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Can Conservative thinkers convince Pierre Poilievre to take climate change seriously? That’s the question that centre-right website The Hub, with some financial support from the pro-carbon pricing advocacy group Clean Prosperity, is trying to answer. In the process, they’re raising some questions about their own approach to the issue.
Hub co-founder Sean Speer kicked things off last month with the suggestion that Canada’s Conservatives “are well placed to lead on climate change,” which sounds about as likely as Canada's Liberals being well placed to lead on housing prices. The Conservative Party, after all, has spent years vandalizing every climate policy the federal government has put forward, from the carbon tax to the Clean Fuel Regulations and the Clean Electricity Regulation. It has shown absolutely no interest in taking climate policy even a little bit seriously, instead pretending that we can either dismiss Canada’s role as insignificant (only 1.5 per cent of global emissions!) or use it as an opportunity to push for more fossil fuel exports (LNG, anyone?)
There’s a fundamental unseriousness in Speer’s piece, too. He pretends federal climate policy in Canada is somehow driven by Greta Thunberg and her de-growth worldview, and the Liberal government would “seek to achieve our climate goals by accepting less economic activity, lower living standards, and even fewer humans.”
This is a flagrant straw man he’s built, one that bears no resemblance to the federal government’s actual approach to climate change. It also buts up against the same conspiracy theory that BC Conservative leader John Rustad has mooted, which is that climate policy is actually part of an “anti-human agenda” designed to “reduce the world population.” This sort of silliness has no place in a serious argument, and it’s a shame that Speer even hints at it.
Neither does the self-serving flattery that underpins the contribution of Clean Prosperity’s Ben Dachis and Adam Sweet. They seem to be bent on gaslighting Conservatives into believing that they’re actually the leaders on climate policy by invoking Brian Mulroney’s achievements on repairing the ozone layer, Stephen Harper’s reluctant decision to phase out coal fired electricity and the Government of Alberta’s supposed leadership on carbon pricing. “We need to take ownership of our many accomplishments and figure out how to take them to the next level,” they write.
Alas, Dachas and Sweet give Conservatives credit for something they had very little to do with: Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system. “Under the leadership of PC Premier Ed Stelmach, Alberta was the first jurisdiction in North America to introduce industrial carbon pricing in 2007, which evolved into the current TIER system in 2019 under UCP Premier Jason Kenney….it has been so successful that it inspired the federal government’s own system for industry.”
One small problem: this revisionist history completely elides the existence of the Alberta NDP government or the crucial role it played in developing Alberta’s TIER system. I know because I was literally there, working in the Alberta Climate Change Office while this policy — then known as the “Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation” — was being developed and negotiated with large emitters like the big oil sands companies. That's the system that inspired Ottawa's industrial carbon pricing approach, and Jason Kenney and the UCP get precisely zero credit for it.
All they did upon forming government was change the name, weaken the stringency for the oil and gas industry, and divert some of the revenues it generated to funding its quixotic War Room. “The change from CCIR to TIER is a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars per year which benefits primarily the highest emitting facilities in the province, and a significant reduction in the value of innovative, emissions-reducing technology,” University of Alberta professor Andrew Leach wrote in a 2019 analysis.
Finally, there’s political strategist Ginny Roth’s suggestion that what Canada really needs — and what Conservatives are uniquely positioned to deliver — is some “climate policy realism.” Roth suggests that Canada’s resources are more “cleanly-produced” (they aren’t) and should therefore be valued more highly in global trade agreements (see above). She stops short of explicitly arguing that we should be awarded emission reduction credits for our LNG exports (not happening), instead writing that “whether through savvier negotiations at global trade and climate summits, or through policy solutions like a carbon border adjustment, when it comes to climate policy, we must place some value on our borders and put Canada’s national interest first.”
What this needs, ironically, is a dose of realism. A carbon border adjustment is essentially a carbon price paid on imported goods with higher carbon intensity than locally-produced equivalents. Canada currently ships millions of barrels per day of higher-emitting oil to the United States, which would surely respond to a carbon border adjustment with one of their own. Unless and until Canadian oil and gas producers can actually start reducing their per-barrel emissions — and as the Pembina Institute noted recently, some oil sands producers are going backwards on this front — this would be little more than a self-inflicted injury.
Don’t get me wrong here. I understand and appreciate the intellectual permission structure these people are trying to create for Poilievre to do the right thing on climate change, even if I think giving Conservatives undue credit for half-hearted work is not the way to go about it. But I’m reminded of that scene from the last season of Breaking Bad where Walter White begs the ringleader of a group of white nationalists not to kill his brother-in-law Hank. “You’re the smartest guy I ever met,” Hank says, “and you’re too stupid to see he made up his mind 10 minutes ago.”
The same seems true of Poilievre on climate. No political Jedi mind trick, no matter how well intentioned or executed, will convince him to see climate policy as anything other than another culture-war front on which to attack the Liberals. Until the remaining climate-conscious Conservatives are prepared to reckon with reality here, both in terms of their own party’s record and their leader’s most basic political instincts, I don’t think they’ll make much progress.
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When asked about the Conservative Party’s plans to tackle climate change, MP Rick Perkins’ response is that the full plans will be released just before the next federal election but will largely be based on new emerging technologies. Mr. Poilievre’s relentless “Axe the Tax” campaign has been successful in distracting Canadians from the real existential threat of accelerating climate change and the effects it is already having on the cost of living including costs of food production due to drought and insurance rates due to wild fires.
We might assume that the emerging new technology the Conservatives will rely on will be carbon capture and storage rather than reduction of our over reliance on fossil fuels. “Not so fast says a recent editorial in Nature. Canada already spends three times more backing oil and gas than renewables. Many climate scenarios bake in a temperature overshoot before technologies are used to scrub the atmosphere clean of emissions. Emerging science says that is probably a fool’s errand.”
“New research finds that, “even assuming that removing that amount of carbon is feasible, some Earth systems will probably not be restored to their previous equilibrium. The solution, it will not surprise you to hear, is to cut emissions now. “To wait and scrub the atmosphere later is to court disaster — for people and the planet.”
Reference:
Don’t overshoot: why carbon dioxide removal will achieve too little, too late, Nature 634, 265; 2024-10-09: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03266-9
Note in the EU which tried carbon capture technology, out of 13 projects, the majority failed to deliver or deliver anywhere close to expectations. Pierre's technology approach is most likely the same carbon capture failures that oil & gas keeps talking about, but expect government handouts and tax payer funding. If oil & gas are that confident it would work, why are they not investing their own excessive profits towards the technology? Why? Because they know it won't work and only buys them more time keep the status quo.
Let us all recalled, that the Conservatives refused to acknowledge that climate change is real. Given that, whatever Pierre "Snake Oil Salesman" Poilievre releases as a platform that may included climate change, you can take it as just a vote grabbing scam. The CPC ship sailed on serious climate change policy a while back with their failure to acknowledge climate change is real.
Just listen to the far right MAGA like MPs in Pierre's dysfunctional collection, pushing disinformation and anti-climate change nonsense across the country. The only time they swing the other way is when an election is loaming. The same have convinced their supporters to push the same disinformation and add in more conspiracy theories. Then add in that oil & gas are in their back pockets.
Climate change will take a back seat should Pierre form the next government.
I think Mr. Fawcett is giving these supposedly climate-concerned conservatives a bit too much credit. They're lying. They're just playing "good cop" to most Conservatives' "bad cop", trying to give the impression to potential Conservative voters outside the core crazy that there's still some hope a Conservative government would not govern from the core crazy.
It is hard to take Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives commitment to any policy on climate change seriously. I've read on several occasions that Milton Friedman was a major influence on Mr. Poilievre. It is almost a certainty that Friedman would argue there should only be one way to fight carbon pollution - put a price on it (i.e. a carbon tax). Either Mr. Poilievre doesn't understand one of his intellectual hero's or he is being a hypocrite because his major campaign promise is to Axe the Tax, sigh.
The manifestarion of Friedman's Chicago School doctrine in part took the form of deep cuts to social programs while elevating subsidies to the private sector, or privatizing public services altogether. Trickle Down theory abounded, so money and tax breaks were directed to the wealthy elite, which in fact proved Trickle Up was the reality in the end.
Today you've got an amalgamation of the Chicago School with MAGA College, and voodoo government management is the result. The only requirement for a masters is that you are mentally ill or cognitively impaired.
Kidding themselves and me. That attitude had got to be a joke! Poilievre, and starting from West to East! Rustad? Denys; Smith bets the future on fossil fuel and the more CO2 the better; Moe in Saskatchewan is so busy telling g feds they suck and trying to make gas tge alternative even though it us likely more polluting than coal due likely to incredible leaks of methane; Ford in Ontario flip flops around so nothing gets done;; Higgs in NB is joke. Conservatives leaders, u have to be kidding g
No kidding. Great article Max, especially the apt comparison with the classic "Breaking Bad," a morality tale like no other, down to the highly lucrative product at the heart of it which is a dangerous, toxic sludge like no other.
And many thanks for so effectively lampooning just a few of the depressing army of die-hard apologists for what conservatism has become, people who have never been MORE on the WRONG SIDE of human history, period, as stupidly and unthinkingly sucked in by the allure of power as Walter White was. They remind me of the students in the Public Relations program at Mount Royal, upcoming corporate shills, fashionably dressed and self-important next to the Journalism students at the time; it's a type...
At this point, ANYONE who still defends the insanity that is the current, "cooked" political right wing is also Trump adjacent, Marjorie Taylor Green adjacent, UCP adjacent, convoy adjacent, post-truth adjacent, anti-vax and anti-science adjacent, pro-human extinction adjacent etc. etc. and should be treated as the enablers and enemies they actually ARE.
Excellent article. We need ti remind folks who may be on the verge of depression merely from the sheer volume of bad news on the climate front of a few salient facts.
Yes, Canada is tossing mountains of cash at fossil fuels, thre
...three times more than renewables. However, at the very same moment the rest of the planetary economy is now funding renewables MORE than the world investment in carbon.
I sure wish Chris Hatch would report more on the progress -- if anything to punctuate the rivers of depressing info he regularly features ... inevitably followed by a big fat red Donate button.