Remember the Leap Manifesto? That was the wild-eyed ultra-greenist, anti-capitalist dogma-sheet that Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein dragged out ...
... Kill oil. Kill all fossil fuels. No pipelines. No refineries. Cripple the economy. Deny the poorer nations ... a cascade of unexamined and baseless assertions, a manifest distaste for reality, a raw pulse of dogmatic certitude, and a set of prescriptions that would obliterate a modern economy, push hundreds of thousands out of work, and bring the industrial age back to the days of horse cart and covered wagons for transportation. ...
The authors of Leap were ... merely projecting as it were private fantasies into the public arena. If, however, they had presented in Ontario, if they had urged Ontario’s government with the dreams they urged ... I suspect they would have been mocked as timid, restrained, unimaginative, even perhaps, regressive. For the Wynne government’s recently revealed plans for the ‘transformation of the Ontario energy industry,” is of a reach and scope, depth and range, that defies all comparison.
Even if there were good evidence that alarmists are right (and there isn't) Canada's contribution to global CO2 emissions is tiny and it's effect on global climate un-measurable. But politicians like Wynne (and Trudeau and ... ) behave as if the world's fate hinges on Canada (or Ontario or ...) taking the lead in sacrificing their citizens' standard of living to Gaia. This is insanely reckless. Canada has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to move any faster on this than the least committed of the largest GHG emitting nations. Doing so is not only climatically pointless, it unnecessarily risks wrecking our economy. We are being led either by nitwits or by cynical tax-grabbers or both.
