How Dare You!

The world is now threatened with a Green Depression. Or it will be if governments — including Canada’s — go ahead with variants of a “Green New Deal” in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

One of the great leftist perversions of history is the claim that, in the 1930s, FDR’S New Deal “saved capitalism from itself.” In fact, it was the New Deal — and the uncertainty created by its myriad interventions and its demonization of capitalism and the rich — that made the Great Depression “great.”

There was little of additional destructive green substance in Canada’s recent throne speech, but the threat still lurks behind Orwellian slogans about “Building Back Better” and “Resilient Recovery.” And the followup announcement about the proposed new Clean Fuel Standard signals more chaos to come.

I have been writing about this threat for a long time. This week the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum will publish a collection of just over a hundred of the more than 1,600 pieces I wrote for FP Comment between 1998 and 2019. They represent, as the book blurb says, “Two decades of politically incorrect columns … exposing the climate (policy) crisis, junk science, environmental alarmism, unsustainable sustainability, corporate social irresponsibility, uncivil society, censorship and the cancel culture, the war on Canadian resources, and the great green energy non-transition. Incorporating a rogues’ gallery of threats to global health, wealth, freedom and happiness, from Al Gore through Maurice Strong, Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, David Suzuki,

Naomi Klein and Mark Carney to the Pope.”

Environmental hysteria has been with us for more than half a century, but it had risen to new heights of frenzy before COVID struck, not least in the elevation of Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg as its spokeschild. Thunberg, who has been disgracefully exploited, is perhaps the most prominent example of what I call pre-traumatic stress disorder, a state of deliberately induced acute environmental anxiety. An entire generation was forcefed the self- serving apocalyptic misrepresentations of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

I do not wish to make Greta suffer more than she already has, but I have used her now- famous challenge at the UN in the fall of 2019 — “How Dare You!” — as the title of this collection because it reflects the self- righteous totalitarian intolerance of the climate industrial complex and its idealistic young mouthpieces.

I cut my journalistic teeth in Canada writing about the economic nationalist follies of Pierre Trudeau, specifically with books on the 1980 National Energy Program and the state oil company, Petro- Canada. The title of the latter book — Self-serve: How Petro- Canada pumped Canadians Dry — summed up my mounting reservations about Canada’s “Natural Governing Party” and its bureaucratic cohorts, as well as about left-liberalism more generally. Now another Trudeau heads a Liberal party with much more dangerous pretensions, even as it threatens — as his father did — to wreck the nation’s finances. These pretensions are closely tied to a much larger agenda rooted in the UN.

Canadian Liberals like to talk of the country “punching above its weight,” though they don’t usually mean “doing damage out of proportion to our size.” But we can certainly claim to have done disproportionate damage in terms of Canadians who have masterminded and/ or are pushing the Agenda. First and foremost comes the late Maurice Strong, who was critical in programs of indoctrinating children, infiltrating radical environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOS) into the policy process at every level, and creating bureaucratic makework on an unprecedented scale. He was also critical in sucking the corporate sector into the Agenda via organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.

Strong’s equally dangerous successor is Mark Carney, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and currently United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. That Justin Trudeau should have appointed Carney his adviser on economic recovery is almost beyond satire. Carney is the leader of a campaign to defund Canada’s most important industry and kill fossil fuels globally. The ENGOS are the Agenda’s stormtroopers. My book contains numerous columns about their vicious campaigns of lies and intimidation against Canadian forestry and oil companies.

It also includes segments dealing with the subversive concepts of “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” and finally how, and why, the much-heralded “green transition” simply isn’t happening, and indeed can’t happen.

In the wake of COVID-19, it is essential that business be as innovative, efficient and productive as possible in order to mend the damage that the pandemic — and pandemic policy — have done to lives and livelihoods. It cannot afford the burden of a bogus “Climate Emergency” and policies that seek a “carbon-neutral economy” as part of a deliberately poorer, freedom-constrained and globally governed world.

The coronavirus will pass, but the battle to kill fossil fuels will continue. Only now it will represent even more of a threat to ravaged economies, particularly Canada’s. It is crucial to understand the origins of the demonization of fossil fuels and how it represents more than a threat merely to prosperity. It is also an assault on freedom and even the environment itself.