Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.
This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”
What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.
Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.
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