Conrad Black: The climate of fear that gave way to unjustifiable environmental policies

A carbon tax is just a tax increase falsely masquerading as planetary salvation

A carbon tax is just a tax increase falsely masquerading as planetary salvation, our existence as human beings is threatened by climate change. Yet there is a great deal of learned dissent from that conclusion, and even those reports most frequently cited as evidence that the end is nigh if we don’t pull up our socks and, in the case of Canada, shut down Alberta, if read carefully, do not justify the terrifying headlines that the media normally attaches to them. President Richard Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency and 642 national parks because his parents, in his youth, were too poor to afford real vacations, so they made extensive use of state and national parks. In Canada, the Progressive Conservative party under Brian Mulroney had an enviable record in environmental matters, for which the former prime minister has been justly recognized.

But once the international left had shouldered the birdwatchers and lepidopterists aside and mounted their full flank attack on capitalism from this new angle, focusing on the fossil fuel industry, it was going to be a real problem for the Conservative party to hold its support in Alberta and Saskatchewan, while defending itself from the rising crescendo of deindustrialization set up in the rest of the country, in obedience to the fads of the democratic world. Those who guided Ontario through an insanely costly pursuit of so-called «sustainable energy» and almost drove it into the status of a have-not province, departed the provincial Liberals shortly before they sank and took over the wheel house of the federal Liberals and began pursuing essentially the same environmental policy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta MP, managed this issue capably, especially when John Baird was environment minister. China made itself the head of the claimant countries, known as the G77, despite being the chief wrongdoer.

It is demeaning to see Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole claim that «the debate is over» about fossil fuel use generating environmental damage, and then losing a vote on the importance of this issue to his party’s membership. Anyone who has been alive for the last 50 years can see that the climate is not changing very quickly. government make the points that humans had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the last century, the Greenland ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly now than it was 80 years ago and the net economic impact of man-made global warming will be minimal, at least to the end of this century. Add to this the fact that Canada’s carbon footprint is not material to the world as a whole, and that the leading climatic offenders, China and India, are not altering their high-pollution economic growth policies and consider the entire subject to be nonsense and hypocrisy.

It would be too much of a shock to our over-brainwashed political psyche for the Conservative Party of Canada to become a climate denier, and indeed that position is not justifiable. But it is certainly the role, the duty and a politically advantageous course for the official Opposition to embrace the main body of climate science that calls for a prudent carbon emissions policy and much more comprehensive research until the likely extent and effects of climate change are known. This is the policy of reason and of settled science.

And it is the policy that will reconcile fair treatment of the persecuted energy and pipeline industries that must be encouraged as the great generators of national wealth they are, with climate prudence.

Source: Conrad Black | NP