On the Industry Energy blog, Terry Etam expresses baffled frustration that climate alarmists link fossil fuels to child porn. No, really. At a Green New Deal town hall meeting in a church in Toronto, he says, alarmists like David Suzuki and Naomi Klein sat nodding while aboriginal activist lawyer Pam Palmateer said pipelines and resource development “involve large numbers of man camps, and wherever there are man camps or any kind of natural resource development, you have high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, human trafficking, high rates of child-porn rings — both in Canada and in the U.S.” Klein then objected to misinformation… but only from oil companies.
Etam is not making it up; he links to the original story here. Amidst such vile rhetoric the usual boilerplate about the inadequacies of current policies almost comes across as quaint. Klein, the keynote speaker, said “We’ve had a pretty constricted debate about climate policy in this country.” To which the solution would be to promote more and better debate, not to accuse your opponents of being murderers and child pornographers. She went on to say “We have people pretending to be doing something about it versus the people not even pretending they want to do anything.” Oh really? Who have you heard say they don’t want to do anything? Seriously. Name one public figure.
As to the pretenders, she was briefly and accidentally right. As we’ve said before and will say again, Justin Trudeau’s small carbon tax is incompatible with his overblown rhetoric about crisis. But Klein dug deeper, if only into her own navel, saying “We have a governing party that talks a good game about climate, but still behaves as if the only industry that can create good jobs is the oil and gas industry, and that’s just simply not true.”
Canada’s Prime Minister, as regularly reported in newspapers and commented on by critics and partisan foes, makes it clear that he does not think the oil and gas industry can create good jobs at all. To say he acts as if they’re the only industry that can do so is to depart for the land of fantasy.
Even so, it beats the claim that pipelines cause child porn and that everywhere there’s a natural resource development men murder aboriginal women. As Etam rightly notes, the big problem here isn’t that Palmater said it, engaging in something approaching hate speech about an entire gender in the process. It’s that nobody called her on it.
Have the alarmists no sense of decency at long last? Is this really the level on which they want the subject to be debated?
