Is it time for everyone to panic?

by Fred

(Simpsons video: Disney)

Fear confuses people and makes us easier to control. When someone suggests you should be afraid, ask yourself if the fear they urge you to feel is legitimate. Then consider who benefits from your being afraid.

Donald Trump says he wants to make Canada the 51st state of the USA and threatens tariffs that could damage the Canadian economy.

Canadian media outlets, most of which are heavily subsidized by Canada’s federal Liberal government, are stoking panic, outrage and even that most un-Canadian of emotions: patriotism.

This is remarkable, since most of the actions Trump wants Canada to take should have been taken by Trudeau’s government but were ignored or made worse by Trudeau. Think parasitically low defense spending, loose borders, drugs, money laundering and indefensible cartels.

It is Canada’s Liberal government that made us so vulnerable to the Orange Menace, by skimping on defence spending and preventing the Canadian energy industry, which produces oil and gas, our top exports, from diversifying its customer base. Trudeau also turned a blind eye to a lot of fentanyl dealing, political interference and money laundering in Canada by China, which benefitted Trudeau’s government through vote rigging and donations.

Below is a video interview with journalist Sam Cooper describing a less known Canadian scandal that is very relevant to Trump’s current demands on Canada. Cooper wrote a book I read called “Wilful Blindness”, about China-based drug gangs laundering proceeds of crime through BC casinos and Vancouver real estate. That illegal trade has grown and evolved over the past three decades. It has funded massive Vancouver real estate inflation, political interference in Canada’s elections and has now caught the American government’s attention :

Nobody in Canada is talking about this, because we are all pointlessly panicking about Trump, but Cooper asserts that Trump noticed Trudeau’s China chicanery before many Canadians did. Unlike Trudeau, Trump has no political interest in suppressing awareness of this issue.

Who benefits from Canadians’ panicked response to Trump? Certainly Trump does. Anything Trump does to Canada now, short of rolling tanks northward, will be seen as indulgent, as someone observed.

Thoughtful Canadians might pause before cracking each other’s heads open, to notice that Trump’s threats have been a boon for the Liberal Party of Canada. Rather than focusing on the disaster of the Trudeau Liberals’ decade of economic vandalism and corruption, voters are now emotionally rallying around the current Liberal government, which cynically shut down parliament at this very inappropriate moment, to save its own skin.

In Ontario, home to 40 percent of Canadians, many of whom vote Liberal by default, the foreseeable removal of clown prince Trudeau, plus recent threats from President Pumpkin and the arrival of carbon crusading carpetbagger Carney have given the Liberals a completely undeserved bump in the polls.

Toronto, Canada’s self-appointed bastion of urban sophistication, has only recently realized that the Junior Trudeau regime has been a disaster, possibly because Hogtown house prices have risen so much that Torontonians felt insulated from the endless Zoolander disaster that has so damaged Canada’s economy.

Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t the only panic being promoted by Trudeau and Carney’s Liberal Party. For several decades, Canada’s Liberals and other “progressive” organizations have boosted the idea that Earth is burning up due to “people-kind’s” (a Trudeau neologism) use of hydrocarbons.

The Trudeau regime, for more than a decade advised by so-called “outsider” Mark Carney, who also stoked carbon phobia when he headed the Bank of England, has needlessly made life more expensive for Canadians by imposing two layers of carbon taxes, punishing the oil and gas and pipeline industries and mandating “clean” (i.e. intermittent and unstorable) energy sources and electric vehicles. Trudeau and his gormless lackeys Freeland and Champagne sprayed tens of borrowed billions of dollars at car battery builders, who are now wobbling as demand for electric cars falters.

(Image: slideserve.com)

There is something very medieval Catholic about climate hysteria. We are but lowly, selfish sinners, because we burn gasoline, natural gas, oil and coal in a cold climate, but we can reach heaven, by buying indulgences for our sins. Our path to redemption is paying ever increasing carbon taxes, on fuels we have little choice but to use, for the sake of the less than 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions that come from Canada.

By doing so, we make absolutely no difference to global “emissions”, but enrich our federal government and massively inflate our own cost of living, while making Canada less competitive with the many countries, like China, India and the United States, who are not stupid enough to sabotage their own economies this way.

For a peek at the green future, see Germany and the United Kingdom, who have followed the World Economic Forum (WEF)- inspired “Net Zero” path. Germany and the UK are now de-industrializing, because they have made their own energy costs unaffordable for both industry and consumers. German has a new word, Energiearmut, for energy poverty, the condition in which people must choose between heating and eating.

Take a break from sewing your Down with Trump protest banner and realize that this Net Zero insanity is exactly where Liberal saviour and future PM Mark Carney wants to take Canada.

WEF disciples like Trudeau, Freeland and Carney see people-kind as a blight and so want to depopulate the planet. Hence needless energy cost inflation and even restrictions on fertilizer use. The fertilizer restriction push has created mass protests in Sri Lanka, the Netherlands and the UK and has been adopted by Canada’s Liberal party too. Saskatchewan farmer and former oil worker Quick Dick McDick decodes the fertilizer issue in this video:

(video: Quick Dick McDick Productions)

To reduce cognitive dissonance, Canadians may tell ourselves that by needlessly impoverishing ourselves today, we will leave the planet in better shape for our children.

That isn’t true, but what price will Canadians put on feeling virtuous?

Mark Carney promises to hit the “big polluters” with higher taxes, now that he and everyone on Team Trudeau are suddenly running away from the hideous consumer carbon tax monster that they created. Awkwardly, the “big polluters” Carney has in mind are probably oil and gas producers, which are not remotely the largest source of emissions.

Consumption of hydrocarbons is the largest greenhouse gas source, but taxing consumption would mean another consumer carbon tax and/or a tax on airlines, trucking companies, skidoos, cement plants, railways etc. All of that would be passed along to voters, who would react negatively.

Therefore, Carney will want to confine much of the economic carnage to Western Canada, so expect another unnecessary spike in energy costs via some new fiscal punishment for oil and gas producers, which will also be passed along. Canadian consumers, as they always do, will then blame refiners for the high price of gasoline, a product whose price in Canada is already almost 40% tax. In this scenario, Carney slithers away from most blame for the inflation his policies create.

Freditorial’s free advice to Canada’s oil refiners:

Stop giving political cover to weasel politicians like Legault, Guilbeault, Trudeau and Carney who have done nothing but abuse your industry.

Refiners should post the prices of gasoline and diesel on a pre-tax basis, so Canadians clearly see the taxes and even compound taxes (taxes calculated on top of other taxes) they are paying on fuel today. When consumers explode with rage, it will at least finally be clear who is fleecing them.

How expensive should governments make life in Canada, in order for Ontarians, Quebecois and BC’s Left Coasters to feel really good about themselves?

Headlines indicate that some women are so panic stricken that they have decided to sterilize themselves to spare their unborn offspring the horror of Trumpist America. Others have already sworn off having children due to one of Saint Greta Thunberg’s many psychological afflictions: “climate anxiety”.

This is real progress. Once gullible, panicky people have fewer children, society may eventually calm down and make better decisions.

Schools teach our kids that rather than being the happiest, healthiest, wealthiest society in human history, modern western countries are instead genocidal, racist, sexist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, racializing (whatever that means) monsters who are destroying our only planet.

This is panic pornography.

Countless columns and articles include the phrase “in these dangerous/perilous/fraught times”, typically a reference not just to dictators like Putin and Xi, or to plagues and wars, but to the “Climate Emergency!”

Predictions of climate doom have become ever more hysterical in the last 30 years. Science works by hypotheses once disproved, being rejected. This has somehow not happened with the Climate Emergency.

Climate prophets and profiteers like Al Gore, David Suzuki, Stephen Guilbeault and even King Charles III have all made repeated alarmist climate predictions that have spectacularly failed to come true. Science doesn’t demand that debate be silenced. Those who seek control and cannot defend their position are the ones inciting panic.

Almost ten years ago, at a school in Calgary, my daughter and a classmate who won the science award were climate-shamed by their teacher, in a creepy, inappropriate conformity enforcement exercise.

Prehistoric temperatures were at times much higher than they are today, despite no humans existing to take the blame. Temperatures were also higher than they are today in medieval times, when there was no industry emitting CO2, methane or anything else. Grapes grew in England and Vikings farmed in Greenland.

Sea levels in ancient Roman times were much higher than they are today, as any visitor to Italy notices immediately.

Storms and fires were more frequent in the 1930s than they are today, despite there having been lower CO2 concentrations then.

Volcanos’ emissions of CO2 and methane completely overwhelm anything man can emit.

Cold is much more dangerous than heat. We are more likely to be in a long term cooling trend today than warming. If the planet were slightly warmer, arable land would expand, which would support our human population.

CO2 is essential to life on Earth, by allowing the plant growth that replenishes our oxygen. Prehistoric times had much more CO2 than we have now and a much broader range of species.

The enormous cost of mitigating CO2 prevents us from addressing other problems. The vast sums already expended on “climate mitigation” could instead have eliminated illiteracy and world hunger, as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg points out.

So who benefits from today’s rampant climate hysteria?

Governments love to tax a gas they allege contains the seeds of our own destruction, at some indefinite future date. Socialists delight in seeing capitalism taken down a peg and authoritarian globalists like Mark Carney revel in having conjured an enemy so insidious that they can rally people to support a world government to combat it, via draconian, anti human measures. Thousands of parasitic, activist hangers-on have a vast, new government -subsidized global renewables industry, the Climate Industrial complex, on which to feed. China can exploit its dominant position in Rare Earth metals to sell solar panels and other renewable energy gear to the world, while continuing to open more coal fired power plants for its own use.

Here is an introductory reading list for those prone to panic about the so called “Climate Emergency”:

Unsettled, by Dr Steve Koonin, President Obama’s Science Advisor and an IPCC author, who notes that those who have actually read the IPCC reports, like him, are not panicking. Dr Koonin notes that politicians quote journalists’ headlines about summaries of IPCC summaries, because that generates clicks, creates fear and confusion and increases demands for more to be done.

Cool It, among other books by Dr Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, examine the economics of the climate mitigation versus alternative uses of capital.

Watermelons, by James Delingpole, who recounts the history of the environmental movement of the last several decades

Global Warming: the Missing Science, by Dr Ian Plimer, an Australian Professor of Geology, who lays out the geological history of the Earth. Plimer shows where we stand in the multi-billion year context of Earth’s temperature and habitability.

In a future essay, I will look into Trump’s Canada as a 51st State concept. In the meantime, keep calm and carry on.