Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.

Wulf responded:

Rammage, this is an easy one. China is polluting more because they are turning to corporatism. They used to lub the environment, until wasteful Americans shipped them Cokes and Nikes and corrupted their leaders.

He’s right of course. When the People’s Republic of China began their economic reform in 1978 towards a market-oriented economy, they abandoned the Left’s love of a centrally-planned economy. In effect, becoming less Soviet-esque and becoming more [ptooey] Americanized.

No where is this attitude more obvious in the currently airing Sundance movie "Mardi gras: Made in China."

It's typical for one of their documentaries: juxtapositioning white-guilt American indulgence with the poverty-laden Chinese sweatshop workers making the beads. It's so wonderful. It really gets you into the mind of a Leftist. The Left has seemingly already found an answer to the hypocrisy: It's not China's fault for polluting, it's American Consumerism that is to blame. If not for the evil American capitalist pigs, the Chinese would have no need for massive, polluting factories churning out plastic crap like Mardi gras beads. The Chinese are doing nothing wrong; it’s American excesses that are to blame.

I have been postponing writing about this anti-globalization documentary because there were just so many directions to take with it:

• The fact that the left is so fractioned, i.e. the social personal freedoms of Mardi gras versus the labor that makes them possible.
• Or maybe just comment about what the Chinese workers would be doing now if not for working in the bead factory.
• Or maybe just the fact that someone like me watches these documentaries and says to himself, "Wow, this is great, unfolding exactly as things should." It's horrific for the anti-capitalists who are making money on the made the film, but all I can see are people working for the betterment of their lives and hopefully, someday, their country and standard of living.
• Or maybe just question why they are attacking the consumers, instead of the Communist government that flirts with the free market but will not commit.
• Or, I don’t know, ask about how many pieces of the filmmaker’s camera parts were made in China, and did the filmmaker’s spend more money on camera equipment that was made in America, or choose the lowest priced equipment regardless of where it was manufactured.

So many directions to take, so little time. So, I’ll leave it to the reader to view the film and judge for him/herself. That is, of course, if you can guarantee that no part of your television was made in China.

I am not sure if Mark Steyn saves his comments for an extended period, so I wanted to reproduce it here:

NEW FATAL TRENDS As a keen climatology student in the early 1970's I dutifully quoted the peer-reviewed journals in their conclusions that the planet was doomed unless industry could be stopped from emitting all those particulates and aerosols which were blocking the sun's saving warmth from penetrating the atmosphere. One scientist took pains to demonstrate that no foreseeable amount of increased CO2 would be enough to offset the fatal trend that we were on.

A generation later, that same scientist and thousands like him have embraced the opposite "consensus", and I suppose if I looked long and hard enough I could find someone claiming in a peer-reviewed paper that no amount of emission of particulates and aerosols would be enough to offset the new, opposite fatal trend.

Adapt, move or perish. Those have been mankind's choices as the world's climate has cycled between cooling and warming, as it always has. The self-righteous ecochondriacs fantasize that if others would only embrace their prescribed brand of self-denial the planet would reach climatic equilibrium for the first time ever. Self-abasing guilt-ridden consumers and opportunistic politicians seem willing to substitute this new religion for the inconvenient old one of being good stewards mindful of the ten commandments. And why not? A little sacrifice on my part, perhaps nothing more than spending an extra $5000 on a hybrid SUV which will never recoup in fuel savings the extra money that I spent, and I can feel more holy than my neighbors, and do so publicly.

The futility of our little gestures is never calculated against the sheer volume of CO2 in the carbon cycle, the uncertainty in the climate models of everyday forcings such as cloud cover, changes in vegetation and water vapour, or the increased CO2 emissions that will accompany the use of coal from the 200 new coal mines China is opening in the next 5 years. The fact that the rate of temperature change in the last 30 years matches the rate of change that preceded the mid-century cooling anomaly is ignored.

Worshipping at the altar of climate change seems to require earnestness and genuine sacrifice, but the fruits of this religion will amount to nothing more than the satisfaction of having done something purely symbolic. Requiring genuine sacrifice for merely symbolic ends isn't much of a basis for public policy.

A couple of more cold winters in Europe and eastern North America will cool the global warming zealotry. I predict it will be replaced by fears of "extreme weather", fueled by clashes between warmer air over here caused by CO2, and colder air over there caused by particulates and aerosols. All bad weather can be blamed on this phenomenon, and so it will be.

Sadly, due to other societal changes we are running out of virgins to throw into the volcano.

Stuart Elliot, Edmonton, Canada