What is the environmentalist movement organizing online when they think nobody is watching? And what on earth are conservatives and free thinkers doing to stop it? In this episode, my guest, Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition, joins me to share his inside scoop from a recent environmentalist rally.
00:00:00.080Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
00:00:05.380Tonight my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition and he's really been doing the Lord's work lately.
00:00:14.380He sat in on a Zoom call online environmentalist rally of a thousand environmentalists and he's going to bring us the inside scoop.
00:00:27.720Now if you like listening to the show then I promise you're going to love watching it but in order to watch you need to be a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:35.040That's what we call our long form TV style shows here on Rebel News.
00:00:39.800Subscribers get access to my show as well as Ezra's nightly Ezra Levant show as well as David Menzies' fun Friday night show Rebel Roundup.
00:00:49.540It's only eight bucks a month to subscribe and just for my podcast listeners you can save an extra 10% on a new Rebel News Plus subscription
00:00:55.580by using the coupon code PODCAST when you subscribe.
00:00:59.420Just go to rebelnews.com slash subscribe to become a member.
00:01:05.220And now please enjoy this free audio only version of my show.
00:01:08.740What is the environmentalist movement organizing online when they think nobody is watching and what on earth are conservatives and free thinkers doing to stop it?
00:01:33.720I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
00:01:38.740Normally I don't tell you who my guest is until after my little blurb here but I'm going to tell you right now.
00:01:58.920My guest tonight is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
00:02:02.540And he did something that most conservatives who are concerned about the government and the left using climate change as a means to rob our pockets don't normally do.
00:02:13.720He listened to the left and the government.
00:02:17.380You see Tom sat in on an online Zoom environmentalist rally hosted by far left-wing activists from Lead Now and joined by Elizabeth May of the Green Party and Canada's Liberal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.
00:02:34.660Tom joins me tonight to tell us what he heard the environmentalists plotting for Canada with the full endorsement of these mainstream left-wing politicians.
00:02:43.940Tom, though, also offers an antidote to these radical left-wing environmentalist organizations like Lead Now because we know Lead Now has been up to their anti-conservative baloney for the better part of a decade.
00:02:58.740And by and large, the official conservatives have been asleep at the wheel through it all.
00:03:04.000So my guest tonight, in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon, is good friend of the show, Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
00:03:14.880Joining me now from his home in Ottawa is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition and another organization, which Tom will tell you about at the end of the show.
00:03:35.380Now, I wanted to have Tom on the show today because he's written a couple of really great articles since I talked to him last.
00:03:43.680But he also did a really incredible piece of journalism that involved going to a Lead Now rally that was held on Zoom.
00:03:54.680And Tom was the eyes and ears of normal people into, I guess, this climate strategy that Lead Now is trying to put together.
00:04:56.280For years, we have witnessed the results of chronic underinvestment and inaction in the face of the ongoing preexisting crises of, number one, colonialism.
00:05:06.840Okay, so they're incorporating not just climate change, but what they consider racism against black people.
00:05:14.020And there were lots of shout-outs to Black Lives Matter throughout the Zoom call.
00:05:18.160They're also talking about native sovereignty and all sorts of rights the natives should have in addition to, you know, what they already have.
00:05:24.860They were talking about human rights abuses, migrant workers coming to Canada.
00:05:28.660And, oh, my goodness, they're not getting all of our services, even though they – whether they should be here is another question.
00:05:37.580There was a support for socialism being broadcast throughout.
00:05:41.260And then, of course, they're linking it all together to environmental degradation and climate change.
00:05:46.840So they want to reshape our entire society, not just a little bit, but radically.
00:05:52.780And I'll tell you a little later why we should be quite concerned about this because, you know, when they can get 1,000 people on a Zoom call, they can bring in – the Minister of the Environment actually appeared, Elizabeth May, various other MPs that we can talk about later.
00:06:07.600We have to take them pretty seriously because, boy, they've got a big movement.
00:06:11.360So the Minister of the Environment, the Federal Minister of the Environment was involved in this call that's basically denouncing Canada as racist and basically saying for a complete and total phase-out of the fossil fuel industry here in Canada, a major segment of the Canadian economy.
00:06:33.160And I also think it's quite interesting that a bunch of white environmentalists are – who are actually, I would suggest, doing real acts of colonialism by damming Canada's Indigenous communities to generational poverty by eliminating that really aggressive vehicle to wealth creation called the fossil fuel industry.
00:06:57.960I mean, I mean, we know the largest employer of Indigenous people in Canada is fossil fuels.
00:07:09.260And in Alberta here, a lot of our Indigenous groups partner with industry.
00:07:14.620They incorporate their own businesses.
00:07:16.720The bands own businesses like the Mikasoo Cree in oil and gas.
00:07:22.780And so when you have these largely white environmentalists telling them that they need to get out of the fossil fuel industry, that feels a little bit like colonialism to me.
00:07:31.880But please, tell me what the Environment Minister had to say in all of this, because this is crazy.
00:07:37.440Well, the Environment Minister gave a prerecorded presentation to the group, but he does obviously take them quite seriously because he's trying to appease them.
00:07:45.640It was interesting, though, as soon as Elizabeth May got on, she attacked the minister and she said all these words, you know, and we're still in a climate crisis.
00:07:54.360And it's interesting if you actually look at the lead now just recovery for all, one of their axioms.
00:08:00.660They say that we should be making the transition towards a low carbon economy.
00:08:05.340Canada will therefore be more prepared for any future crises.
00:08:08.600Well, how can you be more prepared for future crises if you get rid of your least expensive, most abundant, most reliable sources of energy?
00:08:17.940I mean, they want us to rely on wind and solar power.
00:08:21.200And then they go on about all the jobs that will be created.
00:08:24.160But, you know, it's interesting, Sheila.
00:08:26.020The people leading this call were all very young, either late teens or in their 20s, early 20s.
00:08:33.060And yet when I scanned the group, you know, as I say, a thousand people online, when I went page after page, many of them, if not the majority, were late middle aged people learning and watching and seniors.
00:08:45.760OK, so what you have is a little bit like the Children's Crusade.
00:08:49.240You have these extremely young people who are advocating causes and charging off in different directions, really not knowing what they're talking about.
00:08:57.020But they're very good at organizing and activism.
00:09:00.840And this is where conservatives should be quite concerned, because, I mean, real conservatives, not like Peter McKay, who in many cases will actually support what these people are saying.
00:09:10.740But, you know, they are talking about organizing Zoom calls with MPs across the country, from coast to coast, with hundreds of people and hundreds of constituents.
00:09:20.460And I've signed up, actually, to be involved in these so I can hear actually what goes on, because, you know, they say they want to be nonpartisan and they want to be, you know, open minded.
00:09:30.440Well, will they be open minded to alternative points of view?
00:09:55.000And, you know, people who are on the line, like the NDP environment critic, Laura Collins from Victoria.
00:10:01.280I mean, they're taking it very, very seriously.
00:10:03.920They really want to reshape Canada, not just from an environmental perspective and energy, getting rid of our least expensive, best energy sources.
00:10:12.360They want to bring in all kinds of other causes, like I listed at the beginning.
00:10:15.940Essentially, they want to see a utopian or maybe dystopian is a better way to put it, a socialist government and socialist society in which many of their ideals are being lumped in with the climate scare.
00:10:29.560So I think we should take this quite seriously and to the best extent we can organize opposition to this because, you know, they otherwise left unopposed with 100,000 signatures to their petition, 1,000 people at least in that one Zoom call.
00:10:48.080You know, they're going to actually start to really sway our society and change the way we operate.
00:10:55.240They want to have socialism, not recognizing that the source of our income is our success in the capitalist fossil fuel industry.
00:11:02.760So, you know, we can talk about later some of the things that we're doing to get ready to oppose this.
00:11:08.680But indeed, it is serious when these groups are so vocal and so confident, even though they really don't know what they're talking about.
00:11:15.900You know, you raise two very important issues in the things you just said.
00:11:21.180First of all, the fact that this environmentalist Marxist revolution, I think this is just another prong of the Marxist revolution happening all around us.
00:11:30.220When you factor in, like, BLM and these Occupy Redux autonomous zones that are popping up all over the place, including Toronto, and then, you know, this Marxist environmentalist revolution that's happening online.
00:11:47.060And like you say, conservatives are asleep at the wheel.
00:11:49.420This is being led by young people, and we should have been prepared for this, knowing full well that Greta Thunberg is going on her second year of scolding adults.
00:12:02.460It's fascinating to me to see the number of adults who are willing to be scolded by young people who absolutely have zero life experience at all.
00:12:11.440I mean, a lot of these people, like you point out, sitting in on these calls, they're older people.
00:13:00.840We have a narrow window of opportunity to shape the government's plans so that we come out the other side of the pandemic, better equipped to take care of each other and the planet.
00:13:10.020Well, you know, it's going to be very difficult for Canada to get back to normal even without these changes.
00:13:16.720OK, it's a little bit like you're trying to rescue somebody and somebody else is pulling them underwater.
00:13:21.380I mean, the bottom line is we've had a huge impact of this COVID-19, and if we can get back to normal, we'll be very lucky.
00:13:29.660The last thing we need to do is pile on top of the requirements for recovery all these demands, and they call them demands, of the left-wing groups.
00:13:38.260I mean, as I say, the best thing we can do is focus on getting back to normal as soon as possible, and these groups, you know, they can work on their causes later, but they want to incorporate them all into the actual recovery, and the government, sadly, is listening.
00:13:55.540The government has written this sort of stuff into some of their big business loans, the bailout loans, that they have to have a climate plan if they want to qualify for any sort of government help.
00:14:07.080It's like having a values test before they put you on a ventilator.
00:14:17.960I mean, imagine if we did that in other government services like health care, and yet nobody seems to bat an eye when Justin Trudeau shoehorns all this stuff into the life support for these large job creators.
00:14:33.920You did point out that this is by Lead Now, and Lead Now, conservatives should have done something to prepare themselves for Lead Now, since Lead Now has been at this for, I would suggest, the better part of a decade.
00:14:53.320They organized the Vote Together campaign back in, I believe it was 2015, that they identified key, they say they're non-political, but they helped identify key ridings where the conservatives would be benefiting from a vote split between the left, and organize progressive voters to vote together, be it for the liberals or the NDP, whoever could stop the conservative.
00:15:22.400And so they're doing that sort of work again right now.
00:15:27.260You can see they're working with the NDP, they're working with the liberals, they're definitely working against the conservatives.
00:15:34.580And where were conservatives and conservative groups and just groups who would present an alternative to whatever Lead Now is offering?
00:15:43.380Where have they been, where have they been the last 10 years?
00:15:47.240And when conservatives were in power, they didn't do much to deal with these sort of foreign-funded third-party groups meddling in our democracy.
00:15:55.180Yeah, and when the conservatives got into power, they changed their position entirely on climate change.
00:16:00.580I mean, it's almost like they want to be with the in-crowd, you know, and the in-crowd is defined supposedly by our media.
00:16:06.860But, you know, I think that there are huge numbers of Canadians who are totally fed up with this.
00:16:12.920And if you had a politician stand up, whoever wins the conservative leadership, if they were to stand up and say, look, this is ridiculous.
00:16:19.700We're not going to restart the economy with all these shackles attached to us.
00:16:24.560We're going to get back to a strong society in which we take advantage of our really bountiful fossil fuel resources to build Canada into a country that we're proud of.
00:16:34.400And, you know, I think conservatives, generally speaking, are far too complacent.
00:16:39.260You know, these groups, they advocate that they're nonpartisan.
00:16:42.580In fact, this was a big point in the whole Zoom call.
00:17:26.820It was published on the 16th in America Out Loud.
00:17:29.620And it deals with some of these shackles that you are referring to when we restart our economy.
00:17:38.120And the article is titled Forget Wind and Solar Power for COVID Recovery.
00:17:42.220And it seems as though green energy is the focus of the COVID recovery.
00:17:46.940This is their moment in time where they want to rewrite our economy instead of restart it in a way where it can grow back to where it once was.
00:17:56.500And you sort of dissect the problems with this sort of green recovery focus that we're seeing from the liberals.
00:18:05.980You know, in many ways, perhaps unintentionally, I don't know, but the left are often sabotaging causes they hold dear by promoting wind and solar.
00:18:17.560Wind turbines in Spain alone, and we talked about this when we were being, you know, we were at the COP meetings in Spain.
00:18:23.740They're killing millions of birds and bats in Spain alone.
00:18:27.240200 birds per year per turbine, 400 bats per year per turbine.
00:18:32.020So if you care about nature and conservation, you should really oppose wind turbines.
00:18:37.880Similarly, if you really care about social justice and the poor, you should oppose wind turbines because they're jacking the prices up hugely.
00:18:46.540And we're forced to pay for it because, of course, there's so much government subsidies.
00:18:51.340If you're concerned about people who don't have the wealth to live or to just simply move when a turbine is put up, you should be against wind turbines.
00:19:00.000Because Shelly Correa, for example, from Lincoln County in Ontario, she moved to Lincoln County.
00:19:06.120It's very much like, you know, Andy of Mayberry's country area.
00:19:09.400And she was promised that they wouldn't put up a wind turbine near her house.
00:19:13.560This was during the Kathleen Wynne administration for Ontario.
00:19:17.240And sure enough, they put up a 60 plus story wind turbine, only 500 and 550 meters from her house, approximately.
00:19:28.620And of course, she can't afford to just simply pack up and leave.
00:19:31.620I'm sure her property value has gone way down because who wants to live beside one of these monstrosities?
00:19:36.700So, you know, in many cases, the causes that the left say they hold dear are being sabotaged by these wind and solar projects.
00:19:46.760And of course, if you're building a massive solar station in the middle of the desert, you completely upset the desert ecosystem.
00:19:53.500In California, they're building something called Project Gemini, which is a huge solar station.
00:19:58.680And believe it or not, under the Trump administration, they have actually approved what will be the largest solar station in U.S. history.
00:20:06.580And they have to collect up all these endangered tortoises during the construction phase, hold them somewhere else.
00:20:13.080Half of them will likely die and then put them back in under the solar panels.
00:20:18.160So, yeah, you talk about environmental destruction.
00:20:20.640And where do you think all these materials are coming from?
00:20:23.520In many cases, they're coming from China.
00:20:25.580OK, with these rare earth elements from China and from Africa, mined under incredibly bad environmental conditions, often using coal as their source of energy to make the wind turbines, which I always find kind of ironic.
00:20:40.240And of course, there's human rights abuses where they use slave labor and child labor.
00:20:44.540So, again, these are causes the left say they hold dear.
00:20:48.880And yet they're advocating energy sources that are not only inefficient and will cost us a fortune, but will hurt the people they say they care about.
00:20:58.080And, you know, I think that what's happening here is because the movement is largely led by very young people, they just really haven't put two and two together and realize that they're really being bamboozled.
00:21:09.640That, in fact, it's sabotaging their own causes.
00:21:13.020Yeah, it's funny that the movement, the environmental movement is led by people who really have only paid attention to the weather, maybe the last year of their life.
00:21:27.760They don't actually have experience when you think about like, OK, well, five years ago we had a really terrible winter or three years ago we had a lot of rain.
00:21:37.040And then four years before that we had a drought and our crops didn't grow.
00:21:41.120They don't really have that sort of anecdotal historical data to put what they are seeing and experiencing today into context.
00:21:49.240And then they're turning that lack of historical knowledge into an entire political movement.
00:21:55.840And they are running roughshod over the rest of us because we're letting them.
00:22:00.680Because they're very brave, you know, and I will give that to them.
00:22:03.700They are showing, to some extent, what we should be doing.
00:22:06.660I mean, having the courage to speak out for what we believe in.
00:22:09.980And, you know, if they were to do fundamental research, they would understand very quickly that their causes don't make any sense, not just in the climate, but in all sorts of areas.
00:22:20.460I'll send you a link to what is probably the very best database in the world of extreme weather events.
00:22:27.520And that is the records that are kept for every state in the United States, all 50 states.
00:22:31.620And they record when the highest temperature was, the lowest temperature, the most snow, the most rainfall, all that sort of thing.
00:22:37.560And what you'll find is that in the whole of the 21st century, only two states set their maximum temperature record, just two out of 50 in that whole 20 years.
00:22:47.200If you go back to the 1930s, I believe it's 1936, where you had something like 15 states set their all-time high records, and those records still stand.
00:22:58.720And, you know, I find it quite interesting because 2018, for example, there was only one record set in the whole U.S.
00:23:05.420And remember, this is a pretty big area for statewide records.
00:23:09.900And that was the largest hailstone in the history of Alabama.
00:23:12.900It was actually five inches in diameter.
00:23:15.660If you can imagine hail coming down, if there was one at five inches, there must have been lots of them at three and four.
00:23:21.600So, I mean, it would have been a real bombardment.
00:23:24.340But, I mean, the bottom line is if they did some research, they would realize that the actual statistics that are there, that go back through the historic record,
00:23:33.960show that hurricanes and tornadoes were far worse in the past than they are now, and all the other extreme weather events that they get all excited about.
00:23:41.440And that doesn't mean we shouldn't address climate change.
00:23:45.500And, in fact, the new group that we're starting, one of the things we're going to focus on is adaptation to climate change, because climate will change no matter what we do.
00:23:55.520The biggest fear, of course, is global cooling, because in a country like Canada, there's nobody farming north of us.
00:24:01.560So, whose farming practices do we adopt if, indeed, it gets a lot colder?
00:24:07.460We can actually use the farming practices in Arkansas.
00:24:10.580So, yeah, we should prepare for climate change.
00:24:12.920But, mainly, we should be preparing for cooling, quite frankly.
00:24:18.080You know, I'm glad you raise farming practices, because I've always thought it to be quite ironic that the same people who are opposed to, I guess, if you care about climate change, and depending on how you look at it, sometimes I do,
00:24:34.540it's the same people who oppose, like, drought-resistant or seeds that are GMO-modified to deal with a shorter growing season.
00:24:46.680It's always the people who are opposed to GMO seeds that would help us adapt to climate change if it is, indeed, going to create shorter growing seasons or longer growing seasons or more droughts.
00:24:57.900Those are the same people who are ringing the alarm bell about climate change.
00:25:01.100It's very strange that they would oppose the very things that would create a solution to the problem they say we're all going to face.
00:25:08.420Yeah, I think largely they're anti-Western civilization.
00:25:13.560And the best way to do that is to cripple us with, you know, incredible restrictions on how we operate, not allow us to use the things that would actually help save us if there was a climate crisis, which there isn't.
00:25:26.040I mean, you're talking about just over one degree Celsius rise since 1880.
00:25:31.140So everything they're talking about really has to be sometime in the future based on computer models that don't work.
00:25:37.800Because if you actually look at the real data, there's nothing going on.
00:25:42.700I read somewhere the other day that Alberta hasn't had, or at least where I live, my region of Alberta hasn't had a day over 28 degrees Celsius since I think it was 2018.
00:25:54.060So, I mean, they told me that every year is going to get hotter and hotter and hotter and we're all going to die.
00:26:01.220And yet the last two years with more people, more fossil fuel usage, more fossil fuel mining, we haven't seen that play out.
00:26:10.640And yet they tell me the threat is immediate, 12 years or 10 years or 11 years or whatever it is.
00:26:16.640Now, Tom, you've been very generous with your time, but you have an exciting new thing you want to tell us about because you are offering us a solution to these uninformed, youthful activists who are sort of running roughshod over the rest of us.
00:26:33.980You, instead of just pointing out the problem, you're offering a solution.
00:26:38.080Yeah, we're just on the verge of launching a new group.
00:26:41.340We're not going to use the name Climate Realism Canada as we were before.
00:26:45.460I mean, you know, there's various problems with that name.
00:26:47.760It sounds a lot like Al Gore's group, Climate Reality Canada.
00:26:51.040But what we're calling the group, and it's a not-for-profit incorporated corporation that's just about to start, and we'll be making a big announcement about this, is called Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
00:27:03.360Okay, because that's what we want. We want sensible climate policy, policy that actually matches the economics and the resource availability that we have in Canada and the science.
00:27:14.320Now, we're not going to focus so much on the science.
00:27:16.360We're going to actually direct people more to the International Climate Science Coalition or to Friends of Science, who are really superb.
00:27:23.360And people should check that out. Friendsofscience.org, I believe, is their website.
00:27:27.620And we're going to work with them quite a lot in Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
00:27:32.120And we're really going to focus hard on the policy aspects and what it would happen to Canada if we actually did what these environmental groups are advocating that we do.
00:27:44.380And for that reason, we have Bob Lyman, who's working with us. He's extremely good on policy formulation.
00:27:49.900And, you know, it's interesting, the World Economic Forum and others keep talking about net zero by 2050.
00:27:55.360So we're asking, well, before the Canadian government imposes yet more climate restrictions on us, increases more tax and everything else, don't we have a right to ask them for their evidence?
00:28:08.180Because, like you said, their forecasts are not coming true.
00:28:12.040None of the UN forecasts for climate change have come true.
00:28:15.140And yet we're basing Canadian government policy on the supposed authenticity of these forecasts when you look at the future.
00:28:22.880So surely Canadians have a right to say, look, you have the onus to prove to us that it's worth spending all this money on trying to stop climate change.
00:28:33.340And, of course, we're going to point out things like Canada's contribution to greenhouse gases in the world is trivial in comparison with China.
00:28:40.440But more importantly, we're going to point out that, to a large extent, CO2 is a great thing to want to increase.
00:28:48.320And in today's America Out Loud, and if people go there, AmericaOutloud.com, we have a new piece about to come out as to how conservatives have to change the way they use language.
00:28:59.860Because right now we're supporting our enemies by calling it carbon pollution or carbon emissions.
00:29:26.020Canadians for sensible climate policy work on adaptation and continue the research so that someday we may be able to forecast what the climate will do in the future.
00:29:44.620One of the things that Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science is so great at doing is breaking down these really large, complex ideas and, you know, with words that you don't use in your everyday parlance and digesting it in a way that normal people can both understand but arm themselves with.
00:30:05.540So I'm very excited to hear that Canadians for sensible climate policy will be doing the same because I think people really need to understand.
00:30:13.300We hear net zero and we think it sounds good, but what does that mean for your family?
00:30:25.080Please let me know when you launch because we're going to have you back on the show for sure.
00:30:28.640Well, it's going to be a great group, and we're going to be helping coordinate all the various climate realist groups together so that we have a unified approach.
00:30:37.580One of our main supporters will be Friends of Science.
00:31:04.420He realizes it's not enough to just be against the radical environmentalist plans for your life and your money.
00:31:14.020You have to actually do something about it, and you have to do what the left does, and that's network and organize and build opposition to something, to build a real unified movement.
00:31:27.680So I wish Tom the best of luck with Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
00:31:32.580Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.