Warm wishes won’t heat my home

So it turns out we don’t need pipelines after all. Jane Fonda just said so in Fort McMurray. “We don’t need new pipelines.” Glad that’s settled.

Now you may think there are still a few issues here. But apparently there aren’t, so let’s just breeze through it and be done.

Some have claimed that because we depend heavily on oil for food, clothing and shelter, the appropriate question is not whether to move it around the country but how. Since trains are less safe and environmentally friendly, and ships do very poorly on land, pipelines are the best choice on every score. And “outsourcing” our emissions by importing oil is neither virtuous nor safe.

Fortunately in the World According to Jane it turns out we don’t need oil either. Consumers and workers should simply turn to alternative energy. “We’re not saying it’s going to be overnight; it has to be planned, it has to be compassionate, it has to take into account the workers and their families.” So there you have it.

At this point I will neither rake through Ms. Fonda’s political past or mock celebrity activists. I actually prefer the rich and famous trying to give something back to the community rather than swanning about calling people dahling at parties. I just want them to think through what they are saying and doing with the same care they gave their career.

Fonda herself has said and done some stupid and hurtful things in her day for some of which she has expressed genuine contrition. But then she picked herself up and tried again. And while a feminist activist should avoid cosmetic surgery, I admire a former fitness guru at what I am astonished to learn is age 79 still jetting around doing stuff. Except, given her environmental views, the jetting bit.

Prince Charles once addressed an environmental gathering holographically. Why not Fonda or Neil Young? It is not getting personal to complain when someone famous, or not, says one thing and does another. Jason Kenney twitted Fonda on Twitter about her Beverly Hills home atop an active oilfield. And while I don’t think she drilled the well, I fault her for living, like Al Gore, in a monument to hypocrisy.

I fault her even more for foggy thinking. I would call it the kind of thing that gives celebrity activists a bad name except here as elsewhere, she is simply giving an amplified voice to all kinds of people who share both her concerns and her warm but reprehensibly fuzzy thinking.

For instance her blithe insistence that central planning can make alternative fuels work. Where did that come from? Central planning can’t even make Canada Post work, and its historic record worldwide is of uniform, massive, callous catastrophe. But somehow people like her assume, with remarkably little analysis, that it is bound to work next time just because it would be neato if it did, thus solving any number of otherwise intractable practical problems.

As Thomas Sowell’s groundbreaking 1987 A Conflict of Visions argues, to those in the Fonda camp, we can wish away pipelines, poverty and war and summon wind power, peace and plenty simply by wanting them badly enough. Or I should say well enough, because intensity and purity of motive are central.

The dark side of t his broadly “liberal” view is its disastrous impact in practice. And the very dark side is its necessary assumption that if good things do not happen it is because somebody somewhere harbours a malevolent desire that they should not. Hence the remarkable speed with which “compassionate” leftists can turn nasty if you disagree with them, assailing your motives and drifting into conspiracy theories from monopolists to “merchants of death.”

To critics of the timing of her knocking pipelines in fire- and job-loss-devastated Fort McMurray, Fonda said “No, it’s exactly the time. In California, we are seeing flooding. We are seeing fires that are burning up whole communities. We watched Fort McMurray burn, and it was so painful for us. But it’s a part of global warming.”

Never mind her outdated script about “global warming” not “climate change.” If you object that flooding and fires have long afflicted us, citing perhaps “Der Grote Mandrenk” of Januar y 1362, you will be called dirty names like “climate denier” by people who, five minutes earlier, had no idea a terrible wave of flooding at the end of the “Medieval Warm Period” even existed. Or that there was a “Medieval Warm Period.” Facts schmacts. We’re building shining castles in the air.

So here’s the deal. We need new pipelines because we need oil. And we will need oil until someone comes up with practical alternatives to heat our homes, cook our food and get us to the Cannes Film Festival or the grocery store.

I FAULT HER FOR LIVING, LIKE AL GORE, IN A MONUMENT TO HYPOCRISY.