La tricherie de Bombardier

On va se le dire tout de suite. Les participations que le gouvernement prend dans des entreprises privées ou publiques sont des subventions déguisées.

En comptabilité, il y a un principe généralement reconnu qui s'énonce ainsi : "La primauté de la substance économique sur la forme légale".

Or, si on se fie à ce principe, il est aisé d'en arriver à cette conclusion.

Lorsqu'il verse une subvention à une entreprise, le gouvernement n'attend pas un retour sur l'investissement (ROI) conventionnel. Ici, c'est évident parce que la subvention n'est ni un titre de propriété ni un titre de créance.

De plus, la subvention sera versée, dans la plupart des cas, en fonction de critères de qualification ayant tout à voir avec les objectifs du gouvernement/programme et rien à voir avec une quelconque notion de ROI.

En fait, hormis certains objectifs sociaux-économiques, le gouvernement n'a qu'un objectif en tête, la création d'emploi.

D'aucun me diront qu'il s'agit là du ROI pour le gouvernement. C'est sûrement le cas, mais ça ne change rien à l'affaire si on reprend mon assertion de départ: "Lorsqu'il verse une subvention à une entreprise, le gouvernement n'attend pas un retour sur l'investissement (ROI) CONVENTIONNEL"

La création d'emploi amène deux choses au gouvernement :

1- Plus de contribuables à taxer

2- Des votes

Or, Les objectifs de rentabilité des entreprises peuvent diverger fortement de ceux du gouvernement et ainsi induire des comportements d'entreprise pouvant nuire à sa rentabilité et, par conséquent, au ROI.

Les ententes commerciales mondiales sont généralement basées sur la prémisse que les entreprises veulent et doivent prioriser le ROI.

Les règles anti-dumping illustrent très bien cette affirmation.

Normalement, on n'aurait pas besoin d'inscrire ce type de clause dans ces ententes. En effet, une entreprise ne peut vivre longtemps en faisant du dumping. C'est contre nature. De façon très temporaire, ça peut permettre à une entreprise d'aller chercher de nouveaux clients ou de nouveaux marchés, mais c'est insoutenable à moyen ou long terme. Donc, pourquoi indroduire une clause anti-dumping si la stratégie est de toute évidence suicidaire à moyen ou long terme?

En fait, il y a principalement une situation où une entreprise peut faire du dumping indéfiniment sans mettre son existence en péril et c'est quand le gouvernement s'en mêle.

Pour atteindre son objectif de création d'emploi ou, tout simplement, pour ne pas perdre d'emplois, un gouvernement pourrait être fortement tenté de subventionner une entreprise boiteuse, non-compétitive ou non-rentable.

Les subventions sont très encadrées dans les ententes internationales car elles sont considérées comme une concurrence déloyale pour les entreprises qui n'en profitent pas.

Vous me direz sûrement que les subventions, ce n'est pas du dumping. Vous avez raison, toutefois, les subventions, qui sont déjà proscrites dans l'ALÉNA, peuvent permettre, en plus, à une entreprise de faire du dumping.

Certains pays rivalisent d'originalité pour camoufler les subventions qu'ils tiennent à donner à leurs entreprises. Droits de coupes dérisoires sur des terres de la couronne, financement à un prix dérisoire des acheteurs du produit vendu par les entreprises nationales, crédits d'impôts démesurés généralement reliés à la main d'oeuvre et prises de participation dans des entreprises nationales.

Évidemment, on m'objectera que la prise de participation n'a rien à voir avec une subvention. Sur la forme, c'est tout à fait vrai. Toutefois, pour ce qui est de la substance économique, c'est une toute autre histoire.

Premièrement, on n'a pas à fouiller très loin dans notre mémoire pour se rappeler quel était le but du gouvernement en avançant de l'argent à Bombardier. C'était évidemment la sauvegarde des emplois qui auraient disparues avec la faillite de l'entreprise.

Deuxièmement, l'argent a été "investie" dans une nouvelle société crée pour la C séries et dont la valeur ne justifiait jamais une telle somme.

Troisièmement, cet apport massif d'argent à permis à Bombardier de produire sa première commande ferme pour Delta Airlines et de la lui vendre à un prix dérisoire, ce qui constitue du dumping.

Dernier point, mais non le moindre, finalité de la prise de participation n'a jamais été le ROI, mais bien, la conservation d'emplois, uniquement.

Au Canada, 90% du capital de risque disponible pour l'investissement dans les entreprises, se trouve entre les mains des divers gouvernements et de leurs multiples tentacules.

Si vous parlez à des VC, ils vous diront tous que c'est un réel problème, justement parce que les gouvernements se fichent éperdument du Return on investment (ROI) et parce qu'ils préviligient exclusivement le nombre d'emplois créés. Ça fait en sorte que beaucoup de ces sommes se retrouvent entre les mains d'entreprises ruineuses et non rentables et sans possibilités qu'ils le deviennent.

On passe donc à côté de bons projets prometteurs tout simplement parce que nos gouvernements se servent du capital de risque pour acheter des votes et maintenir des régions artificiellement en vie.

Bref, la prise de participation dans Bombardier, par les gouvernements, ne passe pas du tout le test de la primauté de la substance économique sur la forme légale et, par conséquent, Bombardier a violé les lois en ce qui concerne les subventions ainsi que celles concernant le dumping.

La réponse du département du commerce américain est donc tout à fait juste et justifiée.

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
Lévis, 27 septembre 2017

The Disrupters

Gregory Ferenstein

In just ten years, Facebook built a global empire that surpassed General Electric in market value—and did it with just 4 percent of the Old Economy giant’s workforce: 12,000, compared with 300,000. Whatsapp, a recent Facebook acquisition, managed an even more impressive wealth-to-labor ratio, with a $19 billion value and just 55 employees. Combined, both companies reach roughly one-sixth of humanity. Facebook’s entertainment colleague just to the south, Netflix, crushed Blockbuster’s mammoth national network of 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees with its more nimble workforce of just 3,700 employees. It’s easy to see why: for just $10 a month, Netflix consumers could enjoy an unlimited video library larger than any of Blockbuster’s retail shops, without ever having to find their car keys. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010.
Blockbuster’s fate has been duplicated many times. The Silicon Valley economy has caused massive disruption of traditional business and business models—in the process, making a relatively small cadre of brilliant engineers staggeringly wealthy. Until now, these dislocations, while profound, have been reasonably manageable. But in the years ahead, a vast new range of technological innovation—from self-driving cars to robots—may make the disruptions we have seen so far look tame. In this coming world, driven by innovation and powered by individual brilliance, what role will “normal” employees and small-business owners have?

I sought to learn how the tech elite would answer these and other questions, and how they think more broadly, by polling dozens of start-up founders and conducting interviews with a handful of notable billionaires. To my knowledge, mine is the first representative opinion poll of tech founders, thanks to connections I made during my time directing political writing for the Valley’s premier tech blog, TechCrunch. At the time, TechCrunch owned an exhaustive, user-generated database of start-up founders and investors, called Crunchbase. It was an insider’s source for all things tech—the Wikipedia of Silicon Valley. I obtained the e-mail addresses of every founder and cofounder in the database and got many of them to answer a long battery of political and psychological questions, on everything from their thoughts on human nature to energy policy. To ensure that the sample wasn’t biased by my own connections, I randomly e-mailed thousands of founders on the list. A total of 147 founders made it into my final sample. I supplemented my randomized sample with direct outreach to a few billionaires and household names in tech (such as the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, who isn’t a billionaire but did create one of the most widely used websites in the world).

As far as the future of innovation and its impact on ordinary people, the most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

My aim in conducting this survey was to discover and report on the long-term economic vision of tech leaders, who are beginning to take on a broader role as public leaders. As such, I explore here two main themes. The first is the economic ideal of the elite and how their technologies shape their vision of an entrepreneurial yet unequal society. The second is Silicon Valley’s uniquely pro-government political ideology and how it feeds into its solution for the displacements that automation and transformation will cause: a universal basic income.

Silicon Valley has a grandfatherly reverence for its living legends, and Paul Graham is one of them. Named one of Businessweek’s 25 “most influential people on the web,” Graham sold his company to Yahoo in the late 1990s for the equivalent of roughly $50 million in stock (a monumental achievement at the time). He then cofounded Y Combinator, a kind of Harvard University for start-ups, which houses aspiring tech founders in an incubator program that prepares them to raise capital, build management teams, and develop companies. Y Combinator has helped start more than 900 firms, including Reddit and Airbnb.

Graham’s blog is highly regarded, but when he dipped his feet into the contentious inequality debate, things got awkward. Inequality is something of a taboo subject in the Valley. Rarely do I hear technologists talk about how they feel about the subject in public. Many take a pessimistic view of most of the workforce. And they fear what will happen when they build robots that can perform most jobs much better than the average human.

Graham, not one to shy from the truth, decided to air these beliefs. He said that it is the job of tech to create inequality. He continued, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. . . . You can’t prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups.”

Few notable Silicon Valley figures disagreed with Graham’s premise that growing inequality was inevitable and that nothing should be done to slow it down. Instead, they criticized how he wrote about the topic. “Yes, income inequality exists and yes, it’s a natural consequence of capitalism, and other forms of government are decidedly worse than capitalism because they inefficiently create and allocate resources,” agreed tech investor Mark Suster. “But the celebratory nature of today’s conversation felt tone deaf.”

To understand whether Graham’s response was representative, I added questions about inequality to my poll of tech founders. I added them late in the poll’s run, so the sample size is small (about 12 to 14 founders), but because the questions produced such a clear consensus, the data are informative.

I asked: In an economy where income was perfectly allocated by how much wealth each worker contributes, would this world be very equal or unequal? All respondents said that a meritocracy inherently leads to an unequal world. “Very few are contributing enormous amounts to the greater good, be it by starting important companies or leading important causes,” explained one founder. “An uninspired population is a stagnant population,” wrote another. “Inequality breeds creativity and fosters motivation to change one’s situation. Mass change starts with one person inspiring another.”

I then asked what percentage of wealth would be held by the richest people in a perfect meritocracy. Roughly eight of 12 respondents said that 50 percent or more of all income would go to the top 10 percent. This worldview is exceedingly common in Silicon Valley. Tech executives often praise so-called 10xer engineers—an elite class of worker ten times more productive than average workers. That is, tech is obsessed with the highest performers within an already-selective class. The phrase is so common that in my old neighborhood, the Mission District in San Francisco, Red Bull advertises that its caffeine-laden beverage turned “10xers” into “100xers.”

Understanding these frank beliefs on inequality is an important step in placing Silicon Valley’s common policy solutions in context with its goals. For instance, tech founders express broad support for increased “equality of opportunity” for every American. When it comes to giving people of all backgrounds a better shot at working for a Google or an Apple, tech founders sound supportive. For instance, in response to a lack of ethnic and gender diversity at tech companies (all of which are about 80 percent male and about 60 percent Asian or white), the industry has directed cash toward programs that teach coding to underprivileged communities. One of the largest recipients is Code.org, an industry-wide initiative to give computer-science education to every American high schooler.

But when you ask donors whether Code.org or other diversity initiatives will reverse the overall trend of growing economic inequality, they demur. At a Code.org launch event in 2013, I asked LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman what the impact would be if everyone learned coding. “It’s not that everyone will have the skills for a high-performing job,” he said. Instead, Hoffman claimed that mass computer literacy would help many more people make meaningful inventions that would benefit their companies and communities. But the upshot was clear: most of Silicon Valley’s charitable initiatives, especially education, engineer a world of vast inequality. This fact is foundational to the high-skilled world. To paraphrase a common saying in the Valley: inequality is a feature, not a bug.

Eatsa opened with a bold premise: the chain could reduce the cost of healthy food by automating its workforce.

How, exactly, does information technology increase inequality? By promoting superstars. For example, 17-year-old Michael Sayman had a dream summer in Silicon Valley. While other interns around the country were busy making coffee and sorting mail, Sayman was posting selfies with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. Sayman is a perfect example of what the economist Sherwin Rosen called the “superstar economy.” Rosen’s prescient 1981 paper predicted that “the phenomenon of superstars, wherein relatively small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage, seems to be increasingly important in the modern world.” The theory goes that, as information technology allows employers to become immediately aware of top talent that can serve millions of people at scale, they’ll all rush into a bidding war for this small slice of extraordinarily gifted people.

Sayman built a viral game, 4Snaps, that snagged an impressive 500,000 users. The unexpected success helped the prescient young coder start paying family bills when he was just 13. Barely after hitting puberty, Sayman was inspired by Steve Jobs’s announcement in 2010 that Apple would be opening up a novel thing called an “app store,” available to anyone who wanted to submit his or her own programs.

Sayman’s school didn’t teach computer programming, so he taught himself through free online tutorials. Andrew McAfee, an MIT economist and expert in the long-term social impact of automation, describes online courses as “diamond finders”—platforms that enable people of great ability in unlikely places to reach their full potential. For McAfee, economic trends accelerated by Internet products leave less room for people of mediocre ability or motivation.

Many industries seem to be following the superstar trend. Since the 1980s, the share of concert-ticket revenue going to the top 1 percent of artists has skyrocketed, from 26 percent to 56 percent. “The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large,” wrote Alan Krueger, former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, in a working paper. “We are increasingly becoming a ‘winner-take-all economy,’ a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced.”
Earlier this year, I attended the high-profile opening of Eatsa, a fast-food restaurant in San Francisco’s “start-up” neighborhood, the South of Market (SoMa) district. Rarely does the promise of discounted food attract so many highly paid professionals. But this was no ordinary restaurant. Eatsa opened with a bold premise: the chain could radically reduce the cost of healthy food by automating most of its workforce. No humans manage the front counter. Everything is managed in a brightly lit, Apple-store-style open-floor layout, with tablet kiosks lining the walls to take orders. Bowls of fresh quinoa are deposited in futuristic cubbyholes, where translucent screens with real-time graphics tell customers when their custom-made bowls are ready.
For now, a kitchen staffed with real people makes each quinoa bowl by hand, but Eatsa keeps them out of sight because it’s trying to design a restaurant where customers are comfortable never interacting with another person. Eventually, Eatsa is looking to automate more and more of its staff, including cooks. The economies of the model are clear: in a neighborhood known for $20 meals, Eatsa offers lunches starting at around $7. “Technology plays an important role in improving the speed, convenience, and efficiency of our experience. By making things as efficient as possible, we can offer a great price now for a high-quality product,” cofounder Scott Drummond told me.

Eatsa opened not long after the city passed a new minimum-wage law, aimed especially at the service and hospitality industry. Though Drummond is careful with his words, this law doesn’t concern his team as much as it does other struggling San Francisco restaurants because Eatsa doesn’t employ nearly as much low-skilled labor. If Eatsa’s design works, it’s likely that other restaurants could license its technology to avoid the impact of minimum-wage laws. Eatsa’s model represents a long-term trend in mass automation, as technology begins to shift more low-skilled workers into part-time or independent contract work—what’s becoming known as the “contingent” workforce.
Where will this increasing automation leave most people? “Most of us just want a good old-fashioned industrial-era job,” admits McAfee. Yet such jobs will be harder to come by, and such people will play a smaller role.
Mark Zuckerberg’s politics are difficult to pin down. He rarely talks about them publicly but agreed to make the press rounds in 2013 while promoting his immigration-reform agenda. During a rare public interview at the famed Newseum, The Atlantic’s then-editor, James Bennett, asked Zuckerberg point-blank how he identifies politically. Zuckerberg gave a less than satisfying answer: “I’m pro–knowledge economy,” he said, with a smile.

Indeed, the young billionaire doesn’t have easily categorizable beliefs. He’s certainly a Democrat: Zuckerberg is an open and generous donor to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a few lucky senators, such as New Jersey’s Cory Booker. Yet he is avidly pro–free market. In a thinly veiled protest against Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in summer 2016, Zuckerberg posted to his millions of followers a rant against anti-trade and anti-immigrant populism, “fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others, for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, reducing trade and, in some cases around the world, even cutting access to the Internet.” Remarks like these often get Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley leaders branded as antigovernment libertarians. They’re seen as fiscally conservative and socially liberal billionaires who just want to be left alone to solve the world’s problems.
But that doesn’t explain the tech elite’s politics at all. Contrary to popular opinion, most of Silicon Valley is not a libertarian ATM. The tech industry is overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2008, 83 percent of donations from the top Internet firms went to Obama, not John McCain. Many of the Valley’s household names, including Google’s then-chairman Eric Schmidt, personally helped Obama in both presidential campaigns. Republicans rarely get much money or talent from the Valley.

And it’s not just Democratic elected officials: the tech elite also support major liberal policies. Sixty-three percent of all donations from start-up founders and investors went to liberal-leaning causes. Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, who once had a picture of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for his Twitter avatar, has publicly stated that he supports the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Google is an aggressive backer of clean-energy policy. The company withdrew support for the pro-free-market group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, after discovering that it was distributing messaging that questioned global warming. “They’re just literally lying,” Google’s Schmidt said. “Most of Silicon Valley, most of the executives, tend to be Democrats,” tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, told me.

Yet Silicon Valley’s reputation as a haven for small-government activists isn’t entirely off base: the Valley does support some staunchly libertarian ideas, and the tech elite are not typical Democrats. They don’t like regulations or labor unions. For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have both given hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools and supported policies that would allow public schools to fire teachers more readily and dodge union membership. Big tech lobbyists are also strong supporters of free trade. According to Maplight, several telecommunications companies have lobbied for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that union groups and many Democrats oppose.

So what explains the rather odd mix of support for Democratic positions and hyper-capitalistic policies? What I discovered through my survey was that Silicon Valley represents an entirely new political category: not quite liberal and not quite libertarian. They make a fascinating mix of collectivists and avid capitalists.

On the capitalistic side, tech founders were extraordinarily optimistic about the nature of change, especially the kind of unpredictable “creative destruction” associated with free markets. Philosophically, most tech founders believe that “change over the long run is inherently positive.” Or, as Hillary Clinton supporter and billionaire Reid Hoffman told me: “I tend to believe that most Silicon Valley people are very much long-term optimists. . . . Could we have a bad 20 years? Absolutely. But if you’re working toward progress, your future will be better than your present.”

That is, the tech industry’s obsession with innovation is, at its core, a belief that the future gets better. Change is evolutionary. The more things change, the more companies fail—and, alas, the more people get fired—the more we learn how to do things better. As a corollary, they also believe that the government should be run like a business. The “problem with government orgs is they don’t really have an incentive to innovate or improve processes, services, and customer experience, and they are run very inefficiently. If they were run in more of a private-market environment, like start-ups, they could have better ROI and deliver better service for all. Competition is a healthy way to encourage that,” one anonymous respondent in my poll wrote. This explains Zuckerberg’s and Gates’s support of charter schools. Theirs is a move to make public schools more like charters—a different focus from a libertarian vision of simply privatizing the education system. The tech elite want to bring the essence of free markets to all things public and private. Using traditional American political categories, this would land them in the Republican camp.

But Silicon Valley philosophically diverges with libertarians and conservatives in a key way: they aren’t individualists. When the libertarian icon Rand Paul began his early run for president in 2015, in San Francisco, he expected to be greeted like a hero.

During the rally that I attended, Paul got rousing applause for railing against mass government spying. But when Paul asked, “Who is a part of the leave-me-alone coalition?” expecting to hear cheers, the room went silent. “Not that many, huh?” he nervously asked.

Indeed, in my survey, founders displayed a strong orientation toward collectivism. Fifty-nine percent believed in a health-care mandate, compared with just 21 percent of self-identified libertarians. They also believed that the government should coerce people into making wise personal decisions, such as whether to eat healthier foods. Sixty-two percent said that individual decisions had an impact on many other people, justifying government intervention. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a businessman-turned-politician who instituted regulations on soda consumption because the adverse health effects were costing the state money, exemplified this kind of thinking. “I feel [government] encouraging or even incentivizing positive behaviors is supportive, and thinking that personal decisions in health don’t affect others is myopic,” wrote one anonymous tech founder in my poll. That is, tech founders reject the core premise of individualism—that citizens can do whatever they want, so long as they don’t harm others. In the collectivist philosophy, nearly everything we do has an impact on others, justifying government involvement in many aspects of our lives. Hence, the tech industry is heavily populated by what might be called pro-capitalist collectivists.
So if Silicon Valley doesn’t value liberty the way libertarians do, or fairness the way liberals do, what does it value? The tech people I interviewed valued contribution above all. When Steve Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, asked the iconic inventor about his principal motivation, Jobs responded: “Just letting each person have creative tools to fulfill his or her potential. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”
In Silicon Valley, unearthing the latent talent of each individual is the top priority. For technologists, this means making tools that enable people to create new ideas and distribute them. For the state, this means a role as an investor, rather than as a regulator. Instead of stifling capitalism, the state accelerates the promise of capitalism by heavily funding education, welcoming high-skilled immigrants, and paying for breakthrough scientific research.

But what is government’s role as it concerns those who can’t be entrepreneurs? As the Valley elite see it, it’s to tax the wealthy—and give everyone else lots of cash. A number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, have begun investigating the possibility of a government-provided universal basic income. A no-strings-attached mass cash transfer will ensure that no matter what happens in the future, everyone will have a reasonable income. Y Combinator is investing millions of its own charitable dollars in a first-of-its-kind universal basic-income experiment to see how poor residents in Oakland respond to an unconditional cash transfer. “I think one of the reasons that inequality feels so unfair is that there are people really truly suffering,” said Y Combinator president Sam Altman, explaining why he supports the basic income. “People have some innate sense of what is absolutely fair: health care, enough to eat, a place to eat, things like that. If you can do that, and then give people equality of opportunity on the upside. I hope that will feel fair to people.”

In other words, Altman says, we shouldn’t try to regulate our way to stopping the inevitable rise of inequality but instead raise the quality of life for everyone. Basic income, he believes, will allow many more people to contribute something unique to the world. “I think there are new novelists who are right now driving for Uber who could contribute more to the sum output of humanity; there are great artists, there are people who just have new ideas about how to build communities that make people happy, that have nothing to do with tech or start-ups at all but are currently not able to do what they want to do,” he said.

How would such a massive new entitlement be paid for? Altman hasn’t calculated the costs, but it comes down to more taxes—taxes paid largely by the super-successful, like the innovators in Silicon Valley. “You give this money to a lot of people,” he says. “Most fail at whatever they do, and some are these wild outlier successes. And if you can enable a lot of people to take a swing, most will fail and some will generate incredible economic value. And, tax the fuck out of that and do more basic income.”

Thus, the government serves an essential purpose in not only helping people become “wild outliers” but ensuring that such success gets more widely shared throughout society.
Over the last few decades, technology leaders and entrepreneurs have emerged as some of the most prominent figures in American life, and Silicon Valley has become a byword for innovation, brilliance, and futuristic thinking. But while millions of Americans know the most famous names and the most prominent companies, and we all use the products, the broad philosophy and long-term economic vision of Silicon Valley remain little understood. As tech leaders move to the forefront of economic and public policy, Americans should understand better how they think—especially since their goals and conclusions tend to separate them from earlier generations of business leaders. In many respects, their vision represents something new. Whether it is something that Americans as a whole will embrace and support remains to be seen.

Gregory Ferenstein is a technology journalist and editor of the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated service that publishes news about tech, health, education, and society.

City Journal
A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.

How Trump Turned the National Media Into Impotent Hecklers

Source: The Daily Wire

Savor it. It finally happened. The national media no longer matters. The entire institution has been rendered as irrelevant as a drunken fan in the cheap seats pretending to know more about the game than Kobe. Sure, the media might still have the power to annoy. But as far as how the players play, the institution is now just, well, belligerent jerks with no power, no sway, no influence.

Much of the credit does not belong to President-elect Donald Trump. The media did this to themselves. What Trump does deserve credit for -- and I'll get to this -- is realizing that the Emperor has no clothes and firing the kill shot.

The media's collapse began in 2008, when something I call "Capital-J Journalism" came to a tragic end. Oh, sure, these cocktail-partied backslappers will convince themselves that phoning a friendly "source" for a quote is journalism, or they will bask in the glory of "breaking" a piece of "news" fed to them 10 minutes before that "news" was going to go public anyway. But as far as deep-dive investigations into powerful people and government institutions go, that died with Obama's inauguration.

It works likes this…

An opinionator-disguised-as-a-journalist cites studies and "experts" that tell him what he wants to hear (no one is better at this than our phony fact-checkers). Then an op-ed cloaked as objective reporting is puked up to the public. Even if there is actual information to pass along, even if journalism was blundered upon, it is always delivered in a boorish lecture that tells you what to think about that information. And that viewpoint always come from the left.

This is why the media had zippo to do with uncovering many of the major scandals that hit the Obama White House. Were we naive enough to count only on the media to uncover scandal, we would not know about the IRS, the myriad of surveillance improprieties, the truth about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, or the Clinton Foundation. Moreover, instead of uncovering scandal, our media did everything to ensure these inconvenient truths couldn't cripple Obama. 

With the arrogance of supremacists still certain of their persuasive powers, the media went all in against The Donald, and in doing so completely exposed and destroyed themselves.
In short, in pursuit of their overriding goal, which has nothing to do with uncovering government abuse and everything to do with empowering  government, the media rejected the art of information gathering and sharing -- which is the essence of  journalism. Instead, armed with the belief that in doing so they could sway public opinion further to the left, the media became nothing more than a gang of leftwing pundits.

For a while it worked. An inexperienced community organizer with ties to a domestic terrorist and a racist church became president. Shameless lies were hurled to allow central government to capture 1/6th of the economy -- healthcare.

The cracks, though, started to show with gun control. No matter how hard they tried, the media's usual bag of tricks failed. Again and again, the public rejected further restrictions on their Second Amendment civil rights -- and then Trump rode into town.

With the arrogance of supremacists still certain of their persuasive powers, the media went all in against The Donald, and in doing so completely exposed and destroyed themselves. And now, knowing that 70% of the American people despise and distrust the media, Trump is using his considerable savvy to render them unnecessary, to crush this once all-powerful institution into little more than crybaby hasbeens left to pompously pout about lost "norms" and their own self-importance.

Through social media, Trump has already stripped The New York Times of its sacred job of setting the daily agenda, and in order to communicate directly to the public, he has bypassed the media filter entirely.

Look at what occurred during Trump's Thursday night rally in Cincinnati. The entire mainstream media could only helplessly stand by and fume as a man they despise spoke directly to the people. Afterwards, the oh-so precious Journalist Class was left with only one option: to prove themselves helpless, small and embittered as they impotently heckled what had already happened.

Imagine this … we now live in a world where the media has zero leverage. They can't blackmail Trump into behaving a certain way because 1) they have nothing he needs -- to reach the people, he can easily go around them; and 2)  they can't put pressure on him by hammering him with coordinated narratives because they have lost all moral authority with the public. Nothing they say matters. Nothing they do moves the needle.

Sure, there could be a downside here. If the Trump administration gets wrapped up in a legitimate scandal, we might not listen to eunuchs who cried "disqualified" thousands of times already. But to me, that's like lamenting the lack of trains running on time after the death of a dictator. Whatever downside that comes will be well worth the defeat of outright evil.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC   

Les mots de Pierre Dion, les maux des contribuables de Québec.

Voici quelques citations de Pierre Dion, président et chef de la direction de Québecor, tirées d'une entrevue faite cette semaine, en marge de la décision de la NHL, d'exclure Québec de sa prochaine expansion et de l'annonce du chèque de 729 000$ que l'administration Labeaume a dû faire à Québecor pour éponger le déficit des 4 premiers mois d'opération du Centre Vidéotron.

Je me suis permis de les traduire... librement.

«Ça prend quelques années avant de rentabiliser un amphithéâtre comme le Centre Vidéotron. Ça se mesure sur 10, 20, 30 ans. Tu ne peux pas mesurer ça après quatre mois [...]»

Traduction : Le chemin qui mène vers la rentabilité sera long. En fait, il devrait être suffisamment long pour nous permettre de récupérer les 33M$ qu'on a payé pour la dénomination de la bâtisse.


«La Ville a été sage dans les négociations [...]»

Traduction: Nous avons dicté, à la ville, tous les termes de l'entente de gestion.


«[La ville] s'est assurée d'avoir 33 millions $ comptant pour les droits de nommer le bâtiment.»

Traduction: On a dit à Régis qu'il paraîtrait très bien (tiré de la fable du renard et du corbeau) si on s'entendait pour faire l'annonce de la vente du nom de l'amphithéâtre pour une somme de 33M$ à Vidéotron - un prix qu'aucune compagnie sérieuse ne serait prête à payer en l'absence d'une équipe de la NHL. Évidemment, ce serait une sorte de prêt qu'on récupérerait en totalité, en déclarant des pertes d'exploitation durant plusieurs années. (inspiré de Nicolas Machiavel)


«Même bon coup pour la Ville, estime M. Dion, pour les redevances touchées de 4 $ par billet.»

Traduction: Pis là, Régis nous a dit, en reniflant à 3 ou 4 reprises: "Moi, les p'tits gars, je suis le champion de la taxation. J'pourrais même taxer le" reniflage", si je voulais, pis le monde serait content pareil, mais là, j'f'rais jamais ça parce que ça ferait trop monter MES taxes.

On lui a dit qu'il pouvait taxer ce qu'il voulait, sauf les billets des Remparts. Vous auriez dû voir le sourire qui affichait.


«Quant aux 729 000 $ remboursés par l'administration Labeaume pour éponger le déficit des mois de septembre à décembre, ils étaient à prévoir»

Traduction: En tout cas, nous, on les avait prévus... It's payback time, baby. 😉


«Ce qui est sorti cette semaine est que la Ville a dû faire un chèque à Québecor. En aucun moment que ce soit, avec ou sans Nordiques, la ville a une sortie d'argent. Ce qu'ils ont fait est qu'ils ont repris le729 000 $ qu'on leur avait donné et ils nous l'ont remis»

Traduction: Bon là, c'est le temps de profiter de l'ignorance financière et économique des Québécois pour leur pousser une énormité. Ils n'y verrons que du feu.


«[Je me réjouis] qu'un homme comme Bob Newman de AEG, qui gère120 amphithéâtres à travers le monde, estime que ce qui a été accompli avec le Centre Vidéotron est extraordinaire»

Traduction: Bob m'a dit en riant: "Vous leur en avez passé toute une, mon Pierre. Bravo!"

Citations tirées d'un article de Valérie Gaudreau, du journal Le Soleil , 25 juin 2016.



Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
25 juin 2016

Journée internationale des travailleurs...

À tous ceux qui manifestent, aujourd'hui, pour le salaire minimum à 15$/h, je vous demande de faire l'exercice suivant:

Parmi les gens qui sont autour de vous, veuillez pointer la personne que vous choisissez d'éjecter du marché du travail afin de vous permettre de travailler à 15$/h.

Ensuite, vous vous dirigez vers elle pour lui expliquer votre choix...

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
1 mai 2016

Je suis Charlie

"Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai jusqu'à la mort pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire." - Voltaire

Si vous ne mettez pas cette citation en pratique, je suis désolé, mais vous n'êtes pas Charlie.

Si vous prétendez être Charlie et que vous n'appliquez pas cette citation, alors vous n'êtes qu'un putain d'imposteur.

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
8 janvier 2016

Greenpeace founder, Patrick Moore, delivers powerful annual lecture, praises carbon dioxide – full text

Posted on Wattsupwiththat.com by Anthony Watts on October 15th 2015

2015 Annual GWPF Lecture
Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London 14 October 2015

My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.

The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.

But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.

But first a bit of background.

I was born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. There was no road to my village so for eight years myself and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the environment and the industry my family has been in for more than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things are inter-related, and how we are related to them.

At the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. While doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.

We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the course of history. We created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to the tests.

When that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of Greenpeace.

Flushed with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace, on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist organization.

Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific, and it most other parts of the world as well.

Going back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets. We confronted the Soviet factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world, bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for the first time. After four years of voyages, in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by 1981 in all the world’s oceans.

In 1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.

Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian environmentalism because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world would be better off without us. As we shall see later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as essential to the survival of life on this planet.

In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.

When I left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to vitamin A deficiency every year.

The Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959 is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to outgassing from warming of the oceans.

NASA tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change. This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.

On the political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.

The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization, weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program, environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”
So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.

Scientific certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?

And then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.

Let’s begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50 million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature.

The Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin, which in combination with cellulose, created wood which in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100 metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds around the world as this huge store of sequestered carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to an end.

There was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2 approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die. Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals, insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that would be that. The human species would never have existed. This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.

A well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average 16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were ice-free and the land there was covered in forest.

The ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago. Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s history.

Coming closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles. These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years during the most recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause, as the cause never comes after the effect.

Looking at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing (absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature, despite the illogical nature of that assertion.

It is sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past 20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to prevail, and there is little reason aside from our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming during this century.

At the height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the variation in sea level since then although many scientists have concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green. The sea level may also have been higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.

Hundred of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has been little net change in sea level in the past thousands of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle wave action in a tropical sea.

Coming back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two. After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.

The IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for an opinion.

There was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940 to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a 30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know that the same natural factors were not responsible for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are the villains in the piece.

Water is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2 atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by 2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter hypothesis.

How many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?

“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

There is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones that have already occurred.

Coming to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a “pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is?

It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today.

We are witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth of plants around the world. This has been confirmed by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere else and the best science says most of it is going into an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that, as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?

All the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial in sediments.

Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.

Today, at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.

But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks. 100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine phytoplankton.

The vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks where it cannot be used as food by plants.

Beginning 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores (phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get fracking”.

The past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a multi-million year basis.

If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive. If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates that depend on plants for their survival will also die.

How long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the atmosphere?

During this Pleistocene Ice Age, CO2 tends to reach a minimum level when the successive glaciations reach their peak. During the last glaciation, which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180 ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die. Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there was a severe restriction of growth as plants began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2 rebounded to 280 ppm. But even today, with human emissions causing CO2 to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000 ppm.

Here is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would begin to die. Given the present trends of glaciations and interglacial periods this would likely have occurred less than 2 million years from today, a blink in nature’s eye, 0.05% of the 3.5 billion-year history of life.

No other species could have accomplished the task of putting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out and locked in the Earth’s crust by plants and animals over the millennia. This is why I honour James Lovelock in my lecture this evening. Jim was for many years of the belief that humans are the one-and-only rogue species on Gaia, destined to cause catastrophic global warming. I enjoy the Gaia hypothesis but I am not religious about it and for me this was too much like original sin. It was as if humans were the only evil species on the Earth.

But James Lovelock has seen the light and realized that humans may be part of Gaia’s plan, and he has good reason to do so. And I honour him because it takes courage to change your mind after investing so much of your reputation on the opposite opinion. Rather than seeing humans as the enemies of Gaia, Lovelock now sees that we may be working with Gaia to “stave of another ice age”, or major glaciation. This is much more plausible than the climate doom-and gloom scenario because our release of CO2 back into the atmosphere has definitely reversed the steady downward slide of this essential food for life, and hopefully may reduce the chance that the climate will slide into another period of major glaciation. We can be certain that higher levels of CO2 will result in increased plant growth and biomass. We really don’t know whether or not higher levels of CO2 will prevent or reduce the eventual slide into another major glaciation. Personally I am not hopeful for this because the long-term history just doesn’t support a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature.

It does boggle the mind in the face of our knowledge that the level of CO2 has been steadily falling that human CO2 emissions are not universally acclaimed as a miracle of salvation. From direct observation we already know that the extreme predictions of CO2’s impact on global temperature are highly unlikely given that about one-third of all our CO2 emissions have been discharged during the past 18 years and there has been no statistically significant warming. And even if there were some additional warming that would surely be preferable to the extermination of all or most species on the planet.

You heard it here. “Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on Earth from inevitable starvation and extinction due to lack of CO2”. To use the analogy of the Atomic Clock, if the Earth were 24 hours old we were at 38 seconds to midnight when we reversed the trend towards the End Times. If that isn’t good news I don’t know what is. You don’t get to stave off Armageddon every day.

I issue a challenge to anyone to provide a compelling argument that counters my analysis of the historical record and the prediction of CO2 starvation based on the 150 million year trend. Ad hominem arguments about “deniers” need not apply. I submit that much of society has been collectively misled into believing that global CO2 and temperature are too high when the opposite is true for both. Does anyone deny that below 150 ppm CO2 that plants will die? Does anyone deny that the Earth has been in a 50 million-year cooling period and that this Pleistocene Ice Age is one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet?

If we assume human emissions have to date added some 200 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we ceased using fossil fuels today we have already bought another 5 million years for life on earth. But we will not stop using fossil fuels to power our civilization so it is likely that we can forestall plant starvation for lack of CO2 by at least 65 million years. Even when the fossil fuels have become scarce we have the quadrillion tons of carbon in carbonaceous rocks, which we can transform into lime and CO2 for the manufacture of cement. And we already know how to do that with solar energy or nuclear energy. This alone, regardless of fossil fuel consumption, will more than offset the loss of CO2 due to calcium carbonate burial in marine sediments. Without a doubt the human species has made it possible to prolong the survival of life on Earth for more than 100 million years. We are not the enemy of nature but its salvation.

As a postscript I would like to make a few comments about the other side of the alleged dangerous climate change coin, our energy policy, in particular the much maligned fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Depending how it’s tallied, fossil fuels account for between 85-88% of global energy consumption and more than 95% of energy for the transport of people and goods, including our food.

Earlier this year the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100, a most bizarre development to say the least. Of course no intelligent person really believes this will happen but it is a testament to the power of the elites that have converged around the catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade. How might we convince them to celebrate CO2 rather than to denigrate it?

A lot of nasty things are said about fossil fuels even though they are largely responsible for our longevity, our prosperity, and our comfortable lifestyles.

Hydrocarbons, the energy components of fossil fuels, are 100% organic, as in organic chemistry. They were produced by solar energy in ancient seas and forests. When they are burned for energy the main products are water and CO2, the two most essential foods for life. And fossil fuels are by far the largest storage battery of direct solar energy on Earth. Nothing else comes close except nuclear fuel, which is also solar in the sense that it was produced in dying stars.

Today, Greenpeace protests Russian and American oil rigs with 3000 HP diesel-powered ships and uses 200 HP outboard motors to board the rigs and hang anti-oil plastic banners made with fossil fuels. Then they issue a media release telling us we must “end our addiction to oil”. I wouldn’t mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the rigs to hang organic cotton banners. We didn’t have an H-bomb on board the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear testing.

Some of the world’s oil comes from my native country in the Canadian oil sands of northern Alberta. I had never worked with fossil fuel interests until I became incensed with the lies being spread about my country’s oil production in the capitals of our allies around the world. I visited the oil sands operations to find out for myself what was happening there.

It is true it’s not a pretty sight when the land is stripped bare to get at the sand so the oil can be removed from it. Canada is actually cleaning up the biggest natural oil spill in history, and making a profit from it. The oil was brought to the surface when the Rocky Mountains were thrust up by the colliding Pacific Plate. When the sand is returned back to the land 99% of the so-called “toxic oil” has been removed from it.

Anti-oil activists say the oil-sands operations are destroying the boreal forest of Canada. Canada’s boreal forest accounts for 10% of all the world’s forests and the oil-sands area is like a pimple on an elephant by comparison. By law, every square inch of land disturbed by oil-sands extraction must be returned to native boreal forest. When will cities like London, Brussels, and New York that have laid waste to the natural environment be returned to their native ecosystems?

The art and science of ecological restoration, or reclamation as it is called in the mining industry, is a well-established practice. The land is re-contoured, the original soil is put back, and native species of plants and trees are established. It is possible, by creating depressions where the land was flat, to increase biodiversity by making ponds and lakes where wetland plants, insects, and waterfowl can become established in the reclaimed landscape.

The tailings ponds where the cleaned sand is returned look ugly for a few years but are eventually reclaimed into grasslands. The Fort McKay First Nation is under contract to manage a herd of bison on a reclaimed tailings pond. Every tailings pond will be reclaimed in a similar manner when operations have been completed.

As an ecologist and environmentalist for more than 45 years this is good enough for me. The land is disturbed for a blink of an eye in geological time and is then returned to a sustainable boreal forest ecosystem with cleaner sand. And as a bonus we get the fuel to power our weed-eaters, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft.

To conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.

I am honoured to have been chosen to deliver your annual lecture.

Thank you for listening to me this evening.

I hope you have seen CO2 from a new perspective and will join with me to Celebrate CO2!


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
26 octobre 2015