Notley wanted to build one federally approved pipeline with widespread Indigenous support. What did she get instead? Lawsuits and protests. Great job, everybody

Under Rachel Notley, oil country extended the olive branch at great personal expense to itself, but even the NDP government was tarred as a bunch of duck-killing, planet-destroying, neocolonialist knuckle-draggers.

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So, the Alberta NDP lost the election. They probably would have lost anyway, but the fact remains that one of the biggest factors dragging down Rachel Notley was her inability to get construction underway for the Trans Mountain pipeline. There was a brief, shining moment where Alberta – Alberta! – was unilaterally imposing a carbon tax, shutting down coal power plants and wasn’t scared to speak of a future that would eventually phase out oil sands production. She even got oil companies on board with this. And this was a pretty risky tactic in Alberta. It wasn’t all that long ago that the province had mainstream political parties who maintained that climate change was a hoax.

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So what was the reaction to Rachel Notley from environmentalists? F———- YOU. I’m paraphrasing, but come on: Notley wanted to build one pipeline. One federally approved pipeline with widespread Indigenous support in her home province that wasn’t even a new pipeline: It was just an expansion of an existing pipeline. What did she get instead? Lawsuits. Protests. Unconstitutional threats from B.C. to unilaterally shut it down. And failing all that, senior politicians threatening to get arrested to stop it.

So, who’s governing Alberta now? What is probably one of the most regressive parties in Canada when it comes to climate change. The United Conservative Party is planning to kill the carbon tax by any means necessary. They’re going to leave coal plants open. They’re also planning to immediately shut off B.C.’s gasoline supply in order to starve the place into submission. Alberta, a place that is often pissed off, is particularly pissed off right now.

So great job everybody: Oil country extended the olive branch at great personal expense to itself, and you instead tarred them as a bunch of duck-killing, planet-destroying, neocolonialist knuckle-draggers. Now, you’ve got a government that not only doesn’t give a crap about reducing emissions, but sees opposing green activists as a just and righteous thing. It might be time to think about some pragmatic moderation in the environmentalist movement, because this stuff is just going to keep happening.

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You may have noticed that Conservatives everywhere have been losing their goddamned minds over the carbon tax. It’s a “tax on everything,” it’s “job killing,” yada, yada, yada. You can dismiss them as a bunch of climate truthers who hate the earth. Or, maybe they’re cynically tapping into a public mood that is reacting against a green movement that is increasingly uncompromising and unreasonable.

You know what I’m talking about. Cities like Victoria and Whistler suing oil companies for climate change, even while they preside over vast carbon-dependent economies: I’m looking at you, heli-skiing. A green movement that is manically opposed to nuclear energy, even if by simple mathematics, you cannot feasibly run the power grid on renewables. Lauding a fringe group of protesters who illegally blockade an LNG pipeline project that has unprecedented amounts of Indigenous buy-in and is a net boon to global emissions reduction because it will be supplanting coal power in China. Prominent environmentalist voices who are openly saying that we can’t save the climate without “smashing capitalism.”

A lot of people have been watching this unfold, and they are coming to the not unreasonable conclusion that no matter what they do, the green movement’s going to hate it, so screw it: Coal plants and Jason Kenney forever. You can talk all you want about the existential risk of climate change and the need to take radical action immediately. You’ve got science on your side, green movement. But if the Alberta election is any lesson, people aren’t going to be inclined to listen to you if you’re a dick about it.