strictly personal _ONE OF my: favorite “Canadian columnists is The Globe and Mail’s'resident satirist, Terence Corcoran, whose riotous humor : appears in the Report on _ Business — the selection of ‘the finance pages for his . whimsy being part of the joke, naturally. The charming, affuble and always ecologically literate Terry had a column in the national gag- “ysheet recently about global warm- It ran the day after the provin- cial environment and energy minis- ers announced a joke of their’own, a farcical script called the National , ‘Action Program on Climate Change. :.*. “Having looked through the Vv hing, 1 can assure the good eader MEXI-SNAX| ‘assorted 397’ Ss a that the document was, fa fact, written cither by the people over at Sanuday Night Live or the Royal Canadian Air Farce. Those jolly ministers! Rather than alarm/depress/sadden any con- stituents by aking the warnings of the world’s leading climatologists seriously, they opted to — guess what? — do nothing! The do-nothing boys and girls accomplished this by caming up with a “consensus document” that spells out how Canada is going to fudge its way around ils interna- tional commitment, made at the Rio Earth Summit, to reduce green- | house gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000. The “action program” avoids ‘like the plague any measures that would involve regulations, rules, targets, laws, statutes, protocols, or any other such granola stuff. Canada is actually going to be sending its representatives to Berlin. next month to announce to the assembled members of the United Nations, “Hey, we were just hors- ing around in Rio in ‘92 when we solemnly vowed do something about our greenhouse gas emis- sions.” - aly those countries whose shore- lines, and in the casés of small “island nations, entire land mass, ” stand to be flooded. Future Canadian history stu- dents examining the “action pro- . gram” will also be provided with a few belly laughs, since they likely Organic Beef “hat'l get a big yuk-yuk out of ; -jests won't have much inthe way of forests, fish, or fertile sail to sustiin them. What happened behind closed doves in Toranta at the meeting of environment and energy ministers was a laff-riot of wild proportions itself, For openers, there was a politi- cal Dance of the Seven Veils — perforined by Sheila Copps. As predicted, Sheila copped out on any Jeadership, despite the fact thal she adntitted in a recent Vancouver Star interview that glob- al warming means the West Coast salmon industry “nuns the. cisk of virtually being a footnote in the his- tory. books,” due to increased water temperature, But as fur doing anything about ‘it, don't be silly, darlings. While Sheila side-stepped, Ann McLellan, the federal Natural Resources Minister, who hails from - Alberta, did her Oi! Patch Annic shimmying routine to make sure the donors in the energy sector stay on- side with the Grits. Absolutely no need at all for regulations, cooed Annie. We can all trust the oil companies to volun- tarily cut back on production and profits. Hey! Which brings us back to Terry (Krusty the Eco-Clown) Corcoran ... If you didn’t know it was intended as humor, you might get confused, even nauseated, when he spouts the kind of nonsense that would get a kid kicked out of an ecology kindergarten class. Sunday, April 2, 1995 ~ North Shore News - 7 Like, that global warming will be terrific for skate-boarding and bieyele riding in Pebruary in the normally frozen Darkest Kast, Corcoran fans, of course, read between the lines of the aaster satirint’s Hibeciic-sounding cant- ings, in the wake of the collapye of the cad stocks off the Adantic coast, allributed delatedly by scien- tists toa minor change in ocean temperature, and the mass disap- pearance of Pacific salmon fast summer, apparently for the same reason. The Globe and Mail's answer to Stephen Leacock makes the hysterical jest that we can look forward to “longer growing sea sons” and “increased forest and crop production” in the Northwest Territories Corcoran, of course, cannot pos- sibly be the ecological ignoramus he pretends to be. This is just his schtick. For instance, the wholesale destruction of Canada’s boreal forests thanks to ever-worsening fires, the melting of the arctic per- _mafrost and subsequent release of methane, which will greatly accel- erate the Greenhouse Effect, the massive die-affs of wildlife from habitat loss, and the devolution of the Prairies into a permanent dust- bowl ~~ all the predicted side- effects of global warming -— are just “seience-feton! Corcoran hhoots, Aly refles ist always give the weiter the benefit of the doubt. | mean, while | can understand that he might not have interviewed any climatalogists in the course of checking his trap-tines along Bay Street, even a gentieman from The Globe couldn't passibly have avoided stumbling over at least one of the hundreds of books out on the catastrophic consequences of cli- nate change. ~ As proof that the great man is spoofing us, he uses the word “hypothesis” to describe climate change while just a few paragraphs earlier he had been raving about how nice it had been to jog * warm sunshine in streets and ‘parks that have had lite snow all winter.” In other words: No, it's not hap- pening! And yet: Yes, it is! Such splendid contradictions are the sign of a virtual gargantua of paradox. DRAPERIES BY S. LAURSEN & SON CUSTOM, DRAPERIES, TRACKS AND VALANCES | Labour $8.50 per panel unlined, $9.50 lined. CUSTOM BEDSPREADS &. 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