As the Canadian federal election enters the back half, global warming has come to be the one significant area of disagreement between the clusters of parties on left and right. Carbon taxes and pipelines have become the line in the sand and despite rhetorical muddying by the two main parties, there is relatively little common ground. The parties’ positions can be easily surmised..More taxes, no pipelines: Greens, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois..No taxes, more pipelines: PPC..More taxes, maybe pipelines: Liberals..More pipelines, maybe taxes: Conservatives.. Brian Mulroney & Ronald ReaganPresident Ronald Reagan (left) & Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (right) .Between the 1960s and1990s, Canada and much of the Western world enjoyed a broad environmental consensus focused on real, tangible action on clean air, water and soil, with most major parties all taking moderate environmentalism and conservationism seriously. The last real international agreement that Canada signed onto that wasn’t a mere aspirational UN confab was the 1991 Canada-US Air Quality Agreement – virtually eliminating acid rain on the continent – between the Mulroney and Reagan-Bush administrations. It was an era that saw differences in environmental policy between major parties in most countries counted in degrees..This consensus was possible because environmental policy was about the environment. A policy designed to reduce the presence of something in the environment could more often than not be taken at face value. But in the period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Kyoto Accord, the environmentalist movement in North America began taking its cues from its cousins in Europe like the German Green Party, which explicitly fused far-left class and economic theory with militant environmentalism..The 1997 Kyoto Accord was a watershed moment in smashing the cross-ideological environmental consensus. A plan to save the planet somehow required wealthy capitalist nations to transfer vast sums of wealth to poor developing, communist, and post-communist nations. Wealth redistribution was now fundamentally linked with the new environmentalist movement..In 2019, it’s difficult to find a party or group championing action on global warming that isn’t offering as the solution some form of re-treaded socialism. Warming crusader and author of the Leap Manifesto Naomi Klein, made it abundantly clear.. Naomi KleinNaomi Klein, Socialist and Environmentalist Activist .“Humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.”.The radical wing of the Democratic Party in the US has made it similarly clear in its “Green New Deal,” promising trillions of dollars in new spending paid for by more debt, and massive new taxes on industries that it wishes to see the end of..Where the environment was once a largely siloed issue – fenced off from the normal ideological debates – it is now fused at the root with today’s redistributionists. Socialism may not be sexy, but environmentalism is..By making green the new red, the environmentalist movement has set itself back. Instead of seeing parts of its platform enacted by governments regardless of ideological stripe, it has gone all-in on just one side..Just a decade ago, there were many conservatives open or even supportive of revenue-neutral carbon taxes. This support has evaporated entirely since as revenue-neutral carbon taxes (like BCs) were transformed into cash grabs, and new carbon taxes (like Alberta’s) were cash grabs from the start. Nascent support for a carbon tax on the right was strangled in the cradle by the left.. Greta ThunbergSwedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg .When screaming teenagers terrified of Armageddon 2030 are outraged that conservatives don’t take them seriously, it is because they are talking about something else entirely. They believe that the Leap Manifesto-Green New Deal path is the only way to save the planet, and that those who don’t sign on are consciously consigning them to a Mad Max desert hellscape before they graduate college. What they don’t understand, is that those heralding the End Times don’t see an innocent environmentalist movement. They see zealous socialists repackaging old, failed ideology with a pretty green ribbon..On the flipside, where some question the scientific integrity of the data or the severity of predictions of doom, they see science-denying flat-earthers..It’s a chasm in world views unlikely to be closed anytime soon, and almost certainly to be widened by the coming election.
