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“If we don’t convince the world that we have our act together, as a country, on the environment, we will find it harder and harder to get our resources to world markets.”

That was Justin Trudeau, during a 2013 speech in Calgary. Well, here in 2018, how together is “our” act on the environment?

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Currently B.C. and Alberta are staring out at each other over the ramparts on global warming. The Trans Mountain pipeline is the causus belli, but global warming, i.e., what is really meant by “the environment” these days, is what the strife in Canada is, and has been for quite a while, all about.

Whatever it does for the Earth, global warming raises the temperature in politics. Take the ardent catastrophist Naomi Klein for instance. Her view of it is as the hell mouth to “injustice, racism, intolerance and wars,” a tidy quartet. On Canada’s much abjured Kinder Morgan pipeline, Klein is only a little less fretful. She speaks of that, among other drear indictments, as having the potential to “cook the planet.” A sense of proportion is clearly not a dominant virtue when global warming is your cause. Her views are the views of the movement. She is a leading antagonist in the global warming war.