Rebel News Podcast - What a “fossil fuel free” world would really look like

00:00:00.000 Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.

00:00:05.280 My guest tonight is Michelle Sterling from the climate realist non-profit group Friends of

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00:01:13.120 The Federal NDP want to get us all off fossil fuels, and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna

00:01:23.060 is trying to declare a climate emergency in the House of Commons. Has everyone completely

00:01:29.180 lost their minds? Yes, probably. I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.

00:01:35.160 I want to show you a clip from the federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh from earlier this week

00:01:57.960 in a press conference he held in Ottawa. Just watch.

00:02:02.200 I believe the future of Canada does not include fracking. We cannot be fracking.

00:02:06.420 We cannot be relying on fossil fuels to burn as an energy source at all in our country.

00:02:12.020 We need to move to a future that is renewable. That's why I'm calling for

00:02:15.280 a complete end of all fossil fuel subsidies. We need to invest in green energy. We need to

00:02:20.440 invest in clean energy, renewable energy. That is a future for our country.

00:02:23.960 This, of course, is crazy and unrealistic. I mean, Canada is one of the coldest and least

00:02:30.400 densely populated countries on the face of the earth, and fossil fuels are essential

00:02:35.040 for our success as a thriving nation, but also, you know, like just basically for our survival

00:02:40.580 sometimes. But that hasn't stopped otherwise relatively smart people from saying things

00:02:44.980 as dumb as what Jagmeet Singh said without an ounce of self-awareness. I mean, Jagmeet Singh is

00:02:52.140 the Member of Parliament for Burnaby, British Columbia. So his weekly commute is like the entire

00:02:57.880 country on an airplane. Now, thank goodness for people like my guest tonight. She cuts 0.96

00:03:04.100 through the progressive fantasy of life without fossil fuels to tell us what life would really

00:03:10.280 be like without them. So joining me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday morning

00:03:16.620 is my friend Michelle Stirling from Friends of Science.

00:03:37.100 So joining me now from Calgary is my friend Michelle Stirling from Friends of Science. She's such

00:03:43.420 a wealth of information. I mean, Michelle has encyclopedic levels of information about the

00:03:51.660 environmental movement, but not just the people and the players and the environmental NGOs, but

00:03:58.360 the practicality of it all, how their bad ideas fall apart when you examine, well, how do we get

00:04:05.700 to the fossil fuel free utopia that they really are pushing on us? And it is my show. And so I'm going

00:04:15.960 to be a little self-serving today. I have Michelle on because she actually did. Well, I have Michelle

00:04:22.740 on for a few different reasons, but she actually did a report about Mark Cameron, who is Jason Kenney's

00:04:30.420 new policy wonk. But Mark Cameron, before he joined Jason Kenney's bureaucracy, was the head of

00:04:37.080 Canadians for Clean Prosperity. And that is a pro-carbon tax lobby group that really advocated

00:04:46.140 for Kathleen Wynne's cap and trade scheme, Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna's carbon tax, and advocated

00:04:52.480 for increases in Rachel Notley's carbon tax. So I'm having Michelle on to kick off the show 1.00

00:04:58.960 by briefing us on her report. But then we're going to get to a bunch of different places. Because

00:05:06.740 like I said, Michelle really knows it all. Michelle, thanks for joining me and sitting through my long

00:05:12.160 preamble. Thank you, Sheila. No problem. It was an interesting long preamble. And I must say, the report

00:05:19.580 we did regarding Mark Cameron's work was issued actually last September, I believe. And it's called

00:05:27.200 carbon kleptomania. And of course, the foundation principle of Cameron's proposals on carbon taxes

00:05:35.120 are that it's a carbon dividend. So actually, it's a benefit to you to be taxed, which has most people,

00:05:41.920 you know, scratching their head. But then these offers of generous rebates to people, dividends,

00:05:48.980 does attract the attention of some people. And some people who are not good at math think that's

00:05:53.940 grand. But I want to say right off the bat, carbon kleptomania was based on a compilation of works

00:06:00.100 of Robert Lyman. And as most people know, Robert Lyman is a frequent contributor to our blog and to

00:06:07.080 our reports. And I just want to give a bit of background just so that we know who Robert Lyman

00:06:12.820 is. He was a public servant for 27 years. And prior to that, a diplomat for 10 years. So people go,

00:06:19.080 oh, okay, he was a public servant. Well, you know, maybe he was stamping envelopes. But in fact, he

00:06:24.360 has been involved in energy markets for over 44 years. He was the executive assistant to the deputy

00:06:30.620 minister of Indian and Northern Affairs in the 70s, on the Berger Commission, the first secretary in the

00:06:37.460 Canadian embassy in Washington in the 70s. He worked as an economist in the energy policy branch of

00:06:45.260 energy mines and resources, led a group of economists responsible for analyzing international oil

00:06:52.140 prices, executive interchange for two years in Ottawa as a representative of the Canadian Gas Association

00:06:59.100 during deregulation. Director of energy policy, he worked on the early cap and trade, or sorry, the early

00:07:09.020 carbon capture carbon dioxide work, provided expert advice to the Kyoto Accord, was Director General of

00:07:18.940 Environmental Affairs and Transport Canada, performed major studies for Transport Canada and navigable

00:07:24.900 waters. And he's written lots and lots on energy and climate. So here's somebody with 44 years of

00:07:31.020 experience on these very issues. He studied the GHG file inside out and backwards. Carbon kleptomania shows

00:07:38.700 that carbon taxes are a dead weight on the economy. They hurt the poorest the most. And there's no such

00:07:46.420 thing as a carbon dividend that will benefit you more than what you spend. And that's mostly because of

00:07:52.620 the cumulative nature of these carbon taxes. And the fact that the carbon dividend proposal

00:07:58.460 proposes that there will be a huge pot of money from business and industry. And so they'll steal from

00:08:04.540 that to give back to the poor, while stealing from the rich to also give back to the poor. But what

00:08:11.260 happens is business just says, you know what, too expensive for me to operate here. I'm leaving town.

00:08:17.500 So then you have fewer jobs, no big pool of money. And of course, in the middle of that, governments go,

00:08:24.060 oh, what tasty funds we have available to us. Why don't we just siphon this off? And Robert did a

00:08:32.460 report on the global panorama of carbon pricing. And he found that in most cases around the world,

00:08:40.300 governments have ended up absconding with all or most of the money. So, you know, it is a cash grab.

00:08:46.540 So I hope people will read our report. If you don't want to read, we have a short video called

00:08:51.100 carbon kleptomania. Quite a cute little thing. But it's a very important issue people have to

00:08:56.700 understand. There's no such thing as a carbon dividend. It doesn't work. Well, if people want

00:09:03.340 to see my full coverage of the Mark Cameron situation in Jason Kenney's government, they can

00:09:09.500 go to firecameron.com. They can actually sign my petition there and see my full coverage where I

00:09:16.220 break down actually who was on the board of Mark Cameron's Canadians for Clean Prosperity. And

00:09:23.580 they have one of the directors of the Ivy Foundation on their board. And we know the Ivy Foundation

00:09:32.140 gives money to tides. And tides is the foundation that is explicitly attacking Canadian oil and gas.

00:09:39.580 So to have someone with these sort of links now injected into the bureaucracy here in Alberta,

00:09:46.700 I think it's completely antithetical to the things Jason Kenney promised us he would do.

00:09:51.260 But that actually brings me into one of the next reports out from Friends of Science recently. And that's

00:09:57.660 a report on climate charities. Right. Yes, we actually have a series of four reports.

00:10:05.420 They were also put together by Robert Lyman. One is called Money Matters. One is dark green money.

00:10:12.140 One is big green money. And the last one is the green Titanic. And they overall, they look at the

00:10:18.780 different aspects of these NGO charities, some most of which are foreign funded, in part, and then subsidized

00:10:27.180 by taxpaying Canadians. So taxpaying Canadians in the oil patch are funding these guys, subsidizing

00:10:34.620 these guys to block pipelines and to put in a tanker ban. So these four reports are all listed on one

00:10:41.340 easy blog post. We have another report there called Manufacturing and Climate Crisis, which is about a

00:10:49.100 specific case study of West Coast environmental law and how they instituted the tanker ban,

00:10:54.300 and who wrote on the coattails of the tanker ban to victory in elections? Well, it was the Prime

00:10:59.180 Minister. So you can see all of that in these four reports. And really, what people don't realize is

00:11:05.740 the tax base is being drained by hundreds of billions of dollars to these charities. And now, in our last

00:11:16.940 report, Green Titanic, we show how now they have almost 100% free reign to engage in political activity

00:11:24.220 with their money before it was limited to 10%. But there was a change in law last year that was slipped

00:11:31.100 through an omnibus bill. And now, hey, it's open season. So if you see politicians climbing on the bandwagon

00:11:41.340 about green energy and such like, they're trying to attract these followers and this money to their

00:11:47.100 cause. You know, and isn't that really convenient as we head into an election year that there's that

00:11:52.540 change in law? Go ahead. Oh, I was yeah, yeah, it's very, very convenient. And it was slipped through in

00:12:03.180 this omnibus bill. So there wasn't open discussion about it. We did issue a letter to Minister Morneau,

00:12:10.780 noting the implications of many of these NGO charities, how they block development,

00:12:16.460 block jobs. And these are things that we consider to be far outside the operation of a charity. Now,

00:12:23.500 it's funny, because West Coast environmental law calls this a Victorian view of charity.

00:12:28.620 Their view is that charities should be able to do anything they want, I guess. Our view is more

00:12:35.340 traditional that a charity is intended to offer assistance to the poor, like Haligonians, right? 1.00

00:12:42.220 Let's say the Halifax Food Bank being supplied with X number of food baskets for X number of Haligonians.

00:12:50.220 So, you know, it's local, it's tangible, and it actually serves a public good. What's the public

00:12:56.220 good in blocking tankers? Don't know. Well, I guess that brings me into the next thing I wanted to

00:13:03.340 talk to you about. You know, we've got a lot of good segues today, more than my normal clumsy ones.

00:13:11.020 This idea that there's, there's like a spate or like a epidemic of these motions, both at the municipal

00:13:21.340 level, provincial level, and now at the federal level, that there needs to be some sort of debate

00:13:28.140 and declaration of these things called climate emergencies. But they never really actually define

00:13:35.500 what the emergency is, just that we may all die in, I think we're down to 11 and a half years, Michelle.

00:13:42.300 So we better get checking things off our bucket list now. But I mean, Catherine McKenna and Bartish

00:13:48.940 Chogger, they are pushing for an emergency debate on the climate emergency. And I think it's so ironic 1.00

00:13:55.740 that this is what they want to talk about. But they're rejecting the conservatives and the NDP's motion to have

00:14:01.100 an emergency debate on the things that are real and tangible, like the liberals did to Admiral Norman.

00:14:08.140 They bankrupted him. They ruined his life. They sidelined his career. He almost went to jail for breach of trust.

00:14:14.540 Nobody wants to talk about that. But we have to talk about the emergency of the weather that is completely undefined.

00:14:21.180 Yes. Well, this is based on a very big movement by the environmental group. And this book is called

00:14:27.340 unprecedented climate mobilization. So they're trying to do two things by declaring emergency.

00:14:32.620 You know, they set up to kind of a war measures situation where then the government has

00:14:38.140 more sweeping powers. If you look at the

00:14:42.060 pact for the Green New Deal, which is being promoted by about 60 different environmental

00:14:47.020 groups in Canada, including Dogwood. Dogwood is promoting the idea that we should expropriate

00:14:52.700 the Oshawa GM plant and turn it into an EV manufacturing plant. Expropriate.

00:14:59.260 Okay. So this is like their starting point. So this idea of declaring a climate emergency,

00:15:05.580 then you can do two things. You can move into kind of a 1930s New Deal situation where

00:15:12.460 the government takes control of many things, as Roosevelt did in the States. You have to realize

00:15:17.260 in the States at that time, unemployment was 30%. In some places it was 80 or 90%. And farmers were

00:15:25.180 struggling because of the drought and depression. So it made sense at that time to really take over

00:15:31.180 everything, put people to work on make work projects and just get something going. One of the things they

00:15:36.460 did was a lot of dam building in the Tennessee Valley to electrify and provide electrification for

00:15:42.700 everyone in that region. Then the next step after that is warm mobilization, a World War II type of

00:15:51.580 mobilization to industrialize, but with renewables to retrain people from oil and gas to set up wind

00:15:59.180 farms and solar panels. Well, you know, Robert Lyman did a report on this for the Global Warming

00:16:04.540 Policy Foundation on the transition to renewable energy. And the best estimate might be 50 to 70 years,

00:16:11.900 is how long it would take to do that. These guys are advocating trying to do it in 11 years.

00:16:16.860 This is why they're pushing this climate emergency thing. And I think at the back end of it, if we

00:16:22.460 follow the money, we can probably see that there are investors with investments in the failing

00:16:27.260 renewable sector who are desperate to prop it up, who are desperate that now the climate change

00:16:34.940 mantra of CO2 is gradually being diminished as a scientific theory, they're desperate to find a

00:16:42.860 way to make sure that they can get money back somehow, even if it means sending you into heat

00:16:49.340 or eat poverty. So we have to dissect these things and stop them in their tracks because these are

00:16:56.620 impossible things. Well, like for instance, the push for EVs in Canada, aside from them being non-performance

00:17:03.100 vehicles for this type of environment, we don't have enough power generation in Canada to back

00:17:08.860 it up. We don't have enough trillions of dollars in Canada to build out all the necessary transmission

00:17:16.620 lines, distribution lines, the additional dams. I mean, look at Site C dam, look how long that's been

00:17:23.500 going on. How can we build additional power generation when these projects take at least 15 years to get

00:17:30.460 rolling? And they're stopped every step of the way by the same environmentalists who are demanding

00:17:36.620 that we go green. Yeah, I was just reading, working on another story today, actually, about the electric

00:17:44.300 car subsidies that McKenna is giving out at the federal level. And it really is just a handout to

00:17:50.860 to wealthy people, so much so that they increase the cap on the price of cars that qualify for these subsidies

00:17:57.260 from 45,000 to 50,000. And then there's a report in Black Locks Reporter today that says that the demand

00:18:06.380 for electric vehicles is actually decreasing worldwide because they are, like you point out,

00:18:12.780 impractical in Canadian climate conditions. Despite the fact that they tell me it keeps getting warmer,

00:18:20.060 the electric cars keep getting more unreliable, and we just don't have the grid associated with it.

00:18:26.140 I mean, it's just these pursuit of ideas that are just so impractical, but they also say to us that

00:18:32.780 we can make these changes overnight. I mean, the Liberals want all the cars that are sold in Canada

00:18:39.980 to be zero emissions by 2040. That's 21 years away. That's insane. Yes. Yes. We have two reports that we

00:18:49.260 issued. One is by a power engineer with a very experienced person. I mean, Kent's there. It's on our blog.

00:18:55.260 And he does the math calculations so people can follow his logic. And we also have a report from

00:19:02.140 William Kay who followed the electro glides, as he calls them, in the EU. Now, the EU has completely

00:19:09.420 jumped off the cliff into electric vehicles, but it makes some sense for them to try and do that because,

00:19:17.260 first of all, Norway has tons of hydro, France has lots of nuclear, and it's a very dense population.

00:19:23.980 They are already wired, and they want to reduce the fact, not so much the pollution, but they want to

00:19:30.860 reduce the fact that they import every year hundreds of billions of dollars of oil. So they want to cut

00:19:38.300 that out of their budget. It's killing them. It's like, you know, slitting their wrists and draining

00:19:43.180 the entire budget of their industrialized society to have to import all this oil. So it has some sense

00:19:49.580 there. And it may be workable. The temperatures there are far more moderate than those in Canada.

00:19:54.940 The distances are short. They're already wired. In some cases, they may be able to attach

00:20:01.420 charging stations and powering up to existing light rail transit systems that they have crisscrossing

00:20:07.340 most cities. So, you know, they have an infrastructure that has potential to actually

00:20:13.580 feed this need. But here we don't have that. You know, I also was just reading a blog from Czechoslovakia,

00:20:22.220 Lubus Motel, and he was saying in Czechoslovakia, they have three Tesla power stations and 7000 gas

00:20:30.940 stations. So, you know, this is the parody that you cannot fix overnight. And these are real considerations,

00:20:38.940 because it costs a fortune to implement this kind of infrastructure. It's not cheap at all.

00:20:45.900 Yeah. And I was I was looking at a news article about the liberal subsidy program for these electric

00:20:51.740 cars. And Tesla is reworking one of its models so that it qualifies like they're designing their product

00:21:00.620 now around making sure that the buyer qualifies for the subsidy. So if that's not your proof that

00:21:08.380 this is just, you know, a scam from the very beginning, trying to market a product nobody really

00:21:15.420 would buy and nobody really is buying without all these incentives. I mean, there's your proof right

00:21:22.300 there. But that actually brings me sort of back to the climate emergency stuff. This week, the New

00:21:29.580 Democrats are, you know, also trying to bring forward an opposition day motion to declare or argue about a

00:21:37.580 climate emergency. And Jagmeet Singh has been saying some real, real crazy things. He said in a press

00:21:46.300 conference without, you know, a emoticon of irony or self-awareness, he said that he wants a complete

00:21:54.540 abolition of the use of fossil fuels. Does he know what country he wants to be the prime minister of?

00:22:01.180 I mean, we have a resource based economy and it is pretty darn cold all the time.

00:22:07.420 Yes. Well, even if he was not in Canada, I mean, would he want to represent some place like Sudan 0.99

00:22:14.060 or Bolivia or Iraq, because, you know, these are places that live with very limited access to

00:22:21.980 fossil fuels and the people have a very low GDP and live much of them live a hand to mouth existence.

00:22:29.500 Everything in the modern world is made from fossil fuels, from oil, gas and coal. Every wind turbine is

00:22:36.140 made from oil, gas and coal. So if you ramped up and went to 100% renewables, you would actually be

00:22:43.180 using way more oil, gas and coal and way more natural gas because, as Robert Kennedy, the

00:22:49.260 environmentalist, has pointed out, when you build a wind or solar farm, you put up a gas plant. You're

00:22:55.580 actually building gas plants because natural gas is the fuel that backs these up. And this all goes back to

00:23:01.500 the Enron scam of years ago. This is where Enron found that they could make a lot of money on selling

00:23:08.860 and trading carbon credits, the natural gas in the background, the wind farms. What do they do?

00:23:14.700 They peak up and down. What does that do for peaker plants? It means you erratically burn

00:23:20.860 natural gas and peaker plants make more money because they can ramp up and down to meet those erratic

00:23:26.700 flows of the wind. So, you know, you're actually paying investors in the background. This is the

00:23:34.940 whole thing of this clean and green movement goes back to the UNPRI and these institutional investors

00:23:43.660 being deeply invested in all of these things that they're trying to sell you via the climate catastrophe.

00:23:49.580 Now, I know you had another report that just came out called Climate Change Your Mind. Do I have that

00:23:56.300 right? Yes. Climate Change Your Mind is a rebuttal report to the federal government's Canada's

00:24:03.340 changing climate. And our report is fact-based. The federal government report is based on modeling

00:24:11.900 scenarios. Our report shows that there's no increase in wildfires. The Fort McMurray wildfire

00:24:18.300 wildfire was not human-caused. We show that there was warming in the Arctic years ago and there will

00:24:26.460 be again. And in fact, we have a report that I recently found where the Arctic was 4.6 degrees

00:24:34.860 Celsius warmer in the 1930s than today. The flooding that's going on, you can check with Robert Muir,

00:24:43.580 professional engineer. He has done an analysis of urban centers and most of them have paved over

00:24:51.100 the city. So there's no place for that water to go. So it's actually an engineering problem. It's not

00:24:57.420 flooding that's related to additional precipitation or human-caused global warming. It's not related to CO2.

00:25:06.140 Some of the flooding down east, as Dr. Kandikar tells in one of our videos, and also in BC, a lot of it is

00:25:12.700 due to an increased snowpack. So more winter precipitation melting at a time when the ground

00:25:18.060 is still frozen. So of course you get more runoff and more pooling because there's no land to absorb

00:25:23.340 that water. So these are things that are not related to human causation, but they try to make it that way

00:25:29.660 because people automatically respond to these horrible catastrophes. I mean, these are terrible

00:25:34.700 things that people are going through in the flooding and in the fires, but it's not human

00:25:39.980 caused. And it's a problem when we apply climate change resources instead of practically fixing the

00:25:47.340 real problems we can address.

00:25:48.780 Yeah. And I think it's revolting to capitalize on human tragedy to push a climate change agenda. I

00:25:57.260 think it's terrible. People's lives are being ruined. They're losing everything. And then along

00:26:03.020 comes Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley and says, you know what,

00:26:07.340 if I had just taxed you more, maybe your house wouldn't have burned down. I think it is appalling.

00:26:12.380 You know, it's funny that you point out that they are attributing these human caused things

00:26:18.780 to climate change. I wrote this down when I was preparing notes for our interview today.

00:26:25.580 When the city of Vancouver, because of course it was the city of Vancouver, declared their climate

00:26:31.660 emergency or whatever, they actually cited the forest fires in British Columbia

00:26:37.260 as one of the reasons they needed to declare this climate emergency. But as you know,

00:26:42.380 those were caused by arson or a great deal of them were caused by arson.

00:26:47.660 Yeah. Most of them in BC in 2017 were caused by arson and the volume of acreage being or hectares

00:26:56.060 being burned. One of our people did an analysis and showed that there is a very strong correlation

00:27:01.260 with the pine beetle infestation. So what's happened is there's a huge amount of deadwood that should

00:27:06.940 have been cleared out. Like if you threw a few hundred million dollars at that and got people to get

00:27:12.060 out there and clear out this dead underbrush, especially in areas where there are populations,

00:27:18.140 if you built our forestry consultant said to us, you know, if you built a one kilometer fire break

00:27:25.020 around some of these forested communities, that would be a better use of money than, you know,

00:27:30.940 running around trying to get the water bombers in there, paying millions of dollars in an emergency

00:27:35.500 and having people lose property. If people followed fire smart regulations, when you move to an acreage,

00:27:42.940 you clear away all the wood around your house. If you look at pioneers, that's what they did. You know,

00:27:49.340 they did have a windbreak around the property, but they didn't have tons of trees and shrubs right

00:27:54.940 around their house because they knew that if that fire came up would go the house. What do we see in

00:28:00.460 these acreages? Everybody wants to have a cabin in the woods. What do we see in paradise? Tragic images

00:28:07.180 on Google now. You can go and see that the power lines were running right up against the trees.

00:28:13.660 Those should have been cleared away. Oftentimes the people didn't want the power company to do that

00:28:18.940 because they wanted to have this quaint little village. So, you know, there's lots of practical

00:28:23.820 things we can do to address wildfires and instead we're throwing money at trying to catch carbon dioxide.

00:28:30.060 It's really, really stupid and a huge waste, huge waste and risk to human life.

00:28:38.220 Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say it feels as though

00:28:43.020 people have forgotten how to live on the face of the earth outside of, you know, the urban jungle.

00:28:49.660 These are things that people who live in the country like me, I know. It's something we do every

00:28:54.620 single year. But, you know, you clear out all the dead wood, you burn down all the dead grass.

00:29:01.980 Because, I mean, it's something as simple as a cigarette butt thrown out the window that can cause

00:29:06.940 catastrophic damage early in the spring or late in the fall. And it seems as though politicians are

00:29:12.700 counting on the fact that people have forgotten the lessons of our grandparents.

00:29:17.180 Yeah, well, again, you know, a lot of people move to the country to an acreage and they think, well,

00:29:22.540 if there's a fire, I'll call 911.

00:29:24.540 Yeah, good luck.

00:29:25.100 Good luck with that. You know, you actually have to have a local fire volunteer group,

00:29:29.740 committee, and have a plan in place. So, how would your neighborhood, your acreages,

00:29:34.620 how would you respond if somebody's, you know, barbecue got out of control?

00:29:38.940 You know, and there are ways that people who are living right there can actually respond and probably

00:29:45.340 manage or contain a fire until authorities can get there. But it's a long wait. If you're anywhere

00:29:53.260 outside the city, you know, it's not going to be three minutes or eight minutes. That's the target,

00:29:57.980 I think, for the City of Calgary Fire Department. And that's fantastic.

00:30:02.460 Yeah, I think it's about a half an hour for me. You know, I have had some barbecues get out of control,

00:30:07.740 but it's just resulted in a lot of hangovers and no fire.

00:30:12.220 Well, you probably have the holes on standby, right? I mean, you live in the country,

00:30:16.220 you have things on standby because you go, you know what, the wind could come up any time. I

00:30:20.860 better be ready.

00:30:22.220 It's true. Do you know, did we get to everything we had on our list to chit-chat about today, Michelle?

00:30:28.460 Not quite. There's two other reports I'd like to mention, which has been very prolific. One is

00:30:33.580 another report by Robert Lyman called Futile Folly. And it looks at sort of the drip, drip, drip of

00:30:39.900 Canada's emissions versus this ocean of emissions by countries like China, India, the US, and really

00:30:49.580 assesses, you know, why are we trying to break our backs and break our economy on this futile,

00:30:57.580 expensive and dangerous, economically dangerous, and politically dangerous mission to reduce our

00:31:04.620 emissions to nothing when it's actually ripping the country apart. And it won't make a difference.

00:31:11.660 You know, it will not make a difference because our contribution is so small.

00:31:15.820 And the other report we just issued yesterday responds to the climate emergency. It's called

00:31:21.340 Look Before You Leap into Climate Emergency Mode. And it does a fairly detailed evaluation of some of

00:31:29.020 the central claims of the of the Pact for the New Green Deal. So little old friends of science,

00:31:36.540 our tiny little group, is taking on those 60 ENGOs and all their followers and trying to bring some 1.00

00:31:43.660 common sense to the climate and energy policy discussions in Canada.

00:31:47.820 You know, and thank God you do. You know, you do make a very salient point there that

00:31:55.660 these debates around carbon taxes really are ripping our country apart. It is dividing us.

00:32:04.220 It is stripping provinces of their autonomy to deal with their own problems in their own way,

00:32:09.260 the way the people who elected the governments of the provinces have decided they need to be handled.

00:32:14.940 I think the carbon tax is just as detrimental to the unity of our country as the inequity of equalization.

00:32:25.340 Yes, of course, because, you know, the whole principle of confederation was that we would all

00:32:29.580 work together and share our resources, not that we would penalize each other. And we've come to a

00:32:34.700 situation now, largely because of these foreign funded ENGOs, where we have provinces instead of

00:32:40.860 welcoming each other's contributions, where Vancouver port would say, oh, thank God there's a

00:32:46.620 train across Canada. Thank heavens there's a road through the mountains, because now our port is useful,

00:32:53.500 because now we can ship all kinds of things to other parts of the world. And we always have a vibrant

00:32:58.620 economy in Vancouver because of our port. Instead of welcoming that and being reciprocal, when Alberta

00:33:05.580 says we want to build a pipeline, they go, oh, well, sorry, not in our backyard. You know, meanwhile,

00:33:12.220 every single container ship that's in Vancouver port puts out 50 million cars equivalent in emissions,

00:33:20.620 50 million for every single container ship. Okay, so you and your little carbon tax, you're not saving the

00:33:26.540 planet. You're just being fooled. And of course, as you mentioned, then it becomes a huge rift between

00:33:34.060 the resource sector of the of Western Canada, and down east where, you know, they have the James Bay

00:33:40.780 hydro and in Quebec, they're all very proud of their hydro. Well, they've got two refineries there,

00:33:46.140 they've got a big cement plant there, they've got a big ocean port there. None of that counts,

00:33:51.180 right? They're not emitting anything in Quebec. So, you know, it's created this resentment and rivalry,

00:33:58.540 unfair imposition of taxes on different parts of the country. And really, it's a crazy thing.

00:34:06.540 The best thing we could do is leave the Paris Agreement, quit Paris, save Canada, and build some

00:34:13.340 pipelines because that's our economy. We are one of the top seven countries in the world. Actually,

00:34:20.860 Alberta alone is in the top seven of oil producing parties in the world, and we're just a province.

00:34:28.860 So, somebody's obviously trying to block us, and it's a green trade war. We should recognize that and 0.99

00:34:35.500 respond accordingly and win. We should win this battle and get back into the competitive world.

00:34:40.780 Yeah, you know, when you look at the insanity of Canada taxing its oil,

00:34:47.020 it really amounts to us putting a tariff on ourselves. I mean, and no self-respecting country

00:34:55.660 would really do that to themselves. Michelle, I want to give you a chance to let people know where

00:35:02.380 they can find all these incredible reports that Friends of Science is constantly putting out. I mean,

00:35:07.740 I look at these reports, and just they're so labor and time intensive, it's hard to believe that you're

00:35:13.340 a non-profit. I mean, that people are just giving of themselves to create these reports. It's incredible,

00:35:21.660 incredible, and so time-consuming. So, how can they find you? How can they support you in the work that you do?

00:35:27.500 Well, first of all, you can read and share our reports. Our reports are posted, most of them are

00:35:33.020 posted on our blog or our website. We issue press releases every time we put out a report, so you

00:35:39.100 can find those on PR web under Friends of Science Calgary. You always have to add Calgary on the end.

00:35:45.260 And you can support us by going to our website, www.friendsofscience.org, and click on the

00:35:52.940 donate or membership button. Become a member for a nominal price, $30 a year, $60 for three years,

00:35:59.660 and then you will get all of our materials in your inbox, or donate, or both. And we're not a charity,

00:36:09.420 so we can't give you a tax receipt. But we'd love to have you on board, and we need all the help we can

00:36:14.940 get. Yeah, I think also, if you join, you get advance warning of the incredible banquet you guys put

00:36:21.820 on in the spring. I was just at that, I guess it was a month or so ago, great food, good people,

00:36:28.140 and open-minded discussion. I highly recommend becoming a member of Friends of Science. Michelle,

00:36:33.900 thank you so much for your time. You're always overly generous with your time, but it's because I think

00:36:40.540 you just have so much information to impart to us. And I hope that we can take up a lot more of your

00:36:48.620 time in the near future. Thank you, Sheila. I really appreciate your support, and we think

00:36:54.060 The Rebel is great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Michelle.

00:37:09.340 I don't know about you guys out there, but I sort of kind of like that my life isn't short,

00:37:13.740 miserable, sickly, damp, and cold all the time. And that is in no small part thanks to our friend

00:37:21.180 Fossil Fuels. Taxing them is immoral. Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight. Thank

00:37:26.780 you so much for tuning in. I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next

00:37:32.140 weekend. Remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.

Rebel News Podcast - May 16, 2019

What a “fossil fuel free” world would really look like

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