Article content continued

I’m going to skip Climate Weirding and Climate Wilding, which for a time the Magi of the environmental hardliners placed in contention to supplant Climate Change, since these trial terms proved too weird and too wild even for the brandmasters of imminent global doom.

Climate Change is merely a phrase that describes all weather as it has always been and always will be

Now to more current matters. Since its first hours in power, the Trudeau administration has been obsessed with the idea that it is a world champion in the holy combat against Global Warming. In their rosy minds, the nations of our troubled planet are looking to Ottawa, and in particular to the Liberal benches of the House of Commons, as lambs look to their stout shepherd when the wolves descend. It is a curious fixation and could even be seen as harmless, were it not for the havoc it has wrought to one of the country’s principal industries, the black farce of the same administration’s pipeline non-management, and the furious political winds it has stirred in Alberta and British Columbia.

Here, too, the wild dance with language prevails. This is the first government in the history of the world that has declared war on one of the constituents of the atmosphere — carbon dioxide. I guess nitrogen and oxygen were just lucky to escape the fatwa, but who knows, perhaps their day is coming. Maybe the government will get even more expansive and take on the table of elements. Down with Deuterium.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But with carbon dioxide being the life-supporting substance it is, they knew that when they decided to put a tax on it, calling it by its proper name — i.e., a carbon-dioxide tax — wouldn’t do. So they call it instead a “carbon” tax, which of course it is not and could not be. But carbon sounds darker; it reminds one of soot and smog and gruesome things; not flowers and bees and birds and trees, all of which in their way owe something, as do we humans, to good old CO2.