NDP brings in Bill McKibben and bad climate advice (Whse Star column 8 Mar. 2016)

It seems out of touch with the still carbon price confused energy and climate conversation in Yukon where, e.g. an S. David Freeman, who has headed and converted power utilities towards renewables and wrote All Electric America, could have inspired solutions.

At this critical point where Prof. Mark Jaccard, a climate modeller and former figure head of carbon pricing, Simon Fraser University, is backing out, the NDP invites Bill McKibben.

His climate crisis awareness we already have, and his increasingly muddleheaded digging deeper of the carbon price hole, we don’t need.

The choice of speaker for the Change 2016 event is equally out of touch with the climate and energy conversation in Canada, where the rats are beginning to leave the sinking carbon price ship. And not just in the Vancouver Declaration of the recent first ministers’ conference.

The event organizers could have done one better and combine McKibben’s carbon tax emphasis with David Suzuki, who is one more excellent academic and speaker who got himself lost in the policy mine field.

It would have covered the scope of Big Oil and Wall Street climate strategy.

Quite possibly, the Yukon Conservation Society, which, like Suzuki, proudly recruits for carbon derivative trading, would have pitched in.

But three decades of carbon price ideology in instrument and propaganda have incentivized and accelerated emission increases consistently and done enough harm deepening the climate crisis (the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation provided one of many studies).

McKibben brings even more baggage to burden Yukon, where oil and gas resources are only accessible by fracking.

Bill McKibben continues to tickle investors and governments with supposedly $20 trillion of value in the ground they should not touch.

Whereas oil and gas industry data show reserves that are largely unconventional and actually are a financial liability in geological characteristic, which is covered up by more layers of fraud against taxpayers and investors through inflated volume numbers (Deborah Rogers, David Hughes, Art Berman).