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This government’s policies in this area … have been a costly and embarrassing failure

Environmental policy has been a greater and costlier failure, though less afflicted by human tragedy than native policy. Everyone favours a clean environment, but there are points where economic sense is preferable in application to the pursuit of a perfectly undisturbed environment. Comfort and convenience, including most forms of transport and heating and air conditioning homes and workplaces, do compromise a pristine environment. The environment has become the ultimate good cause and political free lunch: everyone likes it. But renewable resources are completely uneconomic, and because storing electricity remains costly or impossible and the sun is not always shining nor the wind blowing, traditional power supplies have to be retained as reserves anyway. What happened was that the traditional ecological movement, which was quite admirable at bird-watching and providing milkweed for monarch butterflies and so forth (even if Greenpeace’s harassments of American aircraft carriers was tiresome), was invaded and taken over by the defeated Marxists sent packing at the end of the Cold War, who saw this commendable if somewhat naive movement as a splendid way to attack capitalism.

Capitalism is the only economic system that works because it is the only one that is aligned with the almost universal human ambition for more, but it must be fine-tuned to avoid financial disasters at the end of the aspirational trail. The attack on capitalism in the name of saving the planet is bunk. Climate change seems to be occurring but we don’t know how, don’t know if it is part of the natural cycle, and don’t know if human action has anything to do with it. The climate alarmists, Marxists and purists, are desperate, as the calamity express has stalled, and are now, in their fright that the jig is up, sending the brainwashed children of the world, who don’t know anything about meteorology or other relevant sciences, to shame and scold us. This government has fallen in with the alarmists and claims to seek the end of the oil industry. It is an insane policy, a brutal and anti-Canadian assault on Alberta in particular, and a partial re-enactment of the energy-choice catastrophes of and by the authors of the McGuinty-Wynne economic miracle that almost impoverished Ontario. It is a disaster.