STIRLING: Have you been greenwashed by your government lately?

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you do atrocities" — VoltaireThe federal government has launched a new campaign to nudge you into climate compliant behaviour. The campaign is called “Raising the Bar in the Fight Against the Climate Crisis.”The campaign’s ad for 'At Home' suggestions include taking the bus twice a week, using electric power tools (such as leaf blowers) rather than gas-fueled ones, installing a heat pump and hanging your laundry out to dry. The benefits claimed are you will be saving the planet and saving money and, by the smiles, you’ll be having a wonderful time doing so!Of course, this is nothing but greenwashing, something high-level experts such as former Environment Minister Catherine McKenna loudly denounce when it comes to corporations. When it comes to governments, it seems greenwashing, psychological manipulation and behavioural nudging is A-Okay! So okay that the government is willing to pay billions to accomplish the goal of conning you into climate compliance. Compliance that will do nothing to stop climate change. As Robert Lyman has reported in When Giants Arise” North America and the EU make up only 15% of the world’s population and emissions growth has been flat here for decades. Whatever you save here with your paltry climate compliance will be outpaced in seconds by GHG emissions in the emerging nations.The feds cannot be completely blind to these facts, nor are the climate compliance specialists.Case in point is the fact that the federal government has funded the Canada Foundation for Innovation for billions of dollars, which has then distributed multi-million-dollar juicy grants to the University of British Columbia to study Changing human behaviour to avert the climate crisis.For example: “Researchers at the University of British Columbia are exploring how people of various political stripes respond to the climate crisis — and how to spur collective climate action despite their differences.”Imagine this. The Canadian government is using taxpayers’ money to fund research to convince you that hanging your laundry outside, instead of using a dryer, will stop climate change. They tell you that if you comply with these rituals, you will stop climate change.Climate scientist Judith Curry has a good quote about this nonsensical psychological manipulation. She says: “Thinking that catastrophes like major hurricane landfalls, massive forest fires, etcetera will be ‘cured’ by eliminating fossil fuel emissions is laughable. Well, its not really funny. Thinking that eliminating fossil fuel emissions will solve the problem of extreme weather events is very sad, sort of on the level of doing rain dances." "Everything that goes wrong, they blame on fossil fuel driving climate change. Imagine how surprised they would be if we were ever to be successful at eliminating fossil fuel emissions and then we still had bad weather!”Sadly, the psychological manipulators over at UBC are not the only ones into magical thinking, but of a different sort. UBC is also home to Prof. William Rees a researcher devoted to the concept of 'Overshoot.' Last spring, UBC Okanagan featured a webinar with Rees, starring Michael Ignatieff via Zoom, on the topic of 'Should individual choice be restricted to preserve the climate?'Ignatieff rather choked on the Q&A where the issue of restricting human freedoms came up as he has traditionally defended human rights and Western-style democracy. Others on the panel were keen to limit freedoms. In fact, I was shocked at the climate zealotry of Rees and his passionate presentation on 'Overshoot.'What’s that about? In short — there are too many of us. And you know where that type of thinking leads.Thus, it is doubly concerning that at the recent COP28 conference, a group claiming to represent 46 million healthcare workers submitted a petition demanding an end to the fossil-fuel era. Just a cursory glance shows us that modern medicine cannot exist without the reliable, affordable energy provided by coal and natural gas. One of the themes of the ironically-named 'Health Care Without Harm,' one of the groups behind the petition is the greenest hospital is the one you don’t build. The medical community is now focussed on NetZero healthcare.In effect, they are demanding the destruction of modern medicine. Ultimately, millions of us would not exist or our lives would be much shorter. Many of us would live in terrible pain and our only option would become Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD.)That’s the point of climate compliance rituals. It’s not about saving the planet for your children. It’s about Boomer demographics. It’s about getting rid of grandma, the costs of her care, her unfunded pension liabilities and the carbon footprint of her end-of-life ‘frailty.’We are at a critical point in society where absurd climate zealotry is leading us into the land of acceptable atrocity.Michelle Stirling is the Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society. https://www.innovation.ca/projects-results/research-stories/changing-human-behaviour-avert-climate-crisis

STIRLING: Have you been greenwashed by your government lately?

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