https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RcSdQ5zhJyI
I want to talk just for a minute, if I could, about this environmental piece, because I think that this is the problem, is that the extinction rebellion types, you know, the ones who are gluing themselves to sidewalks and the top of subway cars and the headquarters of buildings, I have no idea why anyone is giving them any airtime whatsoever. That is an extremist group that I do not think represents the genuine concern that more moderate environmentalists have about the challenges that we face. I’m looking at someone like Michael Schellenberger, who has emerged as such a reasonable voice on the environment. He’s very concerned about emissions, and I get that, but he also has realized that we are not going to address issues of emissions and environmental harms by focusing on wind and solar and battery power. And I think he’s done some brilliant work on this, and I might also give a shout-out to Michael Moore with his Planet of the Humans documentary. That kind of blew it all wide open, where we now have begun to have a conversation that guess what, you cannot produce a wind turbine with a wind turbine, because there’s a lot of steel that comes from coal, and there’s a lot of fiberglass that also comes from fossil fuels, and you have to transport 1,500 truckloads to get it to a site using fossil fuels. And so until you have a situation where you’ve got solar and concrete and transportation fuels and fiberglass that are emissions-free, those are not emissions-free sources of production, and besides that, they’re intermittent. So because they’re intermittent, you have to build three times as many of them, and when you have to build three times as many of them, you’re eating up a lot of landscape. And when you’re eating up a lot of landscape and putting these turbines up, you’re killing birds and bats. And why aren’t we talking about all of the environmental impacts that come from that so that we can have a fulsome discussion? What’s just the thing that… Well, look, I think part of the reason is that people are looking for easy moral virtue, you know, and so it’s easy to be virtuous by having a messy life and saving the planet. And then it’s simplest to save the planet by concentrating on one thing, and then it’s simplest to concentrate on carbon dioxide, as if that’s the only environmental challenge that confronts us. And so you have this overweening, prideful, and ignorant requirement to put yourself forward as some kind of planetary savior. You reduce the complexity of that problem to opposing carbon, and then if you can stick it to the rich, just as an additional benefit to your envy, so much the better. No one wants to talk, like Bjorn Lomborg talks, about the multi-dimensional environmental challenges that confront us, about rank ordering them in some kind of economically intelligent way, you know, and in treating the challenges that confront us like adults might do it instead of like Greta Thunberg might do it. And I think the treatment that’s been handed out to her is exactly emblematic of the whole problem. She’s a relatively eccentric 13-year-old girl. She doesn’t know anything about how the world works, and yet green leaders around the world kowtow to her like she’s some sort of Dionysian prophetess, and that’s a real indictment of the situation that we find ourselves in. There’s no better way to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. 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You know, what I think we have to do, though, is that we’ve got to elevate the voices that are aligned with us, voices like Bjorn Lomborg and voices like Michael Schellenberger, because this notion of energy density is really the key to being able to reduce the impact on the planet. And this is why Schellenberger is a supporter not only of nuclear, and small modular nuclear reactors are becoming increasingly of interest to different jurisdictions, but also he’s a supporter of LNG, because you can have a smaller footprint in developing those. And when you have a smaller footprint, you’re going to have, just by definition, less impact on the environment. And that, to me, I think what I worry about in the… I call myself a libertarian conservative. Maybe we’ll get into what that actually means. But what I worry about on our side of the spectrum is that we only talk in dollars and cents, and we don’t address this environmental piece. This is the emotional piece that everybody cares about. I mean, I was born in 71. The first Earth Day was 1970. So I grew up surrounded by that environmental messaging. And I think we have ceded the ground to the extremists, like Extinction Rebellion, and we haven’t elevated the more moderate environmental voices. And that, to me, is going to be my big challenge, is that I want people to understand that, yes, we can provide energy security, yes, we can address issues of affordability, and we can do it in a way that is going to be the most environmentally responsible, bar none, looking at all of the other options and all of the other producers around the world. That is going to be, I think, our big communication challenge. But I think that that’s the way that we start building those allies that you’re talking about in Europe. Yeah, well, it would be great for conservatives in Canada, and I would say across the world, to reach out to people like Schellenberger and Lombard, perhaps above all else, because they have extraordinarily well-thought-out arguments on the environmental front, and also are astute economically. And that’s a rare combination. And the conservatives have erred tremendously, and the central liberals as well, the middle-of-the-road liberals, by letting the radicals take the moral upper hand on the environment front. And their story, you know, look at what’s going to happen in Europe and around the world, likely this winter, as we put tremendous stress on poor people by jacking up energy and food prices, all that’s going to be disastrous for the planet, in the terms that the environmentalists themselves hypothetically hold dear. The idea that we can make the planet more habitable on the environmental front by impoverishing poor people, by raising energy prices and food prices, is absolutely, it’s not only absurd, logically, but I think it’s tantamount to genocidal in its intent. It’s really appalling. It creates grave danger for those who are on fixed income, going into an environment, and especially in our northern climates, January, February, March, April, it’s dangerous not to have reliable power, not to be able to have reliable home heating. And we have to be mindful that, as you say, the people most impacted by that are the ones at the lower end of the income scale. And so if you are forcing a senior citizen to make a choice of reducing their food bill or reducing their pharmaceuticals so that they can keep their electricity and their heating on, those are not decisions that any government should be forcing their people to make, but that’s the decision that is, this is logically where the policies of those on the extreme green left have led to, is that they are now sacrificing those at the lower end of the income scale, which they put their heart on the sleeve and they say that that’s who they care about, but it is just demonstrably untrue when you see the impact of it. And I’ll add one more to it. The only people that I have heard talk about the plight of those who are living in countries that do not have reliable energy and the impoverishment that occurs from it are some of the energy executives that are at our global conferences. This is part of the reason why we need to get reliable natural gas around the world, because when you look at some of the most impoverished countries in the world, they’re using wood and dung and coal to heat their homes. I talked to somebody, a researcher in British Columbia, who said we have 44 million deaths per year because of indoor air quality problems. And so why is that not elevated as an issue that we know we can solve by having these secure types of energy? LNG is going to be a solution. And specifically, that’s a great question. If there were 5,000 deaths from nuclear power a year, which there aren’t, the legacy press and the left-wing liberal types would be all over that like mad. But the fact that there are 40 million people or thereabouts a year who die from indoor pollution, from using substandard fuels, which, by the way, are not environmentally friendly in the broader sense either, that just goes under the radar completely. So you look at facts like that, and that’s a bloody blatant fact, that one. And it’s children that are disproportionately affected on that front, too. And then you also look at the willingness of the so-called leftists who are hypothetically in favour of the poor to impoverish the poor as a consequence of their non-effective green policies. And you really have to ask, well, just what the hell is driving this? And the only answer that I can think of is that it’s something fundamentally predicated on envy and that the desire to bring down the capitalist system that produces those who are richer than the typical environmentalists, let’s say, that takes precedence over everything. It takes precedence over care for the poor. It takes precedence even over hypothetical care for the planet. It’s like, tear the bloody capitalist system down, and it doesn’t matter what or who gets destroyed in the process. Because otherwise, how do you explain it? The indoor air pollution fact alone, it’s like that’s incomprehensible. Obviously, the thing to do is to get cheap energy that’s clean, as clean as possible, to developing countries as fast as possible. And then, you know, on the environmental side, the stats are pretty damn clear that if you can get the gross domestic product of a country up to something averaging approximately $5,000 US a year, then people start taking a long view and caring about the environment. And so it’s quite obvious that if we did everything we could to eradicate absolute poverty, mostly by driving energy prices down, then we could get people off of their reliance on those primitive biofuels that poisoned them and poisoned the planet and denuded the territory, and we could get them caring about the environment. And so, why not do that? Okay, now, do you want to become Premier of Alberta? Because this is exactly the points that I want to see made on the international stage.