumers will have to make up the slack--we’ll pay for it?" Anderson agreed that that’s the way it will be. Everyone is going to have to pay for Kyoto--not just the big bad oil companies.
The program really wasn’t about Kyoto and climate change. It was about bashing the west and the oil industry. At least they got the title right--it was "Hot Air".
Arthur Weinreb is a lawyer and author and Associate Editor of Canadafreepress.com
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