Kenney needs to explain his party’s position on climate change

During question period earlier this week, Premier Rachel Notley slammed the official Opposition MLAs as climate change deniers.

United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney’s response: “We’re not climate (change) deniers, we’re climate tax deniers.”

Kenney’s comeback is a great quip.

But Notley wasn’t randomly throwing insults. Several members of the UCP, when they were Wildrose MLAs, made comments that made them look like climate change deniers.

But the Opposition MLAs are under new management. So, have their views evolved under Kenney’s leadership? And what exactly is Kenney’s position on man-made climate change? It was a question put to him in a scrum after question period Wednesday.

“Climate change, of course, is a permanent factor of the natural environment, but there’s clearly a scientific consensus around there being a significant anthropogenic element to recent climate change,” said Kenney. “That’s why I support prudent, reasonable measures to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

It’s not exactly an answer that falls trippingly off the tongue. It lacks the punchy clarity of Brian Jean who, when he was leader of the Wildrose and trying to shed the climate-change-denier label, declared: “Man-made climate change is real and we need to tackle it head on.”

How would Kenney tackle man-made climate change?

“Stay tuned for our platform,” replied Kenney. “We’ll be spelling out a realistic policy in our platform that addresses climate issues without massively impairing our economy.”

That platform will come out during the provincial election campaign in about a year.

And there’s the rub. Kenney is quick to attack the government’s climate leadership plan, especially the carbon tax, but won’t say how he’d tackle climate change.

And he continues to blame the carbon tax for “massively impairing ” the economy. The carbon tax didn’t do that — the massive drop in oil prices did.

According to new figures, the economy is turning around and Alberta is on track to grow by 4.5 per cent, despite the carbon tax.

When pushed to give some ideas on climate change, Kenney said the UCP is a new party that has yet to formulate policies. He did give a clue when he said: “I’m broadly in favour of what the previous government had in place, which was the levy on major emitters and a tech fund.”

Yes, but the old Progressive Conservative governments’ programs largely gave lip service to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As for an overall approach, Kenney pointed to “people like Prof. Bjorn Lomborg, who do not challenge the consensus about the causes, but argue for a different response.”

Lomborg is a Danish political scientist, not a climate scientist, who argues there are greater threats than climate change, such as diseases and malnutrition, facing humanity. Lomborg says climate change is an important issue, but that governments are mistakenly spending massive amounts of money on efforts that will have little effect on global warming.

He has been criticized for his conclusions, but Lomborg has gained a following, especially among those looking for an argument against taking significant action on climate change.

You have to wonder if Kenney is one of them.

When asked about his MLAs’ past comments downplaying or dismissing the reality of manmade climate change, Kenney said: “I think there’s a legitimate range of perspectives about exactly to what degree anthropogenic causes are behind climate change, and more importantly, what the solutions are.”

But there’s not a “legitimate range of perspectives” on human causes unless that range is “pretty much all” or “just about all.”

Kenney might want to do some more reading that includes climate experts.

Or just take a peek at NASA’s web page: “Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the ‘greenhouse effect.’”

Kenney is great with a quip on the carbon tax.

We have yet to see if he’s great with a policy on climate change.