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National Post

Conrad Black: Liberals must retreat from their climate obsessions

Article content In the last 10 years, the federal government spent approximately $200 billion on climate change. It is impossible to justify this expenditure and someone certainly needs to explain why adding an estimated $16.5 billion in the Pathways project for minimal emission reductions and increasing oil prices will advance their declared goal of making 'Canada strong.' The best that can be said is that the government is taking note of the evolving public attitude that is parallel to the general reinterpretation of these questions in the United States and other advanced Western countries, and even a relatively modest gesture in the helter-skelter scramble to throttle our greatest industry in the false pretense of protecting the planet is becoming a serious political challenge. Article content This would conform with other indications that we may be reaching the last stages of climate hysteria. The latest evidence of this is a United Nations call last month for the criminalization of disseminating 'disinformation and misinformation' about global warming. Elisa Morgera, the United Nations special rapporteur on climate change, has asked that what is called greenwashing be criminalized since it is deemed to be propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. There is naturally no effort to define disinformation and misinformation and no indication how the meaning of those words will be determined. But there is some evidence that even raising this absurd concept shows that the climate alarmists are becoming desperate. Given their five or more decades of wildly unfounded dire predictions of imminent disaster, that is a reassuring development but demanding that skeptics be arrested and tried as criminals has been a goal of the eco-fascists for some time. Some of the more strident and witless leftists in the U.S. Congress have called for a racketeering suit against the oil and gas industries on this account, supported by a number of 'scientists' who also regard climate skepticism as 'racketeering' and 'corruption.' There have also been the usual noises about referring this practice to the International Criminal Court, which is just an illegitimate mudslinging and shakedown operation that the United States and a number of other important countries have officially ignored. This was the basis of Michael Mann's attempt to muzzle the outstanding Canadian writer and commentator Mark Steyn, who had criticized Mann's theory of the 'hockey stick' acceleration of global warming. Article content The country is waiting to see if Carney is moving stealthily forward on his infamous climate agenda, or is in cautious retreat on this issue, upon which so much, including his government's possibility of being successful, depends. Article content