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Ditto this whole idea of slashing GHG emissions by 30%, 50% or 100%. Yes, 100%. Going to “net zero” by 2050 means cutting them out entirely. Unless the idea is to invent a bunch of carbon-offset jiggery-pokery and pretend. Which it probably was.

Just as the hated carbon tax was also fake. Opponents expended a lot of ammunition on its devastating economic impact and hit nothing, because it was too small to have one. Gas was selling for around a dollar a litre this week in the nation’s capital, where surely politicians occasionally glance out the limousine window and think “Gosh, that price won’t discourage people from using the stuff, will it?” But then it was never really meant to.

As with UNDRIP, some feared the policy of killing fossil fuels, others hoped for it. But most who advocated it, in politics or the press, never took its implications seriously enough even to think them through because it was all make-believe. In our public life very little is now real.

At least, not on purpose. When Teck suddenly threw in the towel on its $20 billion Frontier oilsands mine right before a cabinet decision was due, writing off a billion dollars and a decade navigating the maze, it felt like a reality moment. Until the ministers of Natural Resources and of Environment and Climate Change wrote a surreal letter congratulating Teck, as if not only the consequences of ditching the project weren’t real, the ditching wasn’t either.