Greta Thunberg is not the problem – politicians are
Children are not the cause of climate hysteria, they’re the symptom created by adults who engage in it.
Attacking 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg as “mentally unstable,” as People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier did in a series of recent tweets, is wrong and counterproductive.
It allows alarmist politicians and their operatives (see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s senior political adviser Gerald Butts) to attack Bernier for attacking a child instead of having to defend Trudeau’s broken promises on climate change.
The real issue is that politicians around the world are lying to our children and to us.
They warn us human-induced climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to humanity and then, through their deeds as opposed to their rhetoric, reveal they either don’t really believe it, or don’t care.
In Canada, so many independent, non-partisan agencies have examined and found wanting Trudeau’s and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s claim that Canada is on track to meet its Paris accord climate targets for 2030, that it’s amazing either of them can keep saying it with a straight face.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer says their plan is insufficient. So does the federal environment commissioner and nine of 10 provincial auditors general. So does the federal government’s own studies. So does the United Nations.
Last month, the Climate Action Network — a global coalition of 1,300 environmental groups — released a report ahead of the G-7 meeting in France that concluded that among the world’s leading developed nations, Canada’s plan is almost as bad as that of the U.S. under Donald Trump, which doesn’t have one.
That’s why when they’re out on the campaign trail Trudeau, McKenna and Co. accuse the Conservatives of having no climate plan as opposed to explaining their own in any meaningful way.
That’s unsurprising given that in the space of a few weeks recently, McKenna flip-flopped twice on whether Trudeau, if he wins the Oct. 21 election, will raise his carbon tax/price higher than the $50 per tonne level he has set for 2022.
Anyone who understands the numbers knows Trudeau’s carbon tax/price will have to be in the range of $100 to $300 per tonne of emissions by 2030 if Canada is to have any chance of meeting its UN Paris accord climate targets — which used to be Stephen Harper’s targets — that Trudeau agreed to in 2015.
And yet, on what Trudeau and McKenna say is the most important election issue of our era, and a centrepiece of the Liberal re-election campaign, Canadians have no idea of what their future plans for their carbon tax/price are.
The Liberals are right that absent any carbon tax/price, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s plan will also fail to reach Canada’s Paris climate targets.
But the only party in this election that has a plan that even comes close to what must be done is Elizabeth May’s Greens, and that would require the equivalent of a fighting a world war — without the bombs — on global emissions.
Those emissions are continuing their relentless upward march — a 2.7 per cent increase last year — including an eight-million tonne increase in Canada, rising to 716 Mt in 2017 from 708 Mt in 2016, the last year for which Canadian statistics are available.
If you want to get angry over the political response to climate change, don’t get angry at Greta Thunberg but at politicians who lie to us.