I’m reading my six-year-old son Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, with all its delightful nonsense talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
But, in the words of the Red Queen, life through the looking glass is “as sensible as a dictionary” when ranked against what is happening in the real world.
We touched upon this briefly in March: liberals were going haywire that Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, would take a hatchet to the “crown jewel” of the climate change cult. The National Climate Assessment is a U.S. Global Change Research Program project. It’s a multi-billion-dollar operation sanctioned by Congress, but it only has two employees. They don’t do the study, so what’s the deal?
The news came down like a thunderbolt. In a spectacular decision, the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, ordered the environmentalist organizations that comprise Greenpeace to pay $665 million in damages to Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. The figure appears a monumental slap in the face to Greenpeace, which was sued by Energy Transfer for “defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts,” following demonstrations against the pipeline project in 2016 and 2017.
You can carry on burning petrol and diesel in your car so long as it is a pricey, niche sports car. If you are a pleb who can only afford a family hatchback, on the other hand, you will have to convert to electric – and the government will pretend that it is saving you money. That just about sum up the government’s new policy on electric vehicles. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate will be relaxed, but mostly for car manufacturers who produce fewer than 2,500 cars a year, who will be given a free pass. Given that these manufacturers – like Aston Martin – tend to be at the upper, more polluting end of the market, it is rather as if the government had just come up with a tax on airline travel which exempted private jets.
The federal government provided $2.6 billion for heat pumps, solar panels, insulation and other green upgrades to Canadians’ homes through the Canada Greener Homes Grant. But what difference did that actually make?
A new report released this week by the non-profit Green Communities Canada suggests the program didn’t do enough to meet Canada’s targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s because “the savings aren’t deep enough and because we’re not doing enough retrofits,” said Kai Millyard, the group’s energy manager and co-author of the report.
By any measure, Mark Carney’s resume is impressive. Mostly from Wikipedia, he was born in 1965, the son of a high school principal. The family moved from the Northwest Territories to Edmonton where his father was a Liberal candidate in the 1980 Canadian federal election. His mother returned to university to pursue a career in education when Carney was 10. He has an older brother and sister and a younger brother.
Pierre Poilievre put forward a solid pitch to voters during his visit to St. John’s on Tuesday, focusing on the “lost Liberal decade” and the policies that contributed to the “poorest growth in the G7.”
He used a letter sent to political leaders by the CEOs of Canada’s 14 largest energy companies as a frame for his case, contrasting Conservative positions with those of Mark Carney’s Liberals on five key demands: the need to simplify regulations by overhauling C-69, the Impact Assessment Act; the need to ensure major projects are approved within six months; the removal of the cap on oil sands emissions the CEOs argue will shrink production; the requirement to kill the carbon tax on large emitters; and the desirability of creating ownership opportunities for Indigenous Canadians by extending federal loan guarantees.
What’s good for the Canadian goose doesn’t hold for the American eagle. At least, not for former Brookfield chairman Mark Carney.
That’s because the Liberal candidate for prime minister, a vocal opponent of major new pipelines in Canada, is now facing scrutiny as Brookfield Asset Management — the investment giant he once chaired — closes in on a USD$9 billion deal to acquire Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel transport system in the United States.
‘Though Carney is smooth and superficially sophisticated, he’s cut from the same fanatical net-zero cloth as Trudeau.’
Donald Trump’s continuing rhetoric about making Canada the 51st State is certainly annoying, but one can’t deny that his apparent underlying message — that Canada is performing far below its potential and needs to get serious or its very existence may be threatened — carries a serious point.
Western Canadian agricultural producers of canola, peas and oil cake are facing crippling retaliatory tariffs from China, because Canada imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, in line with the USA, to protect our ‘homegrown’ non-existent EV industry.
Fact: Canola contributes $43 billion to the Canadian economy, slightly less than the subsidies thrown at EV battery plants, the manufacturers of which are bankrupt or teetering.
It is typical of people like Liberal Leader Mark Carney, who have spent significant time on either side of the increasingly porous border between the public and private sectors, that they have amassed a variety of side-appointments to various public and private entities, corporate boards and governmental and quasi-governmental advisory boards.
Germany’s once-firm stance against Russian gas imports is beginning to unravel as the country considers restarting the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines.
Not because it wants to.
Net zero could make flying “something for the privileged”, the boss of Qantas has warned.
Vanessa Hudson, the chief executive of the Australian flag-carrier, said the higher costs associated with clean fuel were likely to push up air fares and could put them out of reach of the masses.
Her warning came as the boss of Airbus said net zero would add a “green premium” to plane tickets and reverse the decades-long trend of flying getting cheaper over time.
They don’t want you driving let alone flying, hell being allowed to heat your home is up for debate with the climate loons.
h/t Mauser
JSO, the climate activist group, is planning its final protest next month after senior figures were given long prison sentences
Just Stop Oil had looked on enviously at Dutch environmentalists who managed to rouse thousands of people to block a main road outside parliament in the Netherlands to protest against fossil fuel subsidies.
They had hoped to emulate their success in central London by gradually swelling a small demonstration to a mass protest that could “reclaim parliament”.
But the logistics of having enough people to occupy Parliament Square and the deterrent of potential jail sentences killed the idea in the end. “The firepower wasn’t there,” Jonathon Porritt, a JSO supporter, said.
Scrapping the EPA’s draconian tailpipe-emissions rule will boost competition, benefit consumers, and strengthen national security.
In his March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump celebrated terminating Joe Biden’s “insane electric vehicle mandate.” A year ago, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency had finalized a rule, nominally about tailpipe emissions, that would have required 30 percent to 56 percent of all new light-duty consumer cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles (EVs). Trump announced his intention to undo Biden’s EV overreach in his first week in office, as part of his executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy.”
