- If you go to the COP28 venue website it offers you a “Switch to Low Carbon Version” and if you do you can then “Switch Back To Full Experience”. Which is pretty much a metaphor for 30 years of climate policy. Even when it comes to a website, the low carbon version isn’t actually better as promised, instead it’s a cut-back, slightly squalid and depressing place you wouldn’t want to get stuck in.
- So there’s this cargo ship lugging coal from Vancouver to Asia called… “MV Climate Justice”. Seems marketing isn’t just for breakfast cereal any more. Speaking of which, Canadian MPs are now investigating a federal government foundation “Sustainable Development Technology Canada” for so-called “greenwashing”.
- The New York Times, in the person of columnist David Gelles, peddles “The pope’s warning to a warming world”. Apparently it’s OK that Francis is not a climate scientist (like Gelles, with an MA in “Journalism” and a BA in philosophy) when he “names and shames the countries and industries he sees as bad actors and makes an urgent plea for collective action” and “In clear, precise language…identifies the burning of fossil fuels as the primary driver of climate change”. Whereas if he drones on about, say, sexual morality they tune him out as some know-nothing fuddy-duddy in a weird hat.
- Facts shmacts. Caught wildly overestimating the return on their huge subsidies to EV makers, one Liberal MP reproached the Parliamentary Budget Officer by saying “We have a vested interest in building an electric vehicle supply chain to help increase the economy and fight climate change” and “I find your assumptions very narrow because you are not looking at the broader vision.” The one where money falls from the sky because government threw it out a window.
- For those of you who hope to see the tone of public debate lowered still further, we note an Alberta Report report that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “will personally head a delegation to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to make the case for the most responsibly produced oil and gas on the planet at the end of November and upstage federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s project of trashing Canada’s – and Alberta’s – energy sector on the global stage. ‘We need to work with industry to make sure we’ve got a kick-ass display committee to take with us to COP 28,’ she told a cheering crowd at the Global Business Forum in Banff Friday.” Nobody will care. Stay home. And wash your mouth out while you’re at it.
- Meanwhile the taxpayer-funded Canada Infrastructure Bank gives a luxury hotel millions for an energy refit, and when challenged the minister says “I made no such decision. The Bank operates independent of my office.” But just in case, pleading in the alternative, “Keep in mind when they loan money to a proponent that’s money that is typically paid back…. my belief is that by allowing the Bank some flexibility to pursue goals including energy efficiency we can actually achieve social outcomes that are important to Canadians.”
- Roger Pielke Jr. argues that “The Public is OK, It's Us Scientists Who are the Problem” given a new survey that found that, of all things, the more politicized a scientific field became the less people trusted its supposedly authoritative and Olympian pronouncements. As he says, “Typically, the idea of a crisis of public trust in science is quickly accompanied by a diagnosis (from us scientists, of course) that identifies the crisis as a failure of the public, e.g., in being easily duped by monied interests or evil politicians, and simply not smart enough to know enough to come to the proper views” but he thinks instead that “trust in science (including scientists and scientific institutions) is placed at risk when leading scientists and institutions become politically active in ways that diverge from the values and preferences of the broader public.” In unrelated news the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to pioneers of mRNA vaccines. Now do you get it, you vulgar clods, or does Hillary Clinton have to deprogram you?
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11 Oct 2023 | News Roundup
"Nobody will care. Stay home. And wash your mouth out while you’re at it."
With friends like CDN, who needs enemies? What a ridiculously puritanical, eastern-Canadian thing to say! Danielle is doing MASSIVELY more on stemming the tide of climate alarmism than keyboard jockeys like you.
Pielke needs to take his own medicine after telling us 100% of post mini ice age warming is due to human action…but he’s not part of the problem.
While Danielle Smith is definitely more attuned to reality, reason, and prosperity than her NDP competition, the marketing plank of "cleaner production" of hydrocarbons that the Jacobins want "eliminated" is wasted effort. She needs to adopt Alex Epstein's Energy Talking Points.