On April 16, Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist and international sensation from Sweden, spoke bluntly to the European Union Parliament about the devastating impacts of climate change.

“Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly because at the moment they are not,” she said after she tearfully spoke about deforestation, erosion, ocean acidification, and loss of insects and wildlife.

Later that day Albertans chose UCP leader Jason Kenney to be their premier.

Kenney isn’t a climate change denier but given his platform he might as well be.

He has already promised he will move quickly to eviscerate the legacy of the Rachel Notley NDP government, including scrapping the carbon tax, significantly reducing levies for industrial greenhouse gas emitters, lifting the cap on emissions from the oilsands operations, and ending the phaseout of coal-fired power plants.

Kenney has also said a UCP government will not offer incentives for renewable energy projects, even though Alberta’s newest wind farms provide the cheapest power option in Canada.

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In other words, fossil fuels must reign forever no matter what they do to the planet.

And who cares about Greta and all the students she has inspired to publicly protest in Europe and North America?

The trouble is, as Greta seems to understand, climate change doesn’t just disappear because you want it to. Or because you think it’s all a hoax invented by the Chinese as Donald Trump once said. Or because you believe that humans will always overcome nature.

After all, it’s not 1957 anymore.

That’s when Walter Gordon as head of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects trumpeted oil and gas as essentials of “modern industrial man” that prove man can overcome nature.

“ … when abundant energy resources are available and techniques are known for transforming them into power, his fortunes can change dramatically. No longer is he fettered by the relative impotence of his puny hands and one of the indispensable conditions for economic progress has been met. So the steam engine, the gas engine, the diesel engine, the turbine and generator have all to be seen in close relationship to modern industrial man as attributes of his increasing ascendancy over nature,” Gordon wrote in the commission’s final report.

Gordon later went on to become finance minister in Lester Pearson’s Liberal government.

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These days it looks like nature is in ascendancy and will continue to be if we don’t transition to low carbon living.

It may soon be forgotten but it was astounding that with the NDP in power in Alberta, a province that earns its way with the production and export of fossil fuels was willing to recognize the dangers of human-caused climate change and impose some limits on both the petroleum industry and individual consumers of carbon.

Alberta could have been an inspiration for people all over the world.

And given the increasing threats of warming temperatures, drought, fires, floods, species extinction, and mass migration, it is equally astounding that leaders like Jason Kenney and Canada’s other conservative premiers have the nerve to challenge the constitutionality of a carbon tax in court.

Never mind all the other moves they are making that will step back the advances made to lessen or mitigate climate change.

Marc Jaccard, an expert in sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is a leading voice on climate change policy in Canada. He was surprised recently to find out that many of his international colleagues see Canada as a leader in global climate policy.

A big change since Stephen Harper was prime minister.

Jaccard wondered if most Canadians actually appreciate the advances that have been made in the past few years and how much that has influenced other nations.

Given our current crop of conservative premiers, and the possibility that Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives could form the next federal government, it’s clear that much of what has been put in place in Canada to address climate change could soon be dismantled.

Let’s hope that Canadians come to appreciate how important those policies are before they completely disappear.

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