Walk Everywhere, Stupid

Whatever one may feel about petroleum, it is necessary and will be so for the foreseeable future.

It fuels our vehicles and heats our homes.

It makes various products including single-use medical equipment.

For hard-working labourers, it provides income and for communities, it provides revenue.

For gaping maws that sponge off of others, it provides welfare on which they can coast.

That's why comments like these ... :

On Wednesday, Elizabeth May, the Green party’s parliamentary leader, stated that, “Oil is dead,” and argued that, “The pandemic, in a very real way, as horrific as this is at many, many levels, gives us an opportunity to stop and think about how we get this economy back on its feet.”

Leaders in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, China, Russia and Norway must have been shocked to hear the news. Imagine waking up on the other side of the world and hearing that the leader of a small Canadian political party declared that your energy industry is dead. I don’t know how to say “Elizabeth May has told us our oil industry is no more” in Norwegian, but I bet it sounds very sad. ...

Though Abhijeet Manay, the deputy leader of the Green Party of Ontario, also tweeted this week that, “A post-COVID world has no place for the greedy, shortsighted & vicious societies that Big Oil creates,” it wasn’t exclusively a Green pile-on. May’s perpetual end-of-the-world mentality would be a cry from the fringe without an accompanying three cheers from the separatists.

The always vigilant CBC had the perfect headline: “May and Blanchet declare the oil patch dead.” 

And they do make a congenial duo: Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet wishes to separate from Canada; and May wants to separate from reality. Blanchet spits on Alberta oil, but it still flows into Quebec. And if oil is really dead, shouldn’t someone stop those tankers from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela that drift into the Montreal harbour to stoke Quebec’s economy. Even separatists drive cars, and some even want to warm their homes with Western energy.

Alberta has kept Quebec a winner in the equalization bingo game for a decades. Quebec should, at the very least, have the good sense not to insult its benefactors. If it were not for “vicious” oil workers and the “dirty” oilsands, the streams of equalization, and the dreams of separatism, would have dried up long ago.

The greatest chasm in Canadian politics is the gap between professional global warming activists and people who work for a living. Let us compare those who hate oil and those who produce it in terms of their contribution to Canada’s well-being.

There is the great number of people who leave their house every morning to put in an honest eight or 12 hours in a mine, oilfield or forest, and another set who tweet a lot, shuffle out grim press releases by the mile and stage gimmicky protests, all in an effort to stop the first bunch from having any work to go to. The hive of climate activists do nothing but sneer at those who keep the nation moving.

This latest battery from May reveals a cardinal element in the green world: environmentalism is a species of snobbery. She knows what Albertans want, and they can hardly be trusted to know for themselves. The Greens prate and sing their virtuous hymns. They slam a carbon tax on the farmers and truck drivers during a plague, without a whisper of apology. They are spiteful of Canadian sources of oil, but silent on every other international source. No wonder they find a bedfellow in a separatist leader.

... are most unwelcome.