PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

It’s time for unity
in softwood talks

by Dave Haggard

; industry got nailed with a 12.58
/ percent across-the-board anti-
dumping duty on October 31
by our supposed friends in the
J United States, the whole
country gasped. Most lumber producers in
Canada have been living under a 19.31 percent
countervailing duty since mid-August.

How could the Americans treat us like this?
Aren’t we supporting them in their “war on
terrorism?” How can they punish their number
one trading partner’s most important economic
sector with 32% in combined duties? Don’t we
live in the era of “free trade”?

Well, first of all, most Canadians have nothing
against the vast majority of Americans. We are
cousins, brothers, sisters, and all the rest. We
are tied to the Americans socially and
economically in more ways than many of us
realize. And we have nothing against American
workers; they are, like Canadian workers, the
salt of the earth. We have to separate the
American people and the American working

class from our real nemesis:
protectionist companies and
bureaucrats in the U.S.A.
and a handful of
uncompetitive, greedy
companies which want to
knock over the Canadian
forest industry and screw
consumers in the U.S. at
the same time.

What must be our
response for all this? Unity
in Canada, we say.

We are facing a serious
crisis in this country. These
combined tariffs, if they
stick — even for the time
that it takes us to appeal
them to the NAFTA panel
and on to the WTO — will devastate our
membership, their communities and one of the
essential economic pillars of the country.

We must not let the Americans kick us around
on lumber exports, then run to their side when
they call for military support.

Jean Chretien and the federal Liberals have
to put pressure on the Bush administration at
the highest political level to send a message, in
no uncertain terms, that the U.S. must cease
its economic war on our forest industry!

It’s time for the forest industry in different
parts of this country to put aside parochial
interests and not let the U.S. split us up. We
are all in this together. It’s up to the federal

government to ensure a level playing field for

all lumber producers and
not play favorites. The B.C.
government is going down
the wrong path of trying to
reach a side deal with the
Americans. Ottawa should
put the brakes on that and
ensure other governments
do not break rank either.

B.C. has already tried to
capitulate its way into an
agreement with the
Americans, giving up a
whole list of forest policy
changes (see article page
one) which they believe,
either naively or foolishly,
will test the United States’
commitment to “free trade.”
Guess what the protectionist lobby group, the
U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports said
about B.C.’s capitulation to get a deal? Their
chief spokesperson Rusty Wood, said that B.C,
has “put nothing on the table.” The more the
province gives up, the more the Americans
want. They are trade bullies pure and simple.

In addition to creating a level playing field
for all lumber companies the federal government
must not put the issue of log exports on the
table for negotiations with the Americans.
Neither private land log exports nor provincial
log exports must be part of any solution and the
feds must make this clear to all the provinces.

It’s time for unity and purpose in Canada. It’s
not the time to be divided and conquered. m

ANOS ORO ES

New book destroys
green myth-making.

by Kim Pollock

(77 ere’s a book by self-described “old
left-wing Greenpeace member.” On
top of that, a statistician.
This guy has written a book, “The
Skeptical Environmentalist,” that
is one of the most useful and

things you might ever read.

Bjorn Lomborg does nothing short of shoot
holes through much of the “received truth” of
green extreme groups the world over.

Lomborg, a Danish academic, starts with
what he calls the Litany: the long list of
environmental disasters and man-made horrors
with which environmentalists terrorize people
daily. He then proceeds to debunk them, using
statistical methods and a vast array of the most
up-to-date evidence.

It quickly becomes clear just how much of
what environmentalists “know” is hearsay,
“weird science” or just plain wrong. All human
knowledge, after all, is simply constructed
in the realm of ideas: it consists of someone’s
belief about what proves what, what is or is
not “evidence.” From that standpoint anyone’s
ideas are potentially as good as anyone else’s,
so we shouldn’t just take one person’s word
for it.

All of us, for instance, have a cousin or one of
our spouses’ relatives who is constantly on
about how we’re destroying the earth, nature’s
disappearing, ecosystems are collapsing, we
are living on borrowed time, consuming too
much, yada, yada, yada. Let’s call this one
Cousin Yada.

You know Cousin Yada is wrong, but you’ve
never had the time to sit down and explain
why. Maybe you don’t actually know why, but
you know it, all the same.

Well, Lomborg has now done it for you. And,
says he, youre right: next Thanksgiving, you
will win the argument.

Instead of simply taking at face value the
claims greens make, Lomborg actually tests
them logically and statistically.

In the area of human welfare, for instance,
Lomborg finds contrary to the green Litany
that people are better off, healthier, better fed,
better housed, better educated and wealthier

than at any time in the
past. That goes for both
the developing world
and the _ developed
countries. Not that there
not are still serious
problems, especially in
‘|sub-Saharan Africa
where economic progress
is slow, social strife
_|rampant and AIDS
\ | unchecked. But on the

| whole, Lomborg suggests,
“things are not every-
where good, but they are
better than they used to be.”

But not for long, Cousin Yada replies. It’s not
sustainable and we’re already reaching the
limits.

No, says Lomborg: Food production and
agricultural yields are actuelly rising faster
than world population. Prices are declining.
Soil erosion is not as high

Not so, Lomborg replies. With respect to air
pollution in Western industrial nations, he
shows, levels of the most dangerous toxic
compounds as well as lead, ozone and airborne
particles have fallen dramatically in the past
twenty to thirty years.

Lomborg agrees that the crowded megacities
of the third-world are the most polluted places
on earth. But even there, he holds out hope: as
industrial output increases, incomes potentially
rise and the amount of toxic emissions per
capita fall because a greater part of the working
population can shift to services or public services.
Just as pollution has fallen drastically in once-
grungy London since the nineteenth century,
we should expect similar falls in Mexico City or
Calcutta in the coming decades.

Garbage? Lomborg’s startling conclusion is
that the entire twenty-first-century waste
production of the U.S. will fit in a single 18-
mile-square landfill occupying about 0.009
percent of its total area.

as earlier predicted,
lessening over time and
having little impact on
yields. There may be
some decline in some
fisheries, but human
beings are replacing that
with farmed fish: in any
event, fish contributes
only 1 percent of human
food and 6 percent of

Life is improving for very
many of the world’s population
and the means are available to

provide a decent life for many more.

Species extinction?
Lomborg shows the
baselessness of the
much-quoted “40,000
extinctions per year
and he debunks it
connection to rain-
forest depletion or
general habitat
reduction. In the
United States, he

protein.

Lomborg finds that we are not destroying the
world’s forests to satisfy our needs for wood and
paper. In fact, the regeneration alone on just 5
percent of the world’s forests will satisfy our
annual needs for the foreseeable future. And
though there is evidence of rapid transformation
of tropical forests, the rate is about half a
percent per year, far lower than the 1.5 - 2
percent claimed by groups like the World
Wildlife Fund. Global forest cover has been
almost constant since the 1940s and “80 percent
of the original rainforest is still intact.”

Even acid rain is not the killer it once was
thought to be. With sodium dioxide emissions
falling by 50 percent in Germany since the
1980s, acid rain is “simply not the terrible
threat we were told it was,” Lomborg concludes.

The world, Lomborg finds, is not heading for
an energy crisis. Nor are our others resources
being depleted: there are sufficient long-term
supplies of metals, key components of fertilizer
and even water. Prices for the majority of
important industrial inputs are falling, not
increasing.

Yes, but we are polluting ourselves out of

existence, replies our Green Friend.

notes, “the eastern
forest was reduced over two centuries to
fragments totaling just 1-2 percent of their
original areas, causing the “extinction of just
one forest bird.” Global warming? Another
overrated problem and one for which many of
the proposed cures — reduced economic growth,
substantial cuts in fossil-fuel use - would be
vastly worse that the problem, Lomberg warns:
“When we fear for our environment, we seem
easily to fall victim to a short-term, feel-good
solution which spends money on relatively
trifling issues and thus hold back resources
from far more important ones.”

In conclusion, Lomborg suggests that we stop
our hand-wringing. Environment is an important
problem but only. one of many. Life for very
many of the world’s population is improving
and the means - the Green Revolution, pollution
abatement, science, technology and modern
medicine, to name a few — are available to
provide a decent life for many more. But we
need to stop wasting our time and resources on
green non-issues.

Pass the potatoes and gravy, cousin Yada.

Kim Pollock is the Director of Environment and
Public Policy for I.W.A. Canada.

4/LUMBERWORKER/NOVEMBER, 2001