Why the Globe and Mail Is Mostly Bollocks

A newspaper publisher, you'd think, would aim to make a profit. In fact, the directors of any newspaper owned by a public company have a legal obligation to the shareholders to maximize profit.

However, the Globe and Mail, Canada's self-proclaimed national newspaper, is 85% controlled by the Thomson-family-owned private company, Woodbridge. Perhaps this explains why, instead of publishing news that people might be glad to pay for, it publishes politically correct bollocks about the terrifying incidence (not) of anti-Semitism in Canada, ridiculous war propaganda, and last week, the need for British Columbia to spend billions on a totally uneconomic scheme to eliminate all carbon emissions in the supply of electricity, notwithstanding that British Columbia is among the World's largest producers of green power. Thus, last Thursday, the G and M's British Columbia section led with an article: Hydro policy threatens to collapse climate-change progress, scientist says:

The Clark government appears poised to adopt a new policy that would roll back the province’s requirements to ensure it can meet its domestic electricity needs even in extreme drought conditions.

Andrew Weaver, the Nobel laureate climate scientist, said Wednesday that would be a mistake, forcing the province to rely on imports from coal-fired plants rather than building up the clean energy sector that the province has been seeking to develop under its Clean Energy Act.

Quite scary As Marvin Shafer points out in a commentary at rabble.ca, if true.

But there is no basis for the story that was told and little need to be concerned. There was no science in the scientist's reported remarks. It was sadly just another effort, sponsored by the Independent Power Producers (IPP) lobby, to encourage the government to retain the now widely discredited "self-sufficiency" policy that is forcing BC Hydro to buy more power than it needs to ensure reliable supply.

The policy issue is not, as characterized by Justine Hunter in the Globe, whether BC Hydro should be able to meet its requirements in drought conditions. Of course it must be able to do that. BC Hydro must ensure reliable supply under all water conditions. The issue is how that can best be done.

The government's self-sufficiency policy requires BC Hydro to guard against the risk of drought by entering into long-term firm power purchase contracts with British Columbia IPPs -- power that in many years it will not need and be forced to sell at a loss. It precludes BC Hydro from even considering more cost-effective and in many ways less environmentally damaging options -- in particular relying on the spot market for electricity in those years that its own hydro production is limited by drought.

Oh, and that bit about "Andrew Weaver, the Nobel laureate climate scientist?"

There is no Nobel Prize for climate science.

Professor Andrew Weaver is not a Nobel Prize winner.

The Nobel Prize referred to is not a science prize.

The Nobel Prize the Globe and Mail is talking about is the 2007 Peace Prize, which was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), members of which include 194 countries, but no individuals. In other words, an almost totally meaningless prize that insults 194 countries by association with Al Gore's bogus claims about climate science.

Although thousands of scientists have participated in writing the IPCC's periodic climate change assessment reports, none of them are, or could be, members of the IPCC, which means that none of them are Nobel Prize winners by virtue of their participation in the the preparation of the IPCC's tendentious and scientifically questionable reports.

Other brilliantly inspired choices for the Nobel Peace Prize made by the Norwegian politicians making up the Peace Prize selection committee include Barak Obama (2009), author of various extensions to the war on terror, Menachem Begin (1978), Irgun terrorist, author of the King David Hotel bombing that left 93 dead, and war criminal, Henry Kissinger (1973), author of the mass killing by illegal bombing of Cambodia (1969-1975).