Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance, the local political party for all right-drinking people, recently released its environment policy: Clean Beer, Clean Water, Clean Land. Coincidentally, the Wild Rose Brewery has just released its seasonal Oktoberfest Lager, which, at 5.5% ABV, might need to be consumed in some quantity to lead to agreement with the position that “there is obviously still healthy scientific debate as to the extent manmade emissions of CO2 are affecting fermentation temperatures --and this debate will likely carry on for many years.”

Wildrose brewmaster Danielle Smith says “people claim our Alberta beers are excessively carbonated. We don’t think that’s the case at all, and rather than adopting the present government’s wasteful and unproven $2 billion carbon capture and storage initiative, we’ll promote natural gas consumption and expand mass transit and commuter rail so that all Albertans can come and drink our koolaid beer without driving.”

The people at the Alliance have a touchingly positive, typically optimistic Albertan outlook on solving environmental problems. Danielle believes that technological advances, encouraged only by the removal of burdensome regulations, will soon completely eliminate the tailings ponds used in oilsands mining, and that industrial development impacts on land would “get to the recovery phase a lot faster” under a “one-window policy for quick regulatory approvals”. The policy wonks take this sunny optimism even further, maintaining that “existing water licences should be more than enough to address Alberta’s growth pressures for decades”.

The people at the Brewery, however, have a somewhat more pragmatic approach -- which, we’re pretty sure, would make the Friends of Science (who like bad rye more than good beer) friends of the Wildrose rather than Friends of Wild Rose.