It’s remarkable how often we attempt to deal thoroughly with some climate fatuity in a newsletter only to have more fools rush in as soon as we’ve sent it out. Or we try to give someone credit in the spirit of positive discussion only to be cruelly let down. And this week it’s a two-fer, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blabbers that “the move off of fossil fuels … is going to happen much faster because of Russia”. So much for his deputy PM’s attempted move toward geopolitical energy sanity, or a sober appreciation of what’s really happening in the energy sector. Instead the man who bills taxpayers over $50 grand a year for groceries, including a thousand bucks just on “boxed spring water” (or, as he put it, “drink box water bottle sorta things”) despite having working taps, and also “recruited noted Montreal chef Chanthy Yen as his family’s personal cook”, hallucinates windmill-powered tanks.

Trudeau did concede the blindingly obvious, briefly. As the National Post reported, “Trudeau acknowledged that the Russian invasion had caused global demand to surge for Canadian sources of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil”. But, as he would, he “predicted that the net effect would be a faster phase-out of the Canadian oil and gas sector.” So much for Freeland’s effort to talk adult sense to her boss.

In a world where causes have effects and vice versa, we are obliged to ask why the net effect of discovering you desperately need something would be to throw it away with unseemly haste. And you only get part marks for saying it’s because he was pandering to his audience at the Canadian Climate Institute, whose annual report boasts that “The strength of our work is rooted in our independence” right before saying it is funded by the full-bore-alarmist “Environment and Climate Change Canada” department. (Speaking of the disconnect between cause and effect, in this case the paying of the piper and the calling of the tune, sure enough the dispassionate independent advice this thing gives is, their Mission statement assures us, to “advance a net-zero future”. Though of course the Chair says that with the blast of climate-change-driven extreme weather last year “we saw growing consensus on the need to act with urgency”… as we were told to.)

Trudeau may well be telling them what they want to hear. And also what he pays them to tell him in a grotty closed circle. But the fact is, the reason he pays them to say it is that he believes it. People sometimes assert that there’s some kind of hoax or scam here. But there’s not. We hear the same stuff regularly including patronizing, angry or angrily patronizing comments on our social media from people who are so certain the green transition is happening now that EVs running on solar power are fast overtaking gross internal combustion cars, that they call us dirty names and accuse us of venal dishonesty when we say we don’t see it.

The fact is that Canada’s Prime Minister believes this stuff as thoroughly as he avoids all practical engagement with economic reality, on the energy front or any other, just like the U.S. President and politicians beyond number across the developed world. In actually allowing one energy project, Trudeau insisted that “Any further oil plants or any further energy production is going to have to fit into our emissions reduction plan”. So if we export more oil, we’ll also export less. As he explained, if that’s the right word, “We can’t actually make a case that democracy is better for the world … if it’s reliant on authoritarian dictatorships,” and therefore the Ukraine conflict proves the need “to accelerate our moves off of oil and gas.”

To be fair, he doesn’t want us burning Russian oil and gas. Or Saudi. Or our own. Or anyone’s. He honestly believes the stuff he says about a bright green future with bicycles, windmills, recycled water in glittering well-lit eco-homes and so forth. When asked about the possibility of building LNG facilities on Canada’s east coast, he doesn’t have to check his briefing notes before gurgling “What we are saying, and what we have been saying, is that we are accelerating the transition.” And the fact that there’s no demonstration project, other than the failures in Germany, the UK, California and so on, that we’re accelerating the decline, doesn’t dent his blithe confidence that somehow, as it always has in his personal life, wealth will materialize somehow when he stretches out his hand. Just as the fact that Canada not only has missed all its GHG-reduction targets in the past, but is missing them now, doesn’t dent his blithe confidence that because he is in power and wants it, it’s actually happening.

Even Reuters’ “Sustainable Switch” gets it:

“Today’s newsletter focuses on the challenges faced by nations trying to transition to clean energy as the winter weather and Europe’s energy crisis cools efforts to lower the carbon intensity of neutral liquefied natural gas (LNG)…. the decline in international demand for the so-called ‘greener’ gas is a potential setback in the fight against climate change because it removes a financial incentive for producers to reduce their climate impacts. In another clean energy setback, high natural gas prices and global competition for the fuel have driven more demand for thermal coal for power generation this year.”

But not Trudeau.