What’s happening in Sri Lanka? After months of massive protests, President Gotabaya Rajapaska fled the country last month. He’s since resigned over email from the safety of Singapore. Probably a wise move. Crowds had stormed his official residence and set fire to the Prime Minister’s home.
Gota, as he’s known, played a key role in wrecking the economy. Inflation runs over 50% and the government has defaulted on 51 billion US dollars in foreign debt. In Sri Lanka, the power cuts out every day. There are shortages of fuel, and medicine. The UN predicts that a third of the population could soon be starving. Now the crowds have turned their fury on the governing elites who haven’t run away.
But why is the economy in ruins?
The government blames the Covid-19 pandemic. Mainstream media nods along, alluding to a few other things. But the obvious explanation – “suicide by Net Zero” – is ignored or dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory.
Gota announced his new fertilizer policy at COP 26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in November 2021. He reminded everyone of Sri Lanka’s “national commitment” to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in pursuit of the now famous globalist goals of “Net Zero by 2050”, or now more commonly known as simply “Net Zero”. The problem, it was said, was that nitrogen emissions from “artificial fertilizer” are “a major contributor to climate change”. Gota was determined to lead the world in addressing that “problem”. He was going to make his whole country go organic!
It was clearly a green policy. And perfectly in synch with the exhortations of the other Zeros.
The British Deputy High Commissioner to Sri Lanka spoke of “a responsibility to take action – now”. The UN’s “Climate Action Champion” called for “ambitious policies”. COP President Alok Sharma said that the “window” for action was “closing fast”.
Canadian Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, made the preposterous claim that “the global financial system has been transformed to deliver Net Zero”. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded that everyone “must do more, and faster.” No one warned Gota to slow down and think again.
And the result?
Sri Lankan farmers had been supplying – in full – the domestic Sri Lanka demand for rice since 2005, but only because they’ve been using those very same dreaded “artificial fertilizers”. Inevitably, six months into Gota’s hare-brained experiment, Sri Lanka was importing hundreds of millions of US dollars of rice, and domestic prices were soaring. Sri Lanka’s main source of export revenue and foreign currency is tea. Inevitably, production fell by a devastating 20 percent under Gota’s organic farming diktat.
And now? Disaster. Total disaster.
How do the climate apologists explain away what is going on in Sri Lanka?
The BBC reports that Gota’s demand that farmers use only organic fertilizers was meant to cope with “foreign currency shortages” but led to “widespread crop failure”.
And a “climate disinformation specialist” debunks the theory that “green policies” might “lie behind” Sri Lanka’s misery.
An “expert” says that Gota’s policy “had nothing to do” with his “environmentally sound, principled position”. Besides, he dropped it after “just” seven months. (Just seven months. What’s the big deal?) The fertilizer policy “hurt the economy” but “other factors” also “contributed”.
Non-experts might wonder whether things that “hurt” an economy may also “lie behind” its collapse. The obvious explanation is right: Efforts to implement Net Zero in Sri Lanka was the main cause of the Sri Lankan crisis, and of most “other factors” that contributed.
All this hysterical moralizing was a “sound, principled position”: according to the green extremists, climate change is an existential threat to life on earth. Everyone needs to act right now to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions orders of magnitude greater than any in human history – and in less than a decade.
But now, as Sri Lanka sinks into abject misery, the Zeros say they didn’t really mean it. Sure, they wanted Gota to drive his country over a cliff – but not quite so fast.
Net Zero is inherently ruinous, not just in Sri Lanka, but everywhere it is tried. It implies economic collapse. Indeed it is designed to bring it about. The choice is stark: a functioning economy or Net Zero. No country can have both.
It was a form of “economic suicide”, but how else could Gota meet the radical targets to which he’d already agreed?
NEXT: The Zero plan unfolds in the Netherlands and Canada
Dan McTeague | President
An 18 year veteran of the House of Commons, Dan is widely known in both official languages for his tireless work on energy pricing and saving Canadians money through accurate price forecasts. His Parliamentary initiatives, aimed at helping Canadians cope with affordable energy costs, led to providing Canadians heating fuel rebates on at least two occasions.
Widely sought for his extensive work and knowledge in energy pricing, Dan continues to provide valuable insights to North American media and policy makers. He brings three decades of experience and proven efforts on behalf of consumers in both the private and public spheres. Dan is committed to improving energy affordability for Canadians and promoting the benefits we all share in having a strong and robust energy sector.
An 18 year veteran of the House of Commons, Dan is widely known in both official languages for his tireless work on energy pricing and saving Canadians money through accurate price forecasts. His Parliamentary initiatives, aimed at helping Canadians cope with affordable energy costs, led to providing Canadians heating fuel rebates on at least two occasions.
Widely sought for his extensive work and knowledge in energy pricing, Dan continues to provide valuable insights to North American media and policy makers. He brings three decades of experience and proven efforts on behalf of consumers in both the private and public spheres. Dan is committed to improving energy affordability for Canadians and promoting the benefits we all share in having a strong and robust energy sector.
Ever since Mark Carney’s rise to power, people have been trying to sell me on the idea that he’s just what this country needs — a (supposedly) practical, no-nonsense businessman who can clean up the mess his highly-ideological predecessor, Justin Trudeau, left us in. To reinforce this claim, they point to the constant rumblings about Carney’s commitment to building new oil and gas pipelines in Canada.
I’m sorry, folks, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Now, building new pipelines is an understandably popular idea. Construction alone would be a serious job creator. New pipelines would enable us to further capitalize on our abundant natural resources. They would pump up the domestic oil and gas supply, bringing down the cost of energy for families and businesses alike, thereby invigorating our economy and fortifying the Loonie.
They would also reinforce national unity at a time when that is being sorely tested.
Green propaganda has created and increasingly widened ideological divides over the resource sector, still the backbone of our economy. Our thriving activist class are happy to exploit these divisions and to do whatever they can to kill new resource projects before they get off the ground. Over time, this has made it just plain easier to sell Canadian fossil fuels to the US, which has been happy to take them off our hands.
Make no mistake, if we made good use of this period of unfortunately high tensions with our cousins to the south, by beefing up our energy infrastructure and fortifying our economy, which would ultimately make us a more attractive trading partner, I’d be all for it.
That said, anyone who believes that Carney is fully committed to new pipelines should revisit what he’s actually said on the matter. They would discover that he has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on pipelines since the moment he stepped out from behind the curtain and publicly took the reins of the Liberal Party. He’s been purposely vague when talking to pipeline-sympathetic crowds out west, and explicitly reassuring when speaking to anti-pipeline crowds elsewhere, saying things like “I would never impose [a pipeline] on Quebec.”
Which should surprise no one! Mark Carney is still Mark Carney. From his banking career to his time at the megafirm Brookfield, from his role as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Leadership and Finance to founding the (now collapsed) Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), he has spent his entire career working towards a net-zero global economy, no matter how disastrous this would be for the world generally and Canada specifically.
Carney himself described his magnum opus, GFANZ, as being “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net-zero.” The same could be said about Carney himself.
Which is to say, though he is more sophisticated, Carney is no less of a “Green” ideologue than Justin Trudeau.
“But, but, but!” I can hear people saying, “He saved us from the carbon tax!”
To which I answer: No, he did not. A longtime apostle of carbon taxation generally, and of Trudeau’s carbon tax specifically, Carney’s main issue with the carbon tax was that it had become “too divisive” — meaning we had noticed its effect on our lives and started complaining about it. To fix that, he used what amounted to an accounting trick to hide it from our view.
Meanwhile, he remains committed to all of his party’s environmentalist legislation and regulations, including the Clean Fuel Standard, which jacks up the ethanol content of our gasoline, while progressively raising the price per litre; Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which significantly reduces our ability to export our natural resources; Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental positives of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard; and the egregious Electric Vehicle mandate, which forces us to buy, starting next year, cars which are poorly suited for our climate, geography, and lifestyle, and for which we simply do not have the infrastructure.
And, most pertinent to this discussion, Mark Carney remains committed to Bill C-69, the “No More Pipelines Act,” which even the Supreme Court said overstepped the federal government’s constitutional authority.
So despite all of their advantages, Mark Carney’s decades of net-zero commitments make the chances of us actually getting a single new pipeline out of this government extremely remote, probably nonexistent.
U.S. tariffs continue to threaten the Canadian economy. Meanwhile, Canada’s debt levels continue to grow. The obvious solution is to develop our oil and gas and become an energy superpower. However, time is running out for Prime Minister Carney to act.
He’s talked a big game but has failed to act as anti-energy Liberal laws continue to drive away investment. This week, TC Energy and Enbridge have indicated they’d prefer to make investments in the U.S. instead of Canada.
