Cow farts, Chairman Mo and the “tiny perfect Minister”

Peter Foster is blogging from the Globe Conference in Vancouver. As might be expected his reports are chock-a-block with great insights and hilarious lines:

Well, here I am, possibly the only climate change skeptic and sustainability naysayer at the huge Globe Biennial Trade Fair and Conference in beautiful downtown Vancouver.

I ... plan to keep my eye out for humour, hoping that something may crop up to equal TransAlta’s purchase a couple of conferences ago of emissions credits based on restraining Ugandan cows’ farts. You can’t make stuff like that up. Which is one of the reasons why I’m here.

.... noted the absence of one of this conference’s greatest supporters, Maurice Strong, who is apparently confined, for health reasons, to his home in Beijing. Since Beijing is one of the smoggiest cities on earth, and Mr. Strong is a severe asthmatic, this is a somewhat strange hidey hole for Chairman Mo. Presumably it is the bracing air of Communist rule in which his lungs rejoice ...

... one of my favourite analogies for the non-likelihood of governments being able to promote new technologies is that of the drunk looking under the lamppost for his car keys..... You can imagine my surprise and delight, therefore, when I came across Canada’s tiny perfect Minister of Natural Resources, Gary Lunn, standing Thursday under a solar lamppost!

... a stunning $3.6-billion that the .... government is “investing” in so-called ecoENERGY projects. These are designed both to teach dim-bulb Canadians how to save their money, and to promote technologies that seem, by definition, to be economically”unsustainable,” since they can’t hack it without subsidies.

It’s too bad Peter doesn’t have a speaking part at the conference.

Update: Sustainability - it's for the children:

Do you love your children? Then you must be for sustainable development.

... Could anything be more bizarre than the concept of destroying the jobs of present parents so that those jobs might somehow, magically, be teleported to their great-grandchildren? Is there a more obvious and objectionable strategy for writing off your intellectual opponents than implying that they lack the love for their children that you have for yours?