This report is produced by re.Climate, who are disappointed in Canadians weakening support for Net Zero alarm and expensive emissions initiatives. More on the findings, but first some facts about the source.
About Re.Climate
Re.Climate is Canada’s go-to centre for training, research and strategy on Climate Change communications and public engagement. We provide strategic services to help practitioners reach new audiences, overcome polarization, communicate urgency, and motivate change.
Re.Climate works closely with experts conducting research in misinformation and climate change communications.
Re.Climate Major Funders with mission slogans
Environment Funders Canada: A national network of philanthropic foundations and other organizations supporting efforts to transition toward a more sustainable world.
Ivey Foundation: A private charitable foundation dedicated to supporting Canada’s transition to a net-zero future while ensuring the country’s long-term economic competitiveness.
McConnell Foundation: We are dedicated to tackling the climate crisis and supporting communities coast to coast to coast in transitioning to net-zero carbon.
Donner Canada Foundation: Supporting Canada’s Transition to a Net-zero Carbon Future While Fostering Economic Prosperity
Clean Economy Fund: Supporting giant leaps toward net zero.
European Climate Foundation: Help tackle the climate crisis by fostering the development of a net zero emissions society at the national, European and global level.
The report is a meta-analysis by people dedicated to reduce hydrocarbon energy use in Canada. So while they claim to be non-partisan, their advocacy is aligned with the Trudeau government. Public opinion organizations conducted surveys in the last year, and Re.Climate consolidated and interpreted the findings.
Executive Summary
Canadians report high levels of concern about climate change and are connecting the dots between wildfires, extreme weather and global warming. But the affordability crisis has displaced climate action on the list of priorities while concerted opposition has dampened support for key policies.
The world is experiencing record temperatures and we are skirting 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels over a full year for the first time. But climate policies and actions are hindered by narratives framing them as costly, unfair and ineffective.
The competing concerns and undermining narratives are impacting public attitudes. Many Canadians say they do not believe we can meet our energy and climate objectives, even when they agree that climate change is a serious threat that requires concerted effort. There is a worrying gap between general concern about climate change and the erosion of support for specific climate actions.
Theme: Mind the Gaps
The report contains communications advice to activists concerning declines in support and shifts away from desired initiatives. Examples of some of the gaps are excerpted below.
My Comment:
All opinion surveys are testing the effectiveness of media messaging upon public awareness. This one seems to show that Canadians have been frightened by what they are told, but are not convinced that current and proposed actions will be practical and effective solutions to the claimed problem.
How did the current obsession with decarbonization arise?
Part of a lecture given by Prof. R, Lindzen to MIT Students for Free Inquiry on March 6, 2024 is posted by John Ray at his blog Greenie Watch. Excerpts in italics with my bold and added images.
Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education and then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences and now STEM.
What is usually ignored is that the first institutions to be captured were professional societies. My wife attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association in the late 60’s , and it was already fully ‘woke.’ While there is currently a focus on the capture of education, DEI was not the only goal of the march through the institutions. I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus of revolutionary movements on the means of production.
The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement.
Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, endangered species, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970 , the focus turned to the energy sector which, after all, is fundamental to all production, and relatedly, involves trillions of dollars. This was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations like the EPA and the Department of Transportation.
Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies like the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. There was a bit of floundering to begin with. The movement initially attempted to focus on global cooling due to the reflection of sunlight by sulfate aerosols emitted by coal fired generators . After all, there seemed to have been global cooling between the 1930’s and the 1970’s. However, the cooling ended in the 1970’s.
There was an additional effort to tie the sulfates to acid rain which was allegedly killing forests. This also turned out to be a dud. In the 70’s, attention turned to CO2 and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. The attraction of controlling CO2 to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon – based fuels. It was also the product of breathing.
However, there was a problem: CO2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to the naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO2 would only lead to warming of less than 1°C. A paper in the early 70’s by Manabe and Wetherald came to the rescue. Using a highly unrealistic one – dimensional model of the atmosphere, they found that assuming (without any basis) that relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere warmed would provide a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier’s Principle that held that natural systems tended to oppose change, but to be fair, the principle was not something that had been rigorously proven.
Positive feedbacks now became the stock in trade of all climate models which now were producing responses to doubling CO2 of 3°C and even 4°C rather than a paltry 1°C or less.
The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade or 2 or 3 with no ideaof how to achieve this without destroying their society. Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well – being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive. Few of them contemplate retiring to the arctic rather than Florida.
Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing miniscule changes in their temperature metric, they now point to weather extremes which occur almost daily some place on earth, as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO2 (and now also to the even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide) even though such extremes show no significant correlation with the emissions.
From the political point of view, extremes provide convenient visuals that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes.
The desperation of political figures often goes beyond this to claiming that climate change is an existential threat (associated with alleged ‘tipping points’) even though the official documents produced to support climate concerns never come close to claiming this, and where there is no theoretical or observational basis for tipping points .
I should note that there was one exception to the focus on warming, and that was the ozone depletion issue. However, even this issue served a purpose. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention which banned Freon passed through MIT on his way back from Montreal, he gloated over his success, but assured us that we hadn’t seen anything yet; we should wait to see what they would do with CO2 . In brief the ozone issue constituted a dry run for global warming.
Yes, they are projecting more than 100 Trillion US$.
To be sure, the EPA ’ s activities still include conventional pollution control, but energy dominates. Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars, and these recipients must only share a few percent of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles and guarantee the support of these politicians for the policies associated with the reorientation.
The animation shows Arctic ice melting season picking up first half of April 2024. Typically, the Pacific side goes to water first, this year Okhotsk (top left) is ahead of schedule. Also Baffin Bay (bottom right) is opening up early. Elsewhere Arctic drift ice remains, and Barents Sea ice (top center) is well above average for mid April.
The graph below shows mid-March to mid-April daily ice extents for 2024 compared to 18 year averages, and some years of note.
The black line shows on average Arctic ice extents decline from a maximum near 14.9M km2 on day 76 down to ~14.1M Km2 by day 105. Exceptionally 2024 started with 15.1M km2 and exceeded the 18-year average throughout. SII was somewhat lower than MASIE in most of April until ending nearly the same. Both 2021 melted faster than average, while 2006 ice started and ended much in deficit.
Why is this important? All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post UAH February 2024: SH Saves Global Warming.
The table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 105 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2006.
Region
2024105
Day 105 Ave
2024-Ave.
2006105
2024-2006
(0) Northern_Hemisphere
14244041
14119733
124309
13589226
654815
(1) Beaufort_Sea
1070983
1069820
1163
1068683
2301
(2) Chukchi_Sea
966006
964681
1325
965591
415
(3) East_Siberian_Sea
1087137
1085571
1567
1083591
3546
(4) Laptev_Sea
897845
893528
4316
896528
1317
(5) Kara_Sea
935023
922957
12066
912379
22645
(6) Barents_Sea
856908
608844
248064
495112
361796
(7) Greenland_Sea
802111
653203
148908
599062
203049
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence
1179443
1279861
-100418
1042266
137178
(9) Canadian_Archipelago
854860
852951
1909
851056
3804
(10) Hudson_Bay
1231701
1247129
-15428
1235951
-4250
(11) Central_Arctic
3247180
3233303
13877
3168930
78250
(12) Bering_Sea
639179
647219
-8040
667951
-28772
(13) Baltic_Sea
31107
44493
-13386
84568
-53461
(14) Sea_of_Okhotsk
442660
610735
-168075
507143
-64483
The overall surplus to average is 124k km2, (1%). The only major deficits are in Baffin Bay and in Sea of Okhotsk, the latter going to open water quite early. Those are more than offset by surpluses everywhere, especially in Barents and Greenland seas. In fact, Barents is 120% of its 2023 maximum.
Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring Arctic ice extents.
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In the video Rupert Darwall is interviewed by Lee Hall discussing the plight of UK obsessing over global warming/climate change. For those preferring to read, below is an excerpted transcript lightly edited from closed captions. In italics with my bolds and added images. (RD is Rupert Darwall and LH is Lee Hall)
Keynotes
Britain is in a deep in a growth trap and we’ll remain in this growth trap. You know someone says if you’re in a hole stop digging. What we’re doing with Net Zero, we’re just digging harder and harder.
Today environmentalism is against economic growth and the green policies allow the ultra wealthy to feel virtuous. If you’re a multi-billionaire, like say Mike Bloomberg, you love it. Because what can you do to protect yourself from people complaining about your wealth? Well I’m saving the planet he says.
Europe’s green push is bringing economic benefit but not to Europe. German trade unions were promised during at the beginning of the energy transition there would be lots of green jobs and there were . . . in China. That’s where the green jobs went.
Green Policies and Economics
LH: Let’s talk about green policies and economics and how to really understand it all.
RD: So setting the scene: 2008 was quite a tough year and we had the financial crisis but then we also had the Climate Change Act. And was there a connection between Britain’s economic woes and then the introduction of what was arguably the most extreme green policies in the world.
The British economy was deeply scarred by the financial crisis and its trend growth of productivity has basically flatlined since 2008, and as you point out 2008 is the same year that parliament passed the Climate Change Act. Which as a result saw huge amounts of capital deployed on very low yielding to negative yielding assets in the power generation sector; namely wind and solar.
It’s very difficult to disentangle the long-term effects of the financial crisis and the so-called energy transition. But it is unquestionably the case that mandating very aggressive decarbonization worsens the productive potential of the economy. To give you an idea of how bad is the energy transition for a Net Zero: The International Energy Agency produced a net zero plan, and by 2030 under its Net Zero assumptions, the global energy sector will be employing 25 million more people using 16 and a half trillion more dollars of capital. 16 and a half trillion dollars more Capital using vast land areas of the combined size of Mexico, France, California, New Mexico and Texas to produce 7% less energy.
So the the critical thing to understand about the energy transition is it means you need more more resources to produce less.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing, what effect the push for Renewables has had on our Energy prices, and thus on our economy and our competitiveness. Well it’s made Britain one of the most expensive places in the world for businesses in terms of of the electricity bills. We’re seeing steel making basically being put out of business in this country. We’re seeing oil refining with the Grangemouth oil refinery being closed. The petrochemical industry is going to have a very hard time to survive.
So a lot of industry is basically going to be wiped out. But then you look at the automotive industry where we have effectively mandates for EV adoption requiring rising proportions of car sales must be EV. If car manufacturers don’t meet those targets, they get taxed and that will basically lead to almost obliterating the British automotive industry, apart from some really very upscale names like Bentley. Essentially you’re looking at the death of the British automotive sector.
LH: Could you give us a a Layman’s introduction to what’s happened with wind power in Britain and what this teaches us about environmentalism?
RD: In 2022 Boris Johnson said offshore wind is the the cheapest form of electricity in the country. It was a line fed to him by Carbon Brief, which is heavily funded by the European Climate Foundation, which in turn is funded by multi-billion philanthropic foundations in the US. It is pure propaganda; there is not any basis for saying that.
Remember that at the time of the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then about 40% of the increase of the natural gas price was actually artificial carbon taxes and the price of carbon. So take that that out; these are completely artificial. This cost isn’t about supply and demand of fossil fuels, it is simply government imposed taxes to basically tax natural gas production out of the system.
Then offshore wind is inherently expensive. If you think about it, putting very large wind turbines in the middle of a hostile marine environment like the North Sea you need to have a big question mark over it. This defies common sense. What happened was the wind industry telling the government and the government believing that the cost of offshore wind was about 50 pounds per megawatt hour. In fact analysis of the accounting data for the financial entities shows that the break even price of North Sea power above 100 pounds per megawatt hour.
Basically the wind industry had conned the government into saying wind is cheap. And of course then they’ve now turned around and said actually our costs are a lot higher than you thought. But you’ve got the climate change act which gives a legal Duty on the government to reach Net Zero. So if you don’t give us more subsidy you’ll be defying your legal duty to reach Net Zero, and we just might take you to court to to have the courts decide whether you are.
LH: We heard recently Constraint Payments that there may be a watchdog investigation into wind farms for overcharging on constraint payments, the constraint payments being getting paid to not produce electricity. Can you help us understand the logic behind this? So they get paid to not produce something then they’re overcharging on the nothing?
RD: Yes, the problem is kind of obvious when you see that the more wind capacity you have, when the wind’s blowing the more electricity is produced and that creates two problems. It may be in excess of demand so you have a sharp fall in the wholesale price of electricity. Which incidentally means that gas generators start to be loss making, and it’s very bad for the economics of the power stations that are needed to keep the lights on. It can actually go negative so you pay them to constrain.
The other thing is that the wind turbines are in remote windy locations and they have to be connected to the grid and there’s simply not enough grid connection. So the wind operators are saying well you need to you need more grid infrastructure. Well that’s not free, but they won’t pay for it, they’re expecting consumers to to pick up the tab. And indeed ofgem the energy regulator has a sort of policy, what they call socializing the cost of grid connection, so they’re picked up by customers rather than by the investors.
LH: People that push Green Growth, the green policies, are talking about green growth and green jobs a lot of the time. It seems they they don’t really materialize and we end up paying more to produce less in a less efficient way. I mean is the environmentalism actually an anti-growth strategy?
RD: In Germany for example the German trade unions were promised during at the beginning of the so-called energy transition there’ll be lots of green jobs. And there’s workers in China, that’s where the green jobs are, they’re not in Europe. I mean Europe is not competitive, doesn’t have the low energy cost that China has. To make this kit is very, very energy intensive.
Since the limits to growth debates of the early 1970s in fact limits to growth came out in 1972, greens have argued that economic growth will destroy the planet. And therefore growth is bad. Now they’re turning around and saying well we’re going to have green growth. Well don’t believe it, you should really believe that they are against growth and that their policies are designed have to knock growth on the head. That’s what we’re seeing now.
This kind of degrowth, anti-growth push is very bad news, for people’s living standards, for their aspirations, for their wanting to have a better life for their children; having greater opportunities, more enjoyable ways to to spend money, to spend your life. All that’s true but also growth is needed to fund the state and to fund fund public services. Having had very little growth since 2008, essentially green policies mean endless austerity, it means extremely high tax rates. The tax burden in Britain is the highest it’s been since since I think the late 1940s, since the post war period. So yes it’s very bad both for private consumption but also for public consumption, also public investment.
Britain has a very low level of public investment. Also we have a very low level of private investment So all together in Britain we find ourselves deep in a growth trap. And we’ll remain in this growth trap. You know someone says if you’re in a hole stop digging. What we’re doing with Net Zero is we’re just digging harder and harder.
LH: Marxism policy is to take the means of production away from private ownership whereas what we’re looking at now is to almost destroy the means of production. I often make the point, that in some respects environmentalism is a more radical ideology. Marxism is about changing the ownership of the means of production. This is about changing the means of production themselves.
RD: The early marxists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, actually if you look at the Communist Manifesto, there’s this great Paean of praise to capitalism and the Bourgeois for creating these fantastic means of production that that have unlocked hitherto unknown levels of prosperity. Of course as we just discussed the greens are very much against that. But what where the greens score is although it’s a radical ideology in terms of changing the means of production and degrading the means of production, it is very socially conservative. It doesn’t challenge the existing social hierarchy.
So if you’re a member of the a feudal royal family like King Charles, you like green stuff. It doesn’t say Dethrone him or cut off their heads. If you’re a plutocrat, if you’re a multi-billionaire like say Mike Bloomberg in the US, you love it because again is what you do to protect yourself from people complaining about your wealth. You say well I’m I’m saving the planet. I’m using my money, my business and my philanthropy is about saving the planet.
So on the one hand, economically it’s very radical, but socially it’s all about maintaining existing social stratifications and of course denying people lower down the means to rise up, to better themselves.
LH: So in the original Marxism the rich guy or the top was the bad guy, but now those Rich guys can actually be the good guys in the environmentalism.
RD: The way I put it is that green policies and decarbonization are ethics for the super wealthy. You see Bill Gates when he gets asked in interviews, what about your carbon foot footprint, he’s got so much money he pays an enormous amount to have carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, direct air capture. Well of course you can do that if you’re if you’re one of the richest people on the planet. But of course but for ordinary people when they take their holiday to the Mediterranean if you’re going to expect them to pay hundreds of pounds extra, I mean it’s not going to happen. So yes this is about the super wealthy.
Another example of virtuous contradictions would be to look at say wind farms or solar panel farms. That’s supposed to be good for the environment but they’re destroying the landscape and they’re destroying the habitats and they’re chopping up birds, killing insects and threatening whales.
LH: This environmentalism expects us to suspend our beliefs to some degree yeah this is what you pointed out is a fundamental contradiction deep in the heart of modern environmentalism. It’s like saying, to save the village we had to destroy it.
RD: It is absolutely clear that the environmentalists don’t care about this. Fundamentally it’s about the precautionary principle so you’ve got to be extra specially careful. But not when it comes to wind power; they’re perfectly okay with with wind turbines destroying nature, since they see it as saving the planet.
So for the greater good we need to ruin some of the planet to save the the greater Planet.
The error is that as soon as you go from the local to the global, you sacrifice the local. And of course the global is an aggregate of the locals but for them it isn’t. This maniacal obsession with carbon dioxide emissions which has led to this tragedy that so much nature is being destroyed in the name of saving nature which it won’t do.
LH: When Rishi Sunak was Chancellor Exchequer he talked about rewiring the global financial system for Net Zero and then redeploying $130 trillion dollar of assets can you help us understand like how that would be possible and and tell us about the role that ESG is playing.
RD: He made that that speech at the Glasgow climate conference, in my opinion the single worst speech ever given by any Chancellor of Exchequer of either party. It was an absolutely appalling speech because essentially he’s saying private savings should be socialized to meet public policy objectives. ESG is very much a part of the socialization of private savings. ESG is basically politics by other means Instead of government saying we’re going to pass laws and regulations and raise taxes and spend lots of money ourselves doing it. We are going to pass regulations and we’re going to browbeat business to do this for us.
There’s a twofold cost in that. One is to investors whose capital is being basically expropriated, is being used by politicians. And the other is to Consumers who pay higher prices as a result. ESG is a very malign trend in in finance. It’s very interesting to look what’s been happening in the United States where it’s in retreat for for basically two reasons. First of all because the anti-green stocks, if you like, that is the oil and gas sector suddenly in the covid recovery suddenly put on great growth spurt in the stock market. So if you weren’t in oil and gas stocks you lost out.
And secondly there’s been a big reaction in in Republican states against these ESG mandates. However in Britain and Europe ESG continues. The government is effectively telling businesses they have to come up with Net Zero transition plans, so ESG is alive well and doing a lot of damage in Britain and Europe. In the US we saw Texas divest about 8 billion dollars from Black Rock because of their ESG measures.
LH: I mean do you think we we’ll see anything like that here or is that very much an American approach
RD: If you like the strength and vibrancy of capitalism in America there is not a peep of that in the UK or Europe. Britain’s largest asset manager is LGIM, Legal & General Investment Management, and it is completely signed up to the Net Zero ESG agenda. There’s very little sign of a backlash. Local authorities turn to be green they want to they say they want they invest want to invest their pension funds in in some nice ESG ways. You have the university superannuation funds. Universities are all kind of green and woke and so forth. so there there is unfortunately. You’ve seen that the London Stock Market until just recently, the last few weeks or so, has massively under performed the S&P 500 in the states.
LH: We seeing this contradiction again, but if I invest some money in a big investment firm, I’d expect them to use it to make money instead they’re using it for ideological means.
RD: There was this the ESG sales patter that it was doing well by doing good. They said we’ll use your money to do good and by the way you will make more money doing that than you otherwise would. That was always rubbish, it defied modern Financial portfolio Theory. But they got away with it until about 2022when oil stocks did extremely well, had a very strong run on on the stock market.
The other thing to point out, ESG used to exclude any defense stocks because armor manufacturers are evil and so forth. Then Putin invades Ukraine and they suddenly wake up saying, well actually we should have defense contractors in there. So it’s completely muddled, an ill-defined concept that is made up as it goes along.
And there’s also why should it be fund managerstaking these really important decisions about things like defense and National Security. These are preeminently decisions and policies for politicians not for market traders.
LH: You’ve very much got your finger on Green and economic issues. Are there any things coming up that you think we should keep an eye out for that are going surprises in the coming year?
RD: The big thing will be what happens in the American elections in November. On the one hand you have the Biden Administration which has set itself a net zero policy goal. The EPA is making a rule which will really take coal Off the Grid. It will cut massively the amount of natural gas power they’ve got on the grid. Biden has imposed a moratorium on new permits for export of natural gas.
On the other hand you have Trumpwho believes in what he calls American Energy dominance, he’s a hydrocarbon politician. He’s actually the only Western leader of the last couple of decades who is what I call an energy realist, who really understands energy. In his first term as president he pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. I think he would do the same again, and if that happens it will raise a huge question mark. What is the sense of persisting with Net Zero if the second largest emitter in the world pulls out of the the Paris agreement?
LH: I think it will it really kill Net Zero to anyone intelligent looking at it. We already had India and China not really buying in, but for America to join them?
RD: There is the conceit of the structure of the Paris agreement in these nationally determined contributions. So what China and India have been doing is they they’re not pledging any Cuts. They say well the carbon intensity of our economy will decline over time, which it will do anyway. One of the interesting facts of Britain is that when Rishi Sunak and British politicians boast about Britain cutting its carbon emissions. Britain’s CO2 emissions peaked in 1972 and you know as economies mature they tend to become less carbon intensive; that’s been the case in Britain.
What has happened since 2008 as we discussed at the beginning, that has been massively accelerated with quite a lot of damaging effect on manufacturing, on Energy prices um on the grid reliability and so forth.
LH: If Trump did get in and and pulled out of the agreement in that way, do you think the UK will follow along or oppose? What do you think will happen here?
RD:I don’t think a Keir Starmer government would follow particularly given Ed Miliband in the position of Energy Secretary, who was Energy Secretary when the 2008 climate Act was passed. He was at the Copenhagen conference in 2009 and played quite an important part there. There is no way they are going to have second thoughts on it.
What will change or what could change is the conservatives in opposition might actually begin to smell the coffee and say actually this is this is a really bad idea this Net Zero costs us votes, it costs people money, and therefore we need to question it. so I think the I think it will change the dynamic of politics in this country particularly if Trump were to repeat what he did between 2016 and 2020.
LH: Will there be an opposition Conservative party think in like five years time we could be seeing an opposition conservative party that’s against a lot of the green policies and quite different from what it is now?
RD: That’s a possibility. The problem is that when when a party goes into opposition quite often as happened in 1997 essentially the conservative party had a collective nervous breakdown and gave up on conservatism. That’s essentially what happened and it went through that long period and it was completely enamored with with Tony Blair and the promise of David Cameron and George Osborne.
Well are we are going to emulate Tony Blair and we’re going to get the conservative party to love the leftward drift of British politics? Will that happen again? Well Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair is he? But on the other hand the ability of the conservative party to really screw things up should never be underestimated.
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Brendan O’Neill writes at Spiked Greta’s class war. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The green ideology is the enemy of working people.
It was like a case study in indifference. There was privileged Gen Zer Greta Thunberg and other Euro eco-brats smiling and flicking peace signs as they called on the Dutch government to stop subsidising fossil-fuel companies. Meanwhile, the Dutch people, very few of whom are the offspring of opera singers with the ear of the world media, are suffering one of the largest spikes in energy prices in all of Europe. Their bills are through the roof. They’re reeling from the ‘pain of high energy costs’, as some in the media describe it.
And yet in sweeps giggling Greta and her barmy eco-army
to agitate for less government backing for energy production,
which would likely hike the price even more.
Rarely has the blinkered vanity, the sheer social apathy, of the green movement been so starkly illustrated. It was on Saturday that Greta and chums made their haughty demands of the Dutch government. In a protest at The Hague, hundreds of supporters of the upper-class death cult Extinction Rebellion marched behind a banner saying ‘STOP FOSSIL SUBSIDIES’. Some of the more spirited of these marchers against modernity, including Greta, broke away from the protest and headed to the A12 highway with the intention of blocking it. Because apparently it’s not enough to hit the pockets of the good people of the Netherlands – no, you have to ruin their weekend travel plans, too. Cops intervened and Greta and others were arrested for the crime of impeding a highway.
The press is full of gushing reports of Greta’s arrest. The BBC features an image of its favourite prophetess of doom yelling something as ticked-off cops drag her away. Our heroine only wanted to ‘block… a main road’ in protest against the ‘Dutch government’s tax concessions for companies connected to the fossil-fuel industry’, the Beeb says. What a turnaround from its reporting on the revolting Dutch farmers who also blocked highways, though in their case in opposition to lunatic Net Zero policies rather than in favour of them. Back then, the BBC said farmers had ‘clogged up’ roads and ‘snarled up motorways’ and created an ‘unsafe situation’. So when workers hold up highways, it’s horrifying, yet when time-rich right-on youths do it, it’s heroic? We see you, BBC.
The truth is there was nothing admirable about
Greta’s latest temper tantrum over fossil fuels.
A phrase like ‘fossil-fuel subsidies’ seems designed to get polite society gagging on its muesli, but what exactly are they? Essentially, they’re tax breaks from the Dutch government that make it cheaper for big companies to produce and use energy from oil, gas and coal. The biggest winner is the Dutch shipping industry, which benefits by around €6.7 billion. Call me a raging leftist, but it seems a good idea to me for the government to assist an industry that employs tens of thousands of people and contributes just shy of five per cent to Dutch GDP. Electricity generation is another big winner, benefitting to the tune of €5.3 billion.
Yes, electricity generation. Just think about this. In an energy crisis, Greta and Co are screaming in the streets about government assistance for… energy production! As the Dutch people, like others in Europe, look with fear and bewilderment at their ever-spiralling energy bills, noisy greens want the government to desubsidise companies that make energy. You don’t need a PhD in economics to see what the outcome would be – more cost offsetting to consumers, higher bills, greater angst.
Haven’t the Dutch suffered enough in the energy crisis already? Although it is being forecast that Dutch people’s energy bills will improve a little this year, for a while they were paying the most out of all EU member states. In 2023, they were stumping up €47.5 per 100 kWh, compared with an EU average of €28.9 per 100 kWh. It was the Netherlands’ over-reliance on gas imports, including from Russia, that plunged it into this crisis following the outbreak of war in Ukraine. And it responded by lifting the cap on energy production at coal-fired power plants and reversing its plans to cut back on gas production. To most folk, this will sound eminently sensible.
To eco-cranks, however, it is intolerable and the Dutch government must
at once stop subsidising such planet-mauling activities.
Seriously, why does anyone listen to these fruitcakes?
To me, it is wild that people would protest against energy production during an energy crisis. That they would have a fit of the vapours over energy subsidies, coal use and gas exploration at a time when people are struggling to keep the lights on. It’s not just dumb – it’s cruel. Imagine how out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns you would need to be to swan into a country experiencing a severe energy crisis and essentially say: ‘Stop supporting energy production.’ What was Greta thinking? She’s become a globetrotting enemy of progress, popping up all over the place to demand that we turn off the lights and don a hairshirt in keeping with her dystopian dream of restoring a pre-capitalist idyll that never actually existed.
It’s not just Greta, of course. The entire green ideology
is a menace to working people.
Climate-change alarmism is an unspoken class war in which the well-off and borderline aristocratic while away their days bemoaning the evils of the Industrial Revolution that liberated the rest of us from grinding poverty. Whether these Gretas, Poppies and Edreds are demanding less energy production, fewer cars on the roads, no more cheap flights or just ruining the snooker, the end result is the same: working people’s living standards and leisure pursuits are put in the crosshairs. More than 80 per cent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. The fossil-fuel phaseout that Greta and the rest dream about would plunge the world’s workers and poor into unimaginable penury. These people claim to be waging war on apocalypse but really they threaten to bring one about.
I far prefer the uprising of the Netherlands’ farmers. And other European farmers. They block roads in service of a cause that is the precise moral opposite of the luxuriant apocalypticism of the spoilt activist class. Namely, the protection of jobs and living standards from the religious fever of Net Zero. The insistence that food production not be undermined by the climate-change targets of out-of-touch Euro elites. The improvement of the lot of workers rather than the further immiseration of them in the phoney name of ‘saving the planet’.
There’s a class war being waged on the streets of Europe, with postmodern eco-loons on one side and actually productive people on the other. Choose your player.
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David Strom explains the growing rift between liberals and the extreme left in his article Gulp: Jonathan Chait Is Right. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
I often make the distinction between liberals and Leftists. I understand why many people think I am too generous in doing so because liberals often fly cover for or implicitly coddle the antics of Leftists, but there is a genuine difference. Liberals tend to think the antics of Leftists are a stupid distraction but fear that criticizing them would give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Conservatives do that, too. Look at Laura Loomer as exhibit one. We have our share of loons, the big difference being that they have less power over our Party and our movement than the Left does over Democrats. And, of course, conservatives don’t control any of the levers of administrative power in America, at least at the federal level.
There are plenty of principled people on both sides of the aisle, although far too few. Jonathan Chait, with whom I have few views in common, is one of them.
In a great piece in New York Magazine, he calls out not just the Left, but Democrats on the Leftist authoritarians who are shutting down speech in America. He notes the obvious: if what is being done by the Left in America was being done by the Right, Democrats would be freaking out. Of course, Democrats are freaking out anyway, given that not all conservatives are in jail yet, but you get the idea.
“The goal of these maneuvers is not to make the case for pro-Palestinian policy, but to abuse and deny basic rights to those who fail to endorse the protesters’ beliefs. And yes, being prevented from holding a planned speech to supporters, stalked on the street, or subjected to sleep denial are all forms of abuse. Almost nobody believes these are all just natural parts of the give and take of public disagreement.
The most elemental premise of liberalism is that politics
should be governed by a uniform set of rules or norms that apply to everybody,
regardless of the content of their beliefs.
Over the last decade, an increasingly visible fault line has opened up on the left betweenpolitical liberals and more radical activists. The illiberal left defines politics as a conflict between oppressor and victim and does not believe the former deserves the same rights as the latter. (Crucially, the special prerogatives of victimhood apply not only to victims but also to those struggling on their behalf.)
Abusive protesters usually meet critiques of their illiberal methods with a facile comparison to the civil-rights movement. But that movement was designed for a political environment in which basic liberal rights did not exist: Black Americans lacked the right to vote, to petition for grievances, or otherwise exert basic freedoms that white Americans enjoyed. The movement’s theorists did not intend their carefully designed arguments to be a permanent license for any progressive cause to declare itself beyond the law for all time.”
The simple truth is that the Right doesn’t do any of these things, despite the fact that the media freaks out any time more than two conservatives get together to say anything. Suddenly we are all Nazis trying to instigate a Beer Hall Putsch. The Left, though, relies on harassment as their primary tactic. Not speeches. Not protests. But harassment.
I’m not referring to tactics like holding protest marches, speeches, social-media posts, organizing uncommitted votes in the Democratic primary, or other exercises of First Amendment rights. I’m specifically referring to a campaign to shut down speakers who oppose (or even, in many cases, simply decline to endorse) the movement’s agenda.
Usually, it means interrupting speeches with screaming insults until the protesters are dragged out of the room, which has become the norm at Biden campaign events. At events with sub-presidential levels of security, protesters often succeed in overwhelming the event and its security and shutting down the speech or event entirely, sometimes employing violence.
I’d place in the same category aggressive personal harassment campaigns, like gathering outside somebody’s home at three o’clock in the morning with bullhorns shouting “We will not let you sleep!,” or surrounding individuals on the street to scream insults.
It is refreshing to see liberals beginning to stand up to the bullies on the Left and scream, “Enough!” It is frustrating that it has taken an outbreak of attacks on Democrats to inspire them to speak up, because I am quite certain that they have known for a while–since at least 2020–that the Left unleashed is a very bad thing for the country.
But until recently, the Left’s tactics have worked well enough. Liberals cheered on as Trump appointees were driven out of the public space, unable to even go to a restaurant without harassment. I don’t know what Chait thought of that, so I will charitably assume he objected. As many liberals quietly did, I suppose.
As a nearly 60-year-old man (who in his head is still in his 30s, despite an aging body) I still hanker for the more sedate and norm-constrained days of the Reagan era. Politics was still quite rough-and-tumble, and the 60s and early 70s were pretty awful. However, in the 80s and early 90s, both parties were still somewhat constrained and occasionally worked together. (The Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings were very low points, though).
As you know, I cringe at the worst rhetorical excesses of the Right. But they aren’t in even the same universe as what the Left has been doing over the past few years, escalating to what amounts to political violence and harassment.
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Medical schools emphasizing DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as criteria for admissions is a prescription for disaster.
The late politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible. Texas physician Dr. Yakov Gizersky described a lamentable example of this in aletter to the Wall Street Journal, expressing his surprise at the influence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives on medical school admissions.
He related that he had recently become aware of how “politicized the selection and training of …future physicians has become” while his son was applying to medical schools. Dr. Gizersky described his epiphany thusly:
Nearly all the schools requested multiple essays providing a detailed explanation of the applicant’s dedication to DEI and participating in DEI-related activism. Some schools had essays querying the applicant’s activism for or opinion of progressive border policies. Most also requested that students discuss how they have been adversely affected by systematic racism (and if they haven’t been affected, then they should discuss what they plan to do to fight systemic racism, anyway).
Finally, he noted that some medical schools have stopped requiring applicants to take the Medical College Admission Test, a useful predictor of medical school performance, for “specific applicant groups.” (Emphasis added.)
Dr. Gizerky’s observations took me back… When I entered medical school at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1970s, a requirement for graduation was passing both parts of the medical board exams, the “med boards.” Part One tested knowledge of basic science; Part Two, clinical medicine. For several years, the medical school had conducted an aggressive program of recruiting and admitting under-qualified minority students. It turned out that they could scrape by on Part One, but many were failing Part Two.
That was not a surprise to my classmates and me. Grades on exams were posted not by students’ names but as curves. Ordinarily, you would expect the grades to fall in what’s called a “standard normal distribution,” or “bell-shaped curve,” that looks something like this:
Instead, the distribution was often more like this:
That implied, correctly, that there were two distinct populations represented by the scores, and we quickly ascertained that the lower distribution consisted of the under-qualified minority students.
Instead of tightening the admissions criteria, the administration responded by lowering the graduation requirement to passing Part One and just taking, but not necessarily passing, Part Two. Nary, a peep was heard from the faculty about this lowering of standards.
This sort of social engineering at medical schools has not been uncommon. Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., a retired dean for curriculum and co-director of the renal division at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, has repeatedly criticized the trend toward allowing “social justice” considerations to play a dominant role in medical schools’ admissions and curricula. He founded a nonprofit called Do No Harm, which aims “to combat discriminatory practices in medicine.”
Dr. Gizersky ended his letter to the editor with this observation: “Medical students are already faced with learning more information than ever, and we can’t afford to have medical schools produce better activists than physicians.” I agree, but I would put it somewhat differently: When you’re admitted to the hospital for complicated cardiac or neurosurgery, do you want it to be done by the most competent and accomplished surgeon or by one who was admitted to medical school and residency because he or she was a member of an underrepresented group?
My Comment
Institutional curators seem oblivious to the dangers when substituting DEI ideology for traditional western democratic values. The DEI trinity invariably leads to standards of performance degraded, accountability unenforced, and individual merit unrewarded. This results in mediocre medical practices and betrayal of patients’ trust. Worse it can induce professionals to focus on getting their equitable share of the pie, rather than on the magnificent obsession with best outcomes for patients.
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As reported many places, a lawsuit against oil companies was allowed by Hawaii Supreme Court and the defendants (petitioners) have asked the US Supreme Court to hear their case by filing a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari. Excerpts from the petition are in italics below with my bolds, the citations omitted but with pages noted. The red title is a link to the entire petition.
In the referenced case, at issue is a technical point concerning which court has jurisdiction to rule on the shakedown lawsuit. Defendants ask the Supremes to decide the question:
Whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate.
On the merits of the case, the petition summarizes this way:
Like many other state and local governments in similar cases across the country, respondents filed this action against petitioners in local state court, asserting claims purportedly arising under state law to recover for harms that respondents allege they have sustained (and will sustain) because of the physical effects of global climate change. (pg. 3)
The Hawaii Supreme Court further held that, despite the complaint’s focus on the physical effects of climate change, interstate and international emissions were not the source of respondents’ injuries; petitioners’ marketing and public statements were. The Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision was incorrect, and it provides this Court with the ideal opportunity to address whether the state-law claims asserted in this nationwide litigation are even allowable before the energy industry is threatened with potentially enormous judgments. (.pg. 4)
Objections: Asserting Facts Not in Evidence
In recapping the judicial history of this case, defense lawyers quote multiple times judges and plaintiffs made assertions in the absence of evidence. Examples include:
In American Electric Power, supra, the Court addressed the effect of the Clean Air Act on the federal common law governing air pollution. The Court held that the Act displaced nuisance claims under federal common law seeking the abatement of greenhouse-gas emissions from another State. Because the Clean Air Act “ ‘speaks directly’ to emissions of carbon dioxide from the defendants’ plants,” the Court saw “no room for a parallel track” under federal common law. The Court left open the question whether “the law of each State where the defendants operate power plants” could be applied. (pg.6)
Petitioners in this case are 15 energy companies that extract, produce, distribute, or sell fossil fuels around the world. The plaintiff respondents are the City and County of Honolulu and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. On March 9, 2020, the City and County of Honolulu filed a complaint against petitioners in Hawaii state court, alleging that petitioners have contributed to global climate change, which in turn has caused a variety of harms in Honolulu. The Honolulu Board of Water Supply later joined the case as a plaintiff.
Respondents allege that increased greenhouse-gas emissions around the globe have contributed to a wide range of climate-change-related effects. In particular, respondents cite:
♦ “sea level rise and attendant flooding, erosion, and beach loss”; ♦ “increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events”; ♦ “ocean warming and acidification that will injure or kill coral reefs”; ♦ “habitat loss of endemic species”; ♦ “diminished availability of freshwater resources”; and ♦ “cascading social, economic, and other consequences.”
Respondents allege that those effects have resulted in:
♦ property damage; ♦ “increased planning and preparation costs for community adaptation and resiliency”; and ♦ “decreased tax revenue” because of declines in tourism.
Respondents contend that “pollution from [petitioners’] fossil fuel products plays a direct and substantial role in the unprecedented rise in emissions of greenhouse gas pollution,” which is the “main driver” of global climate change. (pg. 9)
At the same time, respondents concede that “it is not possible to determine the source of any particular individual molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere attributable to anthropogenic sources because such greenhouse gas molecules do not bear markers that permit tracing them to their source, and because greenhouse gasses quickly diffuse and comingle in the atmosphere.”
Respondents assert state-law claims for public nuisance, private nuisance, strict liability, failure to warn, negligent failure to warn, and trespass. Each claim is premised on the same basic theory of liability: namely,
♦ that petitioners knew that their fossil-fuel products would cause an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, ♦ yet failed to warn of that risk and instead, ♦ engaged in advertising and other speech to persuade governments and consumers not to take steps designed to reduce or regulate fossil fuel consumption, ♦ thereby causing increased emissions and climate change. (pg.10)
The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected petitioners’ argument that a sufficient connection between the claims and the forum did not exist because the use of petitioners’ products in Hawaii could not have injured respondents, as Hawaii accounts for only 0.06% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions per year. (pg.11)
Separately, the court concluded that, even if federal common law had not been displaced, it would not govern respondents’ claims. The court recognized that federal common law governs claims where “the source of the injury * * * is pollution traveling from one state to another,” but it asserted that the source of respondents’ alleged injury was petitioners’ “tortious marketing conduct,” not “pollution traveling from one state to another.” The court did not attempt to reconcile that characterization with its earlier recognition that respondents’ theory of liability depends upon petitioners’ conduct allegedly “dr[iving] consumption [of fossil fuels], and thus greenhouse gas pollution, and thus climate change,” resulting in alleged physical and economic effects in Honolulu. (pg.12-13)
In the Hawaii Supreme Court’s view, the inherently federal area of interstate pollution covers only claims where “the source of the injury * * * is pollution traveling from one state to another,” not “failure to warn and deceptive promotion.” But the complaint in City of New York likewise alleged that the defendants’ promotion and marketing of their products caused injury by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The Second Circuit nevertheless concluded that the plaintiff was seeking relief “precisely because fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases” and thereby exacerbate climate change, and it thus declined to allow the plaintiff to “disavow[] any intent to address emissions” while “identifying such emissions” as the source of its harm. (pg.18)
Allowing the law of one State to govern disputes regarding pollution emanating from another State would violate the “cardinal” principle that “[e]ach [S]tate stands on the same level with all the rest,” by permitting one State to impose its law on other States and their citizens. Federal law must govern such controversies because they “touch[] basic interests of federalism” and implicate the “overriding federal interest in the need for a uniform rule of decision.” And because “borrowing the law of a particular State would be inappropriate” to resolve such interstate disputes, federal law must govern. (pg.23)
Respondents’ theory of liability is that petitioners’ fossil-fuel products are “hazardous” because they “cause or exacerbate global warming and related consequences,” and that petitioners acted wrongfully by promoting those products and allegedly taking actions to “conceal[] the[ir] hazards” and prevent “the[ir] regulation.” Respondents are seeking relief in the form of damages and equitable remedies for physical harms allegedly caused by global climate change, including “sea level rise, drought, extreme precipitation events, extreme heat events, and ocean acidification.” The “gravamen” of respondents’ complaint, is thus that petitioners’ conduct increased the world wide use of fossil fuels, resulting in increased global greenhouse-gas emissions, which contributed to global climate change and resulted in localized physical effects in Hawaii. (pg.24-25)
Respondents allege that their injuries are caused by the interstate and international emissions of greenhouse gases over many decades. Respondents’ requested relief—including damages—is designed not only to remedy injuries allegedly caused by those emissions but to regulate worldwide activities producing those emissions. Respondents are simply attempting to recover by moving up one step in the causal chain and suing the fuel producers rather than the emitters themselves (which include the vast majority of the world’s population). (pg.25)
Although the Clean Air Act has two saving clauses, they are materially identical to the Clean Water Act’s saving clauses and thus permit actions under state law only to the extent that the plaintiff is proceeding under the law of the State in which the source of the pollution is located. Of course, that is impossible here, where the alleged mechanism of respondents’ injuries is the combined effect of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Federal law thus precludes respondents’ state-law claims. Indeed, in light of the breadth of the Clean Air Act’s governance of greenhouse gas emissions, respondents’ state-law claims would be foreclosed even if a presumption against preemption applied. (pg.26)
Climate activists protesting outside the Supreme Court July 1, 2022 after the court announced its decision in West Virginia v. EPA. Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO
Because respondents seek relief for climate-change related harms, international emissions—which represent the overwhelming majority of total anthropogenic emissions—are the primary causal mechanism underlying their alleged injuries. “Greenhouse gases once emitted become well mixed in the atmosphere; emissions in New Jersey may contribute no more to flooding in New York than emissions in China.” (pg.27)
The complaint is candid on this point: respondents repeatedly allege that defendants’ conduct led to increased greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, which caused or exacerbated global climate change and thereby caused localized harms in Hawaii. Respondents nowhere alleged harm from petitioners’ alleged deceptive conduct other than through the mechanisms of increased emissions and global climate change. When faced with the same argument, the Second Circuit rightly held that a plaintiff cannot “have it both ways” by “disavowing any intent to address emissions” when convenient while simultaneously “identifying such emissions as the singular source of the [alleged] harm.” (pg.30)
The approach adopted by the Hawaii Supreme Court not only contravenes this Court’s precedents but would also permit suits alleging injuries pertaining to global climate change to proceed under the laws of all 50 States—a blueprint for chaos. As the federal government explained in its brief in American Electric Power, “virtually every person, organization, company, or government across the globe * * * emits greenhouse gases, and virtually everyone will also sustain climate-change-related injuries,” giving rise to claims from “almost unimaginably broad categories of both potential plaintiffs and potential defendants.” Out-of-state actors (including the nonresident energy companies here) would quickly find themselves subject to a “variety” of “vague” and “indeterminate” state-law standards, and States would be empowered to “do indirectly what they could not do directly—regulate the conduct of out-of-state sources.” That could lead to “widely divergent results”—and potentially massive liability—if a patchwork of 50 different legal regimes applied. And that is especially true to the extent that a state court attempts to exercise jurisdiction expansively over any energy company that does business in the State.
It is a whimsical spoof on anyone skeptical that the solar eclipse will happen tomorrow. (Excerpts)
Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”
That is, of course, unless we wear glasses that are on a list issued by these very same scientists. Meanwhile, corporations like Amazon are profiting from the sale of these eclipse glasses. Is anyone asking how many of these astronomers also, conveniently, belong to Amazon Prime?
Let’s follow the money a little further. Hotels along the “path of totality”—a region drawn up by Obama-era NASA scientists—have been sold out for months. Some of those hotels are owned and operated by large multinational corporations. Where else do these hotels have locations? You guessed it: Washington, D.C.
In fact the entire politico-scientifico-corporate power structure is aligned behind the eclipse. This includes the mainstream media. How many news stories have you read about how the eclipse won’t happen?
That’s a great example of “conspiracy ideation” and a subtle dig at people who don’t trust NASA on climate matters. In fact, many of the real NASA scientists are extremely critical of NASA’s participation in climate activism. Journalists or Senators who raise NASA as evidence of climate change should be directed to The Right Climate Stuff, where esteemed NASA scientists give plenty of good reasons to doubt NASA on this topic.
Bottom Line: A Real Science Makes Predictions that Come True.
The article, perhaps unwittingly, shows why Astronomy is a real science we can trust while Climatology is faith-based, like Astrology. When the eclipse happens, it confirms Astronomers have knowledge about the behavior of planetary bodies. When numerous predictions of climate catastrophes are unfulfilled, it demonstrates scientists’ lack of knowledge about our climate system. Anyone claiming certainty about the climate is exercising their religious freedom, but not doing science.
From street names to gender, criminology and climate, our institutions
are in thrall to crazy wokeness. We need to get our culture back.
Society is in the grip of irrational ideas that defy common sense and drive dystopian policies. Some inane beliefs and trends are made up out of whole cloth; others derive from ideas that have resurfaced, Zombie-like, from the crypt of historic failures. They are advanced by “progressive” activists in thrall to a post-modern woke-ism steeped in Marxist-Leninism. What makes the phenomenon so threatening is its pervasive influence in politics, academia, media, not-for-profits and big business.
Two Finnish surveyspublished in March found that being woke was linked to anxiety, depression and a lack of happiness. We can only speculate why their ideas make them unhappier than the people they impose them on. Or are depressed people simply prone to socially damaging notions?A decade or two ago people would have rejected these bizarre ideas for the nonsense they are, and their proponents as emperors with no clothes. But today they are conventional wisdom and skeptics are know-nothing deviants who must be de-platformed and punished for their heresy.A centrepiece of postmodern ideology is DEI which, by dividing us all into oppressor or oppressed, is neither diverse, nor equitable nor inclusive but conformist, unfair and exclusionary. It undermines excellence, productivity and competitiveness and is largely responsible for the assault on truth and inquiry at schools and universities, which have become left-wing breeding grounds for Gen Z.As for climate catastrophism, there are innumerable examples of the zany policies it has led to. Toronto’s fiscal situation is so dire it has just increased property taxes by 9.5 per cent. Yet its TransformTO 2022 Annual Report says that reaching net-zero goals by 2050 will require a $145-billion investment — though Toronto’s GHG emissions amount to 0.114 per cent of the global total. The U.S. government says that since 1850 the Earth’s temperature has risen 0.06C degrees per decade. That means Toronto contributesless than 0.00001 of a degree annually to global warming.
This is the same Toronto that is re-naming Dundas Street, which honoured
a British abolitionist, after an African tribe prominent in the slave trade.
Virtue-signalling trumping common sense is clearly rampant.
The cost for Canada to reach net zero by 2050 will be at least $2 trillion — about $180,000 for a family of four. The prime minister’s claim we must act now to avoid extreme weather is simply misinformation. Canada’s contribution to the annual increase in the globe’s temperature is less than a thousandth of a degree. And the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change tells us that in fact extreme weather events have not increased in severity or frequency. Despite incessant warnings from governments and media about a climate crisis, most people are unwilling to pay much to alleviate it. The climate consensus currently unravelling in Europe never caught on in the developing world.
An overarching concern for many Canadians is that their income has not kept up with inflation,yet the feds double down on profligate spending and ignore stalled productivity growth. They are also exacerbating a severe housing crisis by promoting the largest immigration levels since 1957 and one of the highest immigration rates in the world.
But the grand prize for cognitive dissonance goes to “Gays for Palestine,” who would be at high risk of arrest or defenestration in Gaza or the West Bank, though not in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s best places to celebrate pride. It is tragically ironic that students obsessed about micro-aggressions protest on behalf of a terrorist organization that advocates genocide. The double standard Israel faces has many rationalizations, but antisemitism has been a constant for millennia. Canada’s recent parliamentary vote calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza rewarded Hamas for its murderous rampage, which broke what was already a ceasefire.
On the criminal justice front, moving serial killer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison outraged most Canadians, but is hardly an anomaly: fewer than 14 per cent of “dangerous offenders” are confined in maximum security prisons. More generally, catch-and-release and lenient parole defy logic, put the public at risk and fuel the growing problem of urban crime.
Males who identify as women and use women’s washrooms and compete against women in sports are hailed as avatars of progress while anyone who points out that this could put women at risk or female athletes at a disadvantage can have their career destroyed. Get ready for complaints brought under the deeply flawed “Online Harms Bill,” C-63, which could impose sentences of up to life imprisonment for speech crimes.
Irrational, illiberal ideas are now entrenched in our most important institutions and the public is becoming habituated to them. It will require a determined effort to take the culture back and root out dysfunctional policies that undermine the economy, personal agency and our core rights and freedoms. But do we have any choice?
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The table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 105 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2006.
To me, it is wild that people would protest against energy production during an energy crisis. That they would have a fit of the vapours over energy subsidies, coal use and gas exploration at a time when people are struggling to keep the lights on. It’s not just dumb – it’s cruel. Imagine how out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns you would need to be to swan into a country experiencing a severe energy crisis and essentially say: ‘Stop supporting energy production.’ What was Greta thinking? She’s become a globetrotting enemy of progress, popping up all over the place to demand that we turn off the lights and don a hairshirt in keeping with her dystopian dream of restoring a pre-capitalist idyll that never actually existed.
A centrepiece of postmodern ideology is DEI which, by dividing us all into oppressor or oppressed, is neither diverse, nor equitable nor inclusive but conformist, unfair and exclusionary. It undermines excellence, productivity and competitiveness and is largely responsible for the assault on truth and inquiry at schools and universities, which have become left-wing breeding grounds for Gen Z.
As for climate catastrophism, there are innumerable examples of the zany policies it has led to. Toronto’s fiscal situation is so dire it has just increased property taxes by 9.5 per cent. Yet its TransformTO 2022 
Science Matters 