Liberals must retreat from their climate obsessions

We are now close to the litmus test of the new Carney government as it approaches the bifurcation between the road to sensible fiscal and environmental policy and the road over the cliff into total war against the oil and gas industry and the piling on of taxes and higher gasoline and fuel costs in pursuit of a tokenistic reduction in Canada’s minimal contribution to world carbon use. So far, we have generally had inconclusive indications of attempts to straddle these irreconcilable options. There have been references to a ”carbon-neutral pipeline,” (a nonsensical idea), and fuzzy comments about how to pay for the prime minister’s vertiginously expensive doomsday climate wish list, including a referendum on tax increases.

Last month a meeting of the prime minister and the provincial premiers in Saskatoon surprisingly produced an agreement that the Pathways Alliance Carbon Capture and Storage Project (PCCS) could be in the national interest. This conforms to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s proposal for a “grand bargain.” This appears to consist of approval of a carbon capture and storage project simultaneously with a new pipeline to expedite the shipment of Canadian oil to other countries besides the United States. A number of oil and gas companies are sponsoring the PCCS, presumably because they know that they will be able to pass on their approximately one third of the $16.5 billion cost to Canadian consumers, after governments will have subsidized about two thirds of the entire cost of the project with investment tax credits.

In the last 10 years, the federal government spent approximately $200 billion on climate change. It is impossible to justify this expenditure and someone certainly needs to explain why adding an estimated $16.5 billion in the Pathways project for minimal emission reductions and increasing oil prices will advance their declared goal of making “Canada strong.” The best that can be said is that the government is taking note of the evolving public attitude that is parallel to the general reinterpretation of these questions in the United States and other advanced Western countries, and even a relatively modest gesture in the helter-skelter scramble to throttle our greatest industry in the false pretense of protecting the planet is becoming a serious political challenge.

This would conform with other indications that we may be reaching the last stages of climate hysteria. The latest evidence of this is a United Nations call last month for the criminalization of disseminating ”disinformation and misinformation” about global warming. Elisa Morgera, the United Nations special rapporteur on climate change, has asked that what is called greenwashing be criminalized since it is deemed to be propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. There is naturally no effort to define disinformation and misinformation and no indication how the meaning of those words will be determined. But there is some evidence that even raising this absurd concept shows that the climate alarmists are becoming desperate. Given their five or more decades of wildly unfounded dire predictions of imminent disaster, that is a reassuring development but demanding that skeptics be arrested and tried as criminals has been a goal of the eco-fascists for some time. Some of the more strident and witless leftists in the U.S. Congress have called for a racketeering suit against the oil and gas industries on this account, supported by a number of “scientists” who also regard climate skepticism as “racketeering” and “corruption.” There have also been the usual noises about referring this practice to the International Criminal Court, which is just an illegitimate mudslinging and shakedown operation that the United States and a number of other important countries have officially ignored. This was the basis of Michael Mann’s attempt to muzzle the outstanding Canadian writer and commentator Mark Steyn, who had criticized Mann’s theory of the “hockey stick” acceleration of global warming.