Kyoto Accords Fire Blanks

Surfers, as a whole, are an apolitical lot. When they do choose to throw their collective weight around, they usually do so in support of environmental causes particularly those pertaining to the ocean. Ask pretty much any surfer if they support stricter environmental guidelines for corporations and I bet you would get a resounding yes. But events don’t happen in a vacuum and life just isn’t that simple. Because of the continued harassment and punitive assessments of Clark Foam by the California Environmental Protection Agency. Grubby Clark has decided to close his doors. His company, which provided 90% of the foam blanks for a piece of equipment that drives an international billion-dollar business closed their doors for business on Monday, December 5, 2005. Besides the end user, the ripple effect is tremendous. Employees of Clark Foam no longer have jobs right at Christmas and may other individual shapers and retail outlets will have difficulties replenishing their stocks. People will lose jobs all because of a good policy initiative that simply went too far.

Now imagine this very draconian measure taking place in all manner of industries across the board. How many people would lose their jobs then? We would see what we see now- Europe backing away from the Kyoto accords because their economies simply could not and cannot bear the strain. There’s one lesson to learn from this and I doubt we (as humanity) will ever learn it: there is barely a correlation and absolutely no causation between passion and competence. Feeling strongly about something, when it comes right down to it, means nothing. People get hurt when we start thinking it does.