“Net-Zero Tyranny”

OTTAWA – David Suzuki said that when Prime Minister Mark Carney was first elected last year, he celebrated. Having met and interviewed the prime minister before, the national environmentalist icon said he knew Carney understood the challenges of climate change.

But in an interview with The Canadian Press, Suzuki said he now feels he was “wilfully blind” to Carney’s promises of action on climate, despite warnings from his longtime friend the late Stephen Lewis, who predicted the agenda of a banker — and now politician — would supersede Carney’s views on addressing climate change.

h/t Mauser

Saanich, BC, desperately needs a new fire hall. In 2019, city council approved a $26 million replacement for its aging Fire Station Two, set to open in 2023. But because the city requires that all public buildings reach a “LEED” Gold or Platinum standard of environmental efficiency, the station was to be built using trendy mass timber construction. (LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.”) Five years later, ground had yet to be broken, and the project was plagued by rapidly rising costs.

David Suzuki: Mark Carney’s investment summit is bound to fail unless it faces this fundamental issue

Prime Minister Mark Carney has invited 300 global CEOs, entrepreneurs and institutional financiers to a Canada Investment Summit. They collectively manage $120 trillion in global assets and the goal of the conference is to catalyze private and sovereign capital into Canadian industries. I understand the urgent need to stand up against Trump, a bullying madman, by reducing our dependence on US markets and I applaud Carney’s efforts. He’s a smart, tough guy.

Russian threats to attack British factories producing drones and missile components for Ukraine are a reminder that the industrial base is once again becoming part of the battlefield.

In a way, this has always been the case. In an attritional conflict, the ability to produce, replace and sustain military capability matters as much as the weapons a country starts with. Military power has always depended on productive force. It was Paul Kennedy who documented the relationship between economic power and military power across five centuries of great-power competition in his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In December 2024, John Bew, former chief foreign-policy adviser to No10, gave this logic a new name – ‘machinepolitik’. He argued we are returning to an era of ‘raw power’ in which the ability to harness productive force, from armaments to energy to technology, will increasingly determine which countries shape events.

It was only a few years ago when the climate change alarms and green energy fad were all the rage at the White House and corporate board rooms. Former President Joe Biden’s policies were all tilted to ending fossil fuels, and many of America’s biggest corporations embraced the concept of net-zero fossil fuels. This was the movement during the Biden years to eliminate virtually ALL oil, natural gas and coal production, and replace these energy sources with windmills, solar panels and electric vehicles.