The public policy landscape is littered with the wreckage of ideas that didn’t work out the way their architects intended. It might convince lesser mortals than our politicians and their claque that good intentions are not sufficient. But at least they meant well. Which you can’t say about unaffordable gasoline.
We’re getting a major Bart Simpson from politicians over $2/litre gas, frantically blaming anything and everything for the soaring cost of essential energy including Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And they have a point … in the short run.
Just as rising food prices will be due partly to less Russian and Ukrainian wheat reaching world markets, as well as less Russian and Ukrainian fertilizer and fertilizer feedstock, the energy shock matters. But all these things are distractions, really, because while virtually nobody except Putin wanted Russia to invade Ukraine (which typically did not work out the way he intended), they all want gasoline to become prohibitively expensive.
To them, $2.22 a litre is just the beginning. And if you’re wondering how high they would go, just watch them.
In theory the figure is infinity. In case you hadn’t noticed, despite their endless hollering about it, the great and the good are united on climate change, as indeed on the Canada Health Act, abortion, deficits, euthanasia and every other important issue. It seems in Canada the greatest threat to sensible public policy is lively debate in which dissenting views are not promptly stigmatized and quashed. But I digress.
The point is, everyone who’s anyone believes in a man-made climate emergency crisis breakdown in which bad weather will destroy civilization by around 2050 unless we find refuge in the magical land of “Net Zero” where humanity gives off no more carbon “pollution” than it absorbs. Thus with transportation being a major source of “greenhouse gas” emissions, along with housing, farming and such like, it is crucially vital that you stop putting gas in your car. And since you will not stop doing so if you can afford it, unless they make gasoline-powered cars illegal, they must make it impossible for you to afford it.
Because a major point on which elite opinion is apparently united is that clarity in public discussion risks provoking insolent questions, this aspect of the situation has been persistently obscured by obscure rhetoric. Promises not to raise the carbon tax, to rebate it, or to remove it temporarily because expensive gas makes voters angry have been pumped into the air faster than man-made CO2. But they have all been nonsense since the sworn goal, and I challenge you to find a politician besides Maxime Bernier who doesn’t pledge allegiance to it, is to price gasoline out of reach.
Congratulations. It’s working. How do you like it now?
To climate crusaders, $2.22 a litre is just the beginning. And if you’re wondering how high they would go, just watch them
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Again, in the interest of clarity, let me repeat something I’ve said often in the climate debate. If the emergency is real, and if fossil fuels are causing it, we must stop using them at all costs. But there is nothing explicit or implicit in that statement about having to deny those costs. Rarely in life do we get to overcome a major crisis without breaking a sweat.
The modern sensibility begs to differ. Hence all these social justice warriors “challenging authority” with the full support of authority. But that world of make-believe is poor training ground for the real world where even the most meritorious actions, and perhaps especially that kind, often bring pain, suffering, anxiety, danger and even death. As, for instance, if you really have to get rid of fossil fuels in the next three decades, a phrase which does not here mean virtue-signalling while kicking real action down the road for 25 years.
There’s an especially pathetic deathbed line from James Buchanan, the U.S. chief executive who presided helpless and hypnotized as the Civil War approached, that “Whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.” But talk is cheap and good intentions famously lead somewhere even hotter than anthropogenic global warming will supposedly make the Earth.
In the real world, you must replace existing sources of energy if you want to get rid of them without causing misery, hunger, cold and death. Which by and large our leaders do. So if you really can build a fleet of electric vehicles suitable to the Canadian climate, and a grid to charge them, and a vast array of shiny new Green Economy energy plants to power that grid, get to it, and spare me the windy verbiage and sunny ways. We’re talking next-generation nuclear here and pronto.
Whatever you do, don’t promise to make gasoline unaffordable and then when it works go “It wasn’t me.” It was. For once you did it on purpose. Congratulations. Sort of.