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Letter: Environment a bad reason to vote

I don’t vote for candidates who trip over themselves about how much they care about environment
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Environment a bad reason to vote

Re: “Important local choices” (Aug. 10)

The letter-writer exhorts us all to vote for people who “will use science and evidence” to do something about climate change.

That’s great, but it’s clear that people have been put in government who talk a good game about the environment, but whose plans to deal with it are ill-informed, unscientific, and unsustainable. Take for example the prime minister of Sri Lanka, who thought he’d ban fertilizer entirely and cash in on the organic farming craze, and ended up starving his entire nation.

Or take Steven Guilbeault, our current Environment minister, who came up with rules about a 30 per cent reduction of nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer in agriculture, claimed it wasn’t about reducing fertilizer usage, but then which nobody can actually accomplish without reduced fertilizer usage. This would lead to harmfully lower crop yields. And also, nobody in the federal government apparently even did any proper research by talking to the farmers beforehand.

There’s an actual, real-life Silent Spring going on in Myanmar, not because of DDT, but because of toxic waste resulting from mining rare earth minerals for solar panels and windmill turbines.

Since nobody is actually against the environment, I don’t vote for candidates who trip over themselves about how much they care about environmental issues. Those are the people, 99 per cent of the time, that come up with ideas that not only don’t actually help the environment, but make life harder and more expensive for the rest of us.

April J. Gibson

Duncan