Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Cowering before carbon
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Despite turning this back this spring, South Dakota continues to be under attack by a freshly born green corporation, Summit Carbon Solutions, funded by China’s Belt and Road initiative, and you, through the Green New Deal provisions buried in the last debt ceiling deal, to pipe “carbon,” from the oil fields to some obscure part of the Dakotas and bury it. The “people” may “rise up” and demand it be shuttered, and all they do is crawl away and try again.
There can be no more stupid waste of money than this. But even some of our bravest politicians, including Kristi Noem, Pierre Poilivere and Danielle Smith in Canada cower before the almighty (anti-)carbon lobby and rabbit on about sequestering it. It is an industry into which thieves flood because it means you loot the public purse at the beginning through Green New Deal giveaways, and then for all perpetuity because of the tax advantage. People have been so scarified by the word, they do not know what it means anymore, they nod enthusiastically.
So let’s refresh: carbon = carbon dioxide. Plant food. Your outbreath. The thing that makes life on earth habitable. The thing they are trying to introduce into Mars to make it habitable. In order to terraform Mars, you need carbon dioxide.
A policy researcher friend tried to track down the annual billions, trillions over the last thirty years, that the U.N. and its various satellites have given of your money to “climate change” mitigation outfits in the Global South. The money vanishes, nothing happens, it’s stolen. She google-earthed one heavily PR’ed outfit, only to discover that it didn’t exist, just a pile of sand. These projects are payoffs to an army of activists placed at every weak point in the system. If the projects exist, they don’t work. Both the Guardian and Harper’s have done extensive work on the fraud of “climate mitigation.” Carbon sequestration is a scam meant to steal public money.
Yeah, this oughta work.
This time, Kristi Noem is facing down an activated people who are fit to be tied, protesting and signing petitions. This is generally taken as “the people’s voice” in the enviro business and must be obeyed. But not, apparently, when you are fighting “green.” This time, Summit Corporation is barreling through people’s farms, breaking into their barns, threatening ranchers with armed guards, and generally behaving like the WEFer army Trudeau sent to brutalize the truckers. This is a new iteration from the One World Government, anonymous Kevlar-coated mercenaries in the heartland.
So it is that the carbon dioxide pipeline in North Dakota is receiving rapid approvals and aggressive eminent domain clearing overturning the years, even decades it takes to clear a pipeline. The first thing Biden did was cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. It was protested by the activist army that moves into any hot spot, the leaders of which are paid well to lead the chaos. But in this instance, the carbon pipeline is being protested by actual residents fearing actual harm. Co2 is an unstable gas, unlike oil and natural gas. Co2 pipelines explode and kill people. They blow up in part because the technology is not sorted out, unlike petroleum engineering. But never mind! It’s virtuous. It’s fabulous, it must be done, whether you like it or not.
I know! Let’s overturn democracy. Writes Pipeline contributor Steven F. Hayward in the Claremont Review of Books:
The most overwrought, assertive climate change activists have a “transformative” agenda to halt and reverse global warming. The problem is that there’s no evidence voting majorities in any modern democracy are willing to be transformed by Green New Deals or other, even wilder schemes. And if the people reject the climate agenda? There must be ways to enact it despite them. There may even be ways to insist that this thwarting of the popular will is, in fact, a more noble rendering of democracy than mere government by consent of the governed.
He quotes Ross Mittiga, the author of “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” asking whether we must sacrifice democracy to save the planet:
Satisfying this standard may entail elevating the status or power of experts in the political process by, for instance, affording them a salient consultatory role or even some kind of veto power over legislation…. One can imagine a “Supreme Court of Climate Experts,” tasked with evaluating, modifying, or striking down legislation to the extent it exacerbates the climate crisis or contributes to other grave forms of environmental destruction.
Observes Steve: “This hardly differs from the parade of authoritarian horrors offered elsewhere in the article.”
Oops.
Alas, all over the U.S., activists are attempting to override both political and judicial process placing their judgment above democratic process, and their pet judges agree. Usually local farmers, ranchers, rural businessmen and women are rolled flat by out-of-state lawyers and money from movie stars, but this time, the victims have constitutional lawyers. The South Dakota Freedom Caucus is fighting back and Gov. Noem is caught. Approving this pipeline will mean money for her coffers from Summit, jobs, albeit temporary; no doubt, federal funds will be held back until she approves it. You can read the Caucus’ extensive legal argument here.
Even the Sierra Club thinks carbon capture is fraudulent:
The fact that the 45Q tax break for carbon capture and sequestration specifically states that enhanced oil recovery [EOR] counts as sequestration means that these companies could get paid twice for the same carbon— first, via the tax break for capturing and shipping it, and again when they sell it for EOR. “The bottom line,” says [Richard] Kuprewicz, “is if you’re trying to get CO2 in the atmosphere to reduce global warming, but you’ve created this huge market incentive to drive and generate more oil recovery, that may be in conflict with getting rid of CO2 in the atmosphere… We’re getting ahead of ourselves on pipelines,” he says. “For billions of dollars you can make smart people do incredibly stupid things.”
Carbon capture is a gold rush, the gold being public money. Exxon Mobil just bought a carbon capture company. Certainly it knows of the dangers and inefficacy, but such virtue signaling makes them look good. Summit Corporation is another dishonest outfit prospecting for free public money.
Opposition mounts. The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission has announced it will hold hearings on their pipeline in September. Three days ago, Daniel Horowitz of The Blaze asked why Noem was dragging her heels about calling a special session of the legislature to deal with the “carbon-capture” threat.
This problem has been festering for quite some time, it’s just that the governor thought she’d be able to quietly skate by enabling Summit Carbon Solutions and Navigator CO2 to do the dirty work while not overtly endorsing their project. Noem’s reluctance to call a session comes on the heels of her refusal to support the existing bill in the regular session. The governor is pretending like this issue is just beginning and that lawmakers need to send some new legislation for her to review. But she is very familiar with House Bill 1133, introduced by Rep. Karla Lems. There’s nothing to review; it’s a one-paragraph bill. It simply makes it clear that eminent domain can only be used for a pipeline that actually produces a public good, not merely captures carbon. Done.
Can’t we just box it and ship it?
In Illinois, through which carbon pipelines are planned to flow, a state senator has proposed a moratorium on carbon capture pipelines to address safety concerns.
McClure said the pipeline issue was first brought to his attention by some of those who live along the path of Heartland Greenway. He said he was concerned about the potential for a pipeline rupture similar to one that happened in Satartia, Mississippi in early 2020, when 45 people were hospitalized and 200 were evacuated. The carbon dioxide sucked the air out of the surrounding area and caused gas-using vehicles to fail, according to reports.
“When you have a pipeline that’s that big [and] that will stretch across so much rural area, how on earth would emergency folks be able to get to a rupture in time to help people?,” McClure said.
We have to stop throwing our future into the great green maw.
Elizabeth Nickson is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Follow her on Substack here.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Is the Price of Reconciliation that we Must Pretend to Believe a Lie?
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Even the Kamloops band is backing away from its most extreme claim, that ‘bodies were found’
The price we are being told that we must pay to achieve “reconciliation” is becoming clear. We must pretend to believe a lie.
The lie is that 215, and then thousands, of indigenous students of residential schools were “disappeared” while at the schools — that they died under sinister circumstances while under the care of the priests, nuns and teachers running the schools, and were buried in secrecy.
To top it off, it is claimed that fellow students — “as young as six” — were forced by these evil priests to dig the graves. The fact that there is not one scintilla of good evidence to support this deeply anti-Catholic blood libel is not supposed to deter us from accepting it as fact. We are being told that we must pretend to believe this lie if we want to achieve “reconciliation”.
If there was any doubt that the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) was insisting that Canadians must pretend to believe the false claim, it was dispelled when they angrily rejected the funding cap that the federal government had placed on its ill-considered promise to provide a total of $320 million to indigenous communities that chose to go on their own “missing children/unmarked graves” search.
The chiefs showed who was boss, and the federal government meekly submitted, and cancelled the funding cap.
The government coffers were left wide open, and indigenous communities expanded existing searches for “missing children.” In reality these children were never missing. As Tom Flanagan explains in Grave Error (above), they were “forgotten children” who had been properly buried in marked graves that were subsequently left untended and forgotten by their families.
Be that as it may, as a result of AFN activism, and government and media incompetence, the Kamloops claim morphed into an officially sanctioned lie.
But where is the truth in all of this?
Most of us knew, even when this claim was first made in 2021, that these grisly tales of sinister deaths and secret burials could not possibly be true.
There is simply no historical record of any such thing occurring.
There are no records of parents frantically looking for children who suddenly went missing from residential schools, no police reports of missing children. Nothing.
In fact the extensive records we do have say exactly the opposite — namely that the deaths of children who sadly died of the diseases of the day at residential schools were all properly recorded, and that almost all of the deceased children were buried by their parents on their home reserves.
The small minority who were buried in special school cemeteries, (because the transportation of the bodies back to remote reserves was impractical,) all received Christian burials. Their places of burial were made known to their parents. The fact is that record keeping of indigenous children at residential schools was far superior to record keeping of the children on reserves, where far greater numbers died of exactly the same diseases.
But for reasons best left to future historians to ponder the Trudeau government and its CBC media ally immediately accepted the crackpot Kamloops claim as true. CBC and other gullible media went into overdrive pumping out misinformation in support of the baseless claim, while the Trudeau government ordered all flags on federal buildings across Canada lowered, where they remained for six months!
Trudeau’s indigenous affairs minister, Marc Miller — perhaps the worst Indian Affairs minister in the history of this country — recklessly promised $320 million to indigenous communities that wanted to make similar claims. And, of course, others did almost immediately.
Down the road, Chief Willie Sellars, of the Williams Lake indigenous community, outdid the rhetoric of his colleague, Chief Casimir. According to Sellars, priests had not only killed countless indigenous children, but had thrown their bodies into “rivers, streams and lakes” as well as the usual old standards of throwing bodies into school furnaces and incinerators. Other communities wanting in on the money jumped onto the bandwagon with increasingly fantastical tales.
The result of this Trudeau government recklessness — aided by a gullible media that asked no questions — was predictable. These false stories became etched in stone as the truth within the indigenous community. A victim mentality that was already deeply imbedded became pathological, as indigenous communities became convinced — on evidence that was entirely false — that they were victims of a genocide committed by their neighbours.
The chiefs also silenced the many thoughtful members within their communities who knew that these stories of murderous priests were not true. As investigative reporter, Terry Glavin, explains, even among the Tk’emlups community there were always sensible voices who did not believe those claims:
“From the outset, even among Tk’emlúps people there was a great deal of skepticism and disbelief in stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates under the light of the moon”
But instead of heeding those sensible indigenous voices, and even as it became increasingly clear to Canadians that these stories were just tall tales, there was so much money in it that the chiefs doubled down. They insisted that Canadians must pretend to believe that the claims were true.
That would be their price for “reconciliation”.
As noted above, the weak Liberal government gave into this blackmail by removing the funding cap on searches it had tried to impose. But other important institutions cravenly played along with what was now an officially sanctioned lie as well.
Jon Kay explains in his recent Quillette essay how the Law Society of British Columbia is now insisting that anyone who wants to be a lawyer in that province must pretend to believe the “evil priest” line of stories.
Other law schools and law societies across Canada are doing this as well. They are so focused on what they perceive as the holy grail of “reconciliation” that they are prepared to sacrifice a pursuit of truth as their goal, and force their own students — our future lawyers and judges — to do the same.
Our public schools — to bring about “reconciliation — are indoctrinating our children with lessons about the “215 Kamloops graves” and other misinformation, such as the “Charlie Wenjack” story.
Children are taught that Wenjack was abused by Catholic priests and nuns in his residential school, and ran away as a result.
In fact, as author and historian Robert MacBain explains in his important book, “The Lonely Death Of An Ojibway Boy” Charlie Wenjack lived at a Protestant hostel run by a kindly indigenous family, attended school by the day in Kenora, and probably never saw a residential school, or met a priest or nun, in his life.
But, in the interests of “reconciliation” our children are being misinformed by their teachers.
And when a teacher does dare to tell the truth, as when B.C. teacher, Jim McMurtry told his students that the children who died in residential schools died of the diseases of the day — and were not tortured to death, as was being reported — he was frogmarched from his classroom, and summarily fired.
Or Frances Widdowson, who was fired from her tenured university position largely for daring to dispute what was becoming an increasingly extreme residential school narrative.
All of this obvious unfairness, is happening in the name of “reconciliation.” The senior lawyers who oversee the Law Society, and the educators who select our children’s school curricula are doing a great disservice to this country. As are our MPs who foolishly labelled Canada as genocidal, based on the same false Kamloops claim.
As are our senior indigenous leaders, who know by know that the murderous, secret-burying priest story has always been just a silly ghost story that children tell to scare one another. Yet they insist that Canadians must pretend to believe it, or they will withhold the “reconciliation” that they wield like a sledge hammer over our heads.
It should have occurred to everyone by now that if the price of “reconciliation” is pretending to believe a lie, the price is far too high. That kind of “reconciliation” is worth nothing.
In actual fact, what this country and its indigenous population needs is not “reconciliation” at all. Too many indigenous people are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. What they need is not “reconciliation” but integration into the economy, and the opportunity to participate in it. As for the opportunists who exploit a false claim to benefit themselves, they deserve only our contempt.
What nobody needs is a country where citizens must lie to each other in order to stay together.
And now, to add insult to injury, MP Leah Gazan wants to make it a law that we must all lie to each other by criminalizing what she calls “residential school denialism”. She specifically singles out the Kamloops claim as something Canadians must accept as true. As she sees it any Canadian who refuses to do so, or who dares to suggest that the positives, as well as the negatives of residential schooling should be recognized, should be made a criminal. Dostoevsky famously asked if there will come a time “when intelligent people will be banned from thinking, so as not to offend the imbeciles”. Has that time arrived?
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Do teens going through cross-gender hormones and surgeries know what they’re doing? A leak of internal conversations by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health shows even some doctors administering the procedures have serious doubts.
The U.S. advocacy organization Environmental Progress, led by president and founder Michael Shellenberger, made the leaks public.
“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” Shellenberger said in a press release.
A short list of excerpts highlighted many telling comments.
Child psychologist Dianne Berg, who co-authored the child chapter of the 8th edition of WPATH Standards of Care, said young girls don’t understand what it means to get male hormones.
“[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair.”
Canadian endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger acknowledged, “We’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”
Metzger said neither he nor his colleagues were surprised at a Dutch study that found some young post-transition adults regretted losing their fertility.
“It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ew, kids, babies, gross,” Metzger said.
“I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, is it?’ They’re like, ‘No, I just found this wonderful partner, and now want kids.’ … It doesn’t surprise me.
“Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about [fertility preservation] in a serious way.”
While youth keeps some from grasping the lifelong consequences of their actions, mental illness does the same for others. But that doesn’t always mean the doctors refuse to transition them.
One gender therapist administered cross-sex hormones to a patient with dissociative identity disorder. The therapist said asking the split personalities if they approved the treatment was ethical. Otherwise, a lawsuit could follow.
In one case, a nurse practitioner struggled with how to handle a patient with PTSD, major depressive disorder, observed dissociations, and schizoid typical traits who wanted to go on hormone therapy. Somehow the clear moral dilemma was lost on Dr. Dan Karasic, lead author of the mental health chapter of WPATH Standards of Care 8.
Karasic replied, “I’m missing why you are perplexed… The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones if they have persistent gender dysphoria, capacity to consent, and the benefits of starting hormones outweigh the risks…So why the internal struggle as to ‘the right thing to do?’”
Testosterone injections carry cancer risks for those born female. In one case, a doctor acknowledged a 16-year-old had two liver masses, one 11 cm by 11 cm, and another 7 cm by 7 cm, and “the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones.”
The friend and colleague of one doctor received close to ten years of male hormones, leading to hepatocarcinoma. “To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment… it was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later,” the doctor said.
Some female-born transitioning patients had terrible pain during orgasms, while males on estrogen complained of erections “feeling like broken glass.”
The future may be even stranger, according to one doctor.
“I think we are going to see a wave of non-binary affirming requests for surgery that will include non-standard procedures. I have worked with clients who identify as non-binary, agender, and Eunuchs who have wanted atypical surgical procedures, many of which either don’t exist in nature or represent the first of their kind and therefore probably have few examples of best practices,” the doctor said.
Unsurprisingly, some people regret their medical transitions and want to change back. Some WPATH members want to discount this altogether. WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted, “[A]cknowledgment that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community.”
An unnamed researcher thought it was just a matter of perspective, saying, “What is problematic is the idea of detransitioning, as it frames being cisgender as the default and reinforces transness as a pathology. It makes more sense to frame gender as something that can shift over time, and to figure out ways to support people making the choices they want to make in the moment, with the understanding that feelings around decisions [may] change over time.”
Should our physical being be substantially altered and re-altered according to our feelings? Is transitioning a matter of mental health or self-expression? At least Alberta is putting the brakes on these dubious practices for minors. Other provinces should follow.
Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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