POP QUIZ

Monday, November 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized

Class?  Put everything away and take out a pencil.  We’re going to have a current affairs/geography pop quiz.  Take one of these and pass the rest back.  

Read the following passages and then write down the place that bat crap-hysterical enviro-leftist whack job George Monbiot considers to be the most evil place in the whole world. I’ve removed anything that might give the question away so you’re all going to have to think hard.  You may begin:

When you think of ______, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its ________ neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has ______ become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to _______.

No talking during the quiz.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. ______ is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by ____________.

You should have said something before we started.  Yes you may but I would suggest that you hurry.  You still have to finish the quiz on time.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was _________________. I was wrong. The real villain is ______. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by ______ in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

If you finish early, bring the test up to my desk and then read for a while.

It is now clear that ______ will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut ______ has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The ________ government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

Shhh.  No talking.

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. ______ now threatens the wellbeing of the world.

Time’s up.  Pass your tests forward.

The answer?  No, it isn’t the United States.  It’s Canada.  According to George Monbiot, Canada threatens the welfare of the entire world.

Beats me, class.

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