Canada’s conservatives have spent decades denying the fundamental scientific reality of climate change and disputing the central role human activity plays in creating and exacerbating it. But as those arguments became increasingly untenable with the public, they’ve had to retreat to attacking the proposed solutions for it, most notably carbon pricing. Now, it seems, they’ve landed on a new explanation for why we shouldn’t do anything about a warming planet: China.
Lorrie Goldstein, the Toronto Sun’s emeritus editor, mooted this new “why even try” argument last weekend. “Making people pay more to heat their homes in Atlantic Canada isn’t going to stop wildfires in Alberta, or for that matter in Atlantic Canada,” he wrote. “Subsidizing electric vehicle battery plants in Ontario isn’t going to stop flooding in British Columbia.” Nobody actually expects Canada’s climate policies to single-handedly solve the growing threat of wildfires or flooding, of course, and these sorts of straw man arguments are nearly as old as Goldstein.
This is to be expected from Postmedia pundits, whose employer has long had a direct financial relationship with Canada’s oil and gas industry and its various proxies. Their audience is one that wants to be told where and how to hate Justin Trudeau, and climate change is a very familiar (and easy) target. But it’s a little more unusual coming from the Globe and Mail, which has traditionally been a bit more sensible when it comes to its analysis of Canada’s climate policy. And yet, longtime columnist Tony Keller wrote a piece last week that traded in almost all the climate clichés and straw men that have become Postmedia’s stock in trade. And while knocking down bad-faith arguments made by the failing chain’s pundits would be a form of self-defeating masochism, Keller’s piece deserves a more thorough response.