Is the Climate Con finally dying out? Not any time soon: the fallacy of sunk costs will see to that, not to mention pure intellectual inertia, as well as the fact that so many people are absolutely emotionally wedded to catastrophism. Like the doomsday cult saying, ‘See you next week, lads: we must get a winner some day,’ the Climate Cultists just will not, cannot, admit they might have been wrong.
But money, contra the saying, walks – and in this case, it’s walking away. Even in Canada.
Four of Canada’s biggest banks have left the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance that aims to accelerate climate action among financial institutions.
Banks including BMO, National Bank, TD Bank Group and CIBC confirmed Friday they were no longer members.
It’s not just Canadian banks, though. US banks, and some of the biggest investment funds in the world, are clamouring for the exit door.
The withdrawals from the alliance follow on departures by the six largest banks in the US in recent weeks ahead of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.
Financial institutions are pulling back following sustained criticism from US Republicans on various climate alliances and the very concept of factoring environmental risks into their business operations.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, left the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative earlier this month in a move that led the group to suspend activities and launch a review of the initiative, citing “recent developments in the US.”
What does this tell us, really? That the big banks were only in it because there was massive troughs of taxpayers’ money lying around. As soon as they get a whiff that the river of gold is about to dry up, they’re gone.
It’s not just the money men, either. More and more strategists are cottoning on to just how toxic climate change alarmism is politically.
It might seem like a distant memory now, but it’s worth remembering that every major federal party ran in 2021 on a platform that included a consumer carbon tax.
Nearly every single Liberal, NDP and Conservative MP who currently sits in the House of Commons – up to and including Pierre Poilievre, who now says Canada needs a “carbon tax election” so he can “axe the tax” – won their seat while carrying a commitment to apply a price on carbon.
But that’s not why they won their seats. They won their seats in spite of their spouting climate change dogma. Survey after survey of voters around the world have shown that ‘climate change’ is rarely even a top-10 issue for people. Sure, they’ll go along with the screeching ninnies of the Climate Cult, but kitchen table issues always have and always will come first: healthcare, education, immigration and the economy.
Especially the economy, stupid. As soon as voters realise just how dearly ‘Net Zero’ really costs them, they run away from it as if it was a week-long dead whale.
But then the Conservative leader whose face was on the cover of that platform, Erin O’Toole, was deposed by his own caucus. And inflation reached eight per cent. And Poilievre was chosen as O’Toole’s successor.
And inflation reached eight per cent. As Australians found out under Julia Gillard, a carbon tax is far from some esoteric bean-counting exercise for big business: it’s a tax on everything: most especially energy. As Australians are finding out under Anthony Albanese, when energy prices soar – thanks to ‘climate’ policies – the price of everything goes through the roof with it.
Mealy mouthed government lickspittles masquerading as journalists can lie and misdirect all they want, but voters aren’t fools. When they see their power bills soaring, along with everything else, they know what’s up and who to blame.
Meanwhile, the Cultists are doubling down and going full communist.
The withdrawal of banks from the alliance shows the need for government to step in, said Greenpeace senior energy strategist Keith Stewart.
That’s the green left for you: ideas so great that people have to be forced to comply with them.
