Climate denial is out of fashion: UN reports have restated the scientific case and voters have spoken their minds — most recently in last month’s election.

Not so fast. In Doug Ford’s Ontario, time for a closer look at the premier’s partner in disruption and disinformation:

Energy Minister Greg Rickford is a little-known Stephen Harper retread in Ford’s cabinet who is fast making a name for himself. Popping up on the front pages and letters pages, he owes his celebrity to his own notoriety.

Is he a climate denier, distorter or delayer? The minister will have to get back to you on that.

Let us turn, then, to the official record of legislative debates. In one of the more peculiar spectacles to unfold at Queen’s Park in recent years, Rickford refused for much of the past week to clarify precisely where he stood.

As opposition critics beseeched the minister to explain his environmental musings, Rickford quoted unapologetically from a climate denial website. Under attack for allocating $231 million in cancellation costs to rip up renewable energy contracts, Rickford turned to a conspiracy clearing house to defend himself.

And then dug himself in deeper by the day.

Donald Trump turns to Fox News for arguments. Greg Rickford talks up climatechangedispatch.com to win debates.

“I had to go where I had gone after all of my years in university — to the literature,” explained Rickford in that tone of lawyerly gravity he adopts when lecturing mere MPPs. “I looked through periodicals, and I came across the Climate Change Dispatch.”

Ontario’s minister of energy then quoted from the crank U.S. website’s argument that wind turbines had caused “German electricity prices to become among the most expensive worldwide.”

Few would dispute that Germany — where renewables make up a higher proportion of the power supply and nuclear energy is being wound down (unlike here) — is wrestling with rising prices. What’s odd is that Rickford would rely on a discredited website to draw a disproportionate analogy to Ontario.

The website resorts to Breitbart News and other Trump favourites to challenge the long-standing scientific consensus on climate change. It decries the “global warming alarmists” who wrongly “believe man is wholly or largely responsible for any fluctuation” in temperatures. The website “does not believe in consensus science,” instead aiming to “consistently contradict the theory of CO2-driven global warming.”

The minister makes no apologies for making common cause with climate contrarians, because there are two sides to every story. Even global warming.

“As a well-studied person, I take every opportunity, whether it’s on the internet or sources of literature, to consider different points of view,” Rickford told dumbfounded MPPs. “Thank goodness that we have those differing viewpoints.”

What exactly is Rickford’s viewpoint on global warming? Is temperature change a by-product of changing times or is human production of carbon a factor?

Day after day he wouldn’t say, preferring to counterattack. In so doing, Rickford single-handedly converted a man-made environmental crisis into a man-made political crisis for the Ford government.

In politics, the first principle of damage control is to cut your losses, typically by backing down or backing away. Rickford, however, is not your typical politician.

Rather than trying to win over the room, he styles himself the smartest person in the room. No matter how much media training he is told to do, he prefers training the media to do as told.

Mortified by the public display of hubris, Rickford’s more humble cabinet colleague, Environment Minister Jeff Yurek, tried to rescue the situation by publicly and unreservedly clarifying that human activity plays a role in climate change.

By week’s end, the recalcitrant Rickford did as told and gave a forced 10-second statement to the media before walking away brusquely without taking questions: “I believe in climate change and I believe it’s a consequence of human activity. Thank you.”

It fell to Ford, later in the day, to clean up the mess over his minister’s musings on the human causes of climate change:

“Well I’ll tell ya, I don’t doubt it, neither does he,” the premier reassured reporters. “I think he made a statement earlier today. We’re going to do everything we can to fight climate change.”

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And so the premier who led the charge against carbon pricing — not merely disrupting but dismantling Ontario’s so-called “cap and trade carbon tax” — rode to Rickford’s rescue. Only in this province, with this premier, does that count as progress.

While Ontario’s Tories try to sort out their position — or more precisely, their political positioning — the world is moving on. Also this week, the UN Environment Programme released its annual Emissions Gap Report, compiled by 57 leading scientists, urging all governments to act urgently to limit global warming.

Memo to the minister: the 168-page UN document is available online, and rather more rigorous than climatechangedispatch.com.

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