Climate alarmists haven’t fooled all Canadians

GREEN INITIATIVES ARE INCREASINGLY BEING REJECTED BY VOTERS. — JOE OLIVER

An important question in this year’s federal election will be whether Canadians hold the Liberal government to account for consciously inflicting an economic calamity on an energy industry that sits on the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world. The answer depends on whether the public buys into climatechange alarmism. We recently heard from a climate believer on why the answer may be no. A skeptic would agree, but for different reasons.

The Globe and Mail devoted over two full pages to an article by Dan Gardner titled “Why don’t we care about climate change?” He wrote that “climate change is the greatest threat we face, save for nuclear war. But we sure don’t act like it.” The reason is apparently not selfishness or ignorance of an undeniable fact. Rather, it is “psychological distance” — the decades it will take for climateinduced disaster to materialize, that it will affect poorer people in other countries more severely than Canadians, and that its worst impacts are uncertain. In other words, climate change is too remote to motivate people to make personal sacrifices.

Gardner concludes the way to deal with this psychological impediment is to make the risk more immediate for the public by, for example, showing P.E.I.’s coastline inundated by a rising ocean, or personalizing the people who may be affected by the Götterdämmerung. I thought this was what alarmists have been doing daily. Whether it is education in furtherance of a noble goal or propagandistic manipulation will obviously vary with one’s viewpoint.

A very different perspective was offered at a 2017 presentation by Prof. Roger Pielke Jr., titled Climate Politics as Manichean Paranoia. He claimed that extreme polarization on both sides has degenerated into a politics defined by four troubling characteristics.

First, a quasi-religious belief that the issue is good versus evil — hence the accusation that skeptics are deniers, evoking the holocaust, and that they should be shunned, penalized or, according to David Suzuki, imprisoned — even though frightening predictions regularly turn out to be grossly exaggerated or plain wrong, and higher greenhouse gas concentration increases arable land. Second, a conviction that the end justifies the means, permitting hyperbole, distortion, cherry-picking and outright falsehood in furtherance of the goal of eliminating fossilfuels usage, depriving dissenting scientists of funding or employment, and using lawfare to silence critics. Third, a refusal to engage in substantive policy discussions or debates, so as not to give a platform to doubters, who might confuse the public with alternative facts. Fourth, millenarian rhetoric about a utopia in which GHG emissions will be eliminated and alternative green energy will drive sustainable prosperity, despite renewables having proved to be costly and uncompetitive.

I would add a fifth: the misleading use of words to evoke negative emotions, like tar sands, though the oilsands do not contain tar; or calling carbon dioxide “carbon” and falsely labelling it a pollutant, even though atmospheric CO2 is a source of life on Earth. No one I know refers to water as hydrogen, which is chemically H2O, nor thinks we are polluted by drinking carbonated beverages.

In Paris, the gilets jaunes rioted against a fuel tax because the elites were concerned about the end of the world, while they worried about the end of the month. In Canada, regulatory impediments, political interference and high taxes blocked pipeline construction and therefore oil transport to overseas markets. Opposition to resource development costs jobs, economic growth and tens of billions of dollars annually that could fund health care and education. It also weakens our national security, heightens regional tensions and undermines national unity.

Furthermore, solutions the government imposes to address climate change, like a carbon-dioxide tax, do not achieve a measurable impact on global temperature or meet our Paris Accord commitments. But they are worse than useless. Perversely, these policies drive up GHG emissions and jeopardize environmental safety by increasing train and truck transportation, importing more oil from less environmentally responsible countries and depriving developing countries of natural gas that would reduce their use of higher emitting coal.

The reason many people do not believe in climate change is not only psychological. The public may sense that alarmist hysteria suggests uncertainty and that hard evidence does not point to an inevitable catastrophe. It is hardly surprising Canadians are unwilling to make painful sacrifices today to prevent an unsure dystopian future that our government has not demonstrated it can do anything to prevent. Meanwhile, other countries put economic selfinterest first, notwithstanding all their hypocritical posturing at the UN.

Costly and useless green initiatives are increasingly being rejected by voters around the world. Yet our prime minister obsessively doubles down on his counter-productive activism, seemingly oblivious to an incipient yellow-vest resistance at home.