This week's Sunday New York Times profiles Connie Hedegaard, the chair of the coming Copenhagen negotiations, which begin in early December.
Ms. Hedegaard is the Danish environment minister. Her goal is to reach agreement in Copenhagen on a new global climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.
Here's the rub: Ms. Hedegaard is a conservative with little time for Scandinavian social democrats or for the world's green parties.
"I've never understood why the environment should be a left-wing issue," she told the Times. "In my view there is nothing as core to conservative beliefs -- that what you inherit you should pass on to the next generation."
If she wanted to push her argument, Ms. Hedegaard could point out that among history's most prodigiously wasteful and environmentally reckless regimes were the planned economies of eastern Europe and Asia, installed under Stalin.
The ocean beds around that empire are strewn with discarded nuclear equipment and fuel. Its hellish industrial towns sit on toxic lagoons. Its water resources are fouled and ruined (look at the Aral Sea via Google Earth). Its energy grid, built on coal and nuclear, is a ticking time bomb.
(To be fair to the region, the successor governments in Stalin's fallen empire know what they have inherited. Many are doing what they can about it.)
The environmental record of the former Stalinist empire is a fascinating example of how causes sometimes become what they were created to fight.
Eastern European communism has its roots in opposition to the lusts, madness, militarism and relentless urge for "development" at any price of unregulated 19th century capitalism. Tragically, once they had seized power (inevitably by force), the communists focused on becoming grotesque dopplegangers of what they opposed. They replicated the relentless urge to develop at any price, did so spectacularly badly, and therefore collapsed -- leaving a bitter legacy of environmental degradation in their wake.
Small wonder then that a thoughtful European conservative like Connie Hedegaard, blessed to live in a gentle social democracy like Denmark, would condemn this and play up the "conserve" part of her philosophy's name.
But if she would like another look at a human environmental event that can be seen from space, she should point her copy of Google Earth at Canada -- and specifically, at our principal energy development projects. She will see, no doubt to her horror, what ethic our so-called "conservative" Canadian governments, at both the federal and provincial levels, bring to development.
Indeed it seems likely, as things stand now, that Canada's principal objective at Ms. Hedegaard's meeting in Copenhagen will be to directly contradict her -- in an attempt to protect our own reckless lunge for development at any price.
Ms. Hedegaard has apparently been traveling the world trying to build a workable consensus leading up to the Copenhagen negotiations. Perhaps she could spare a day for her "conservative" colleagues in Canada. She could talk to them about the fundamentals of the philosophy they supposedly share with her -- so grossly repudiated in the development they have initiated and continue to sponsor in Canada's energy fields.
Since there is some hope that Canada's national Parliament might spare a bit of time for the issues before our country this fall, perhaps the majority in our Parliament could have a timely word with our government on this topic, too.