It’s become popular to blame “speculators” for the soaring price of oil; but speculators don’t drive rising prices. Speculation in oil futures merely provides liquidity that enables the market to reflect the balance between supply and demand. Remember: if speculators guess wrong, they lose!
As my friend César Fenrandez-Stol wrote in a recent blog, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, any government can do to help the people it serves; except staying out of their way of prosperity. The growing speculation and the manipulation that exists-not only in fuels but in many other areas-is nothing but a consequence of politicians meddling where they do not belong.”
One of the best examples of “politicians meddling where they do not belong” was last week’s action by the House of Commons in passing NDP leader Jack Layton’s ill-conceived private member’s bill to force the government to drastically reduce “greenhouse gas emissions”.
Mr. Layton’s bill is based on outdated information and the NDP’s anti-business bias-both bad foundations for public policy. The NDP leader has either missed-or deliberately ignored-recent news that 31,800 scientists have signed a document that calls ‘global warming’ a hoax. He seems to think that carbon dioxide and water vapour are ‘pollutants’, when in fact both are beneficial to agriculture and necessary for life on earth.
And the historical record from tree rings and ice cores shows that CO2 follows the increase in global temperature, it doesn’t cause them.
This draconian, ill-informed bill would cripple industry, and thus weaken our capacity for research, and our ability to deal with real pollution.
However, the NDP bill gives the Senate an opportunity to bring real science into this vexing question, by establishing a special review panel to examine global warming hysteria, and replace panic with facts.
The CHP endorses the position of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist, who says in his book, Cool It!, that money that would be wasted by Kyoto-type treaties and, by damaging industry, could better be used to provide clean drinking water in the Third World. This money could be used to clean up real pollution, such as particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide, and the thousands of inadequately-tested new chemicals released into the environment every year.