Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz celebrated their return from the COP28 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai by accusing federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault of “treachery against our province” in an unhinged rant on the government’s official website.
The bizarre and childish statement, which began with Smith lauding the success of the efforts by Alberta, Saskatchewan and other national and sub-national governments dominated by the fossil fuel industry “in pushing back against the voices of those obsessed with accelerating the phaseout of sustainable and affordable energy derived from abated oil and natural gas,” is a classic example of Trump henchman Steve Bannon’s doctrine of flooding the zone.
Bannon, the far-right provocateur who served as chief White House strategist in the first seven months of Donald Trump’s term as US president, famously observed that “the real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Smith’s tweeted complaint Tuesday about a federal program to reduce cattle emissions arguably set the stage for yesterday’s huge rhetorical cow flop.
She expressed grave disappointment at Guilbeault “and other radical activists” for advocating a climate-change strategy she claimed “would consign the world to energy poverty and economic stagnation by focusing only on ending all fossil fuel use.”
Unsurprisingly, she and Schulz – who these days plays Mini-Me to Smith’s parody of a Bond villain – cheered the watered down UAE Consensus adopted at the final session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, the official title of the conference.
The final text of the UAE Consensus called on the nations of the world to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.”
Alberta’s statement said: “It was a national embarrassment to witness Minister Guilbeault at an international conference actively sabotaging the interests of Albertans and other Canadians by releasing a series of incoherent and illegal policy pronouncements that he and his government have absolutely no legal authority to impose upon the provinces of Canada.” (Emphasis, as ever, added.)
“Albertans will not forget his continued treachery against our province and millions of other Canadians,” Smith’s rant continued, accusing the federal minister of damaging Canada’s reputation “with his misguided personal obsessions.”
Abated oil and gas, by the way, is an ill-defined term often heard at COP28 suggesting that burning coal, oil and gas is OK as long as it’s “abated” with carbon-capture of greenhouse gases, an unproven and likely ineffective technology that amounts to a huge subsidy to the fossil fuel industry.
This is the Alberta way? According to the gruesome twosome, indeed it is! Readers with stern constitutions are invited to read the entire statement for themselves.
By comparison, statements by Canadian environmental organizations sounded as if they had been composed by adults.
For example, Julia Levin, associate director of Environmental Defence, the Canadian environmental advocacy organization, said: “For the first time ever, countries around the world have collectively agreed on the need to leave oil, gas and coal in the ground and massively accelerate the build out of renewable energy and energy savings – this decade. There can be no mistake: the era of fossil fuels is quickly coming to an end.”
“We applaud the leadership shown by the Government of Canada at COP28, including the announcement of regulations to reduce methane as well as an achievable cap on emissions from oil and gas by 2030,” said Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Calgary-based Pembina Institute. “These are responsible responses to international trends.”
“As an oil and gas producing country, all levels of government in Canada need to prepare our economy and workforce for a global decline in demand for oil and gas,” he added.
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