GWPF Newsletter: Carbon Tax Defeated As Conservatives Win Alberta Elections

Allegations Netflix Film Crew Lied About What Caused Mass Walrus Deaths

In this newsletter:

1) Carbon Tax Defeated As Conservatives Win Alberta Elections
Bloomberg, 17 April 2019
 
2) Terence Corcoran: Carbon Tax Trial Full Of Alarmist Political Diversions No Court Should Fall For
Financial Post, 17 April 2019

 
3) Allegations Netflix Film Crew Lied About What Caused Mass Walrus Deaths
News.com Australia, 17 April 2019
 
4) Zoologist Sets the Record Straight After Netflix Tells Kids Climate Change Is Killing Walruses
The Western Journal, 16 April 2019

Full details:

1) Carbon Tax Defeated As Conservatives Win Alberta Elections
Bloomberg, 17 April 2019
 
Build pipelines, scrap carbon tax and battle protesters: That’s what Kenney vows to do for Alberta’s oilpatch

Alberta returned to its conservative roots, electing United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney premier after he vowed to fight harder for the province’s beleaguered energy industry.



Kenney defeated center-left incumbent Rachel Notley, 55, whose New Democratic Party snapped four decades of conservative rule in 2015.

Kenney’s election may herald big changes for Alberta’s energy industry, which produces more oil than most OPEC members and has the world’s third-largest petroleum resources. He’s vowed to get stalled pipelines built, scrap the province’s carbon tax, and create a “war room” to hit back at anti-oil-sands campaigners. He also pledged to cut corporate taxes and balance the province’s books in his first term.

Kenney, 50, a former Cabinet member under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, tapped into voter frustration over the failure to get pipelines completed, which has battered oilsands prices and sparked an exodus of capital by energy firms like Kinder Morgan Inc. Alberta, traditionally one of the richest provinces in Canada, now has among the highest jobless rates and one of the weakest economies in the country.

“Albertans have elected a government that will be obsessed with getting this province back to work, a team that will do everything in our power every single day to create tens of thousands of good jobs,” Kenney said at a victory rally in Calgary.

Alberta became the third major province in Canada over the past year to elect a conservative-leaning government in a growing front of opposition to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s liberal vision for the country.

The United Conservative Party, founded in 2017 as a merger of two right-of-center groups and led by former federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney, won a majority of legislative seats in the oil-rich province. His victory over New Democratic Party Premier Rachel Notley restores the status quo in a province that until her 2015 victory had a decades-long run of conservative leaders.

For Trudeau, the most immediate impact of Kenny’s victory will be on climate change, Notley had proven to be an occasional ally of the prime minister’s environmental ambitions by implementing a provincial carbon tax and capping oil-sands emissions. The United Conservative leader has already promised to scrap the levy. That will force Trudeau to impose his own federal tax in the province. Kenney has also pledged to join other provinces fighting Trudeau’s carbon pricing plan in court.

Kenney is also a philosophical foe of Trudeau’s energy policies, which are based on the idea the nation must secure a “social licence” to develop its resources by being more pro-environment and supportive of indigenous concerns.

Kenney plans to create a $30 million “war room” to hit back at anti-energy campaigners and investigate their sources of funding. He’s also threatening to have Alberta cease doing business with banks that boycott energy projects, cut oil shipments to provinces that fight pipeline development and press Trudeau to kill Bill C-69, which overhauls the approval process for pipelines.

“You have a conservative bloc of premiers stretching from Alberta to Quebec uninterrupted,” said Yaroslav Baran, principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a former communications adviser under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. “The near-consensus the prime minister had on his carbon framework is — it’s safe to say — now in tatters.”
 2) Terence Corcoran: Carbon Tax Trial Full Of Alarmist Political Diversions No Court Should Fall For
Financial Post, 17 April 2019

A carbon tax is not a market-based price. It’s a state-imposed fixed price that has no connection with supply and demand, except to the extent that its proponents aim to reduce demand for carbon.

It is not quite the trial of the century, but the live video feed from Ontario’s Court of Appeal hearing this week on the constitutionality of Ottawa’s carbon tax does have its little moments of drama. At one point Tuesday, after Sharlene Telles-Langdon, on behalf of the Attorney General of Canada, had launched into her case against Ontario’s attempt to have the carbon tax declared unconstitutional, Justice James C. MacPherson leaned in with a pointed question.

Ontario’s carbon emissions are down 22 per cent without a carbon tax, said MacPherson — presumably citing data provided by Ontario during its presentation on Monday. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?” Ontario, he added, “has had a great result.”

Interesting and pertinent question: if Ontario is already cutting carbon emissions without a carbon tax, it seems redundant to impose a constitutionally iffy tax to do something the province is already doing on its own. The question also seemed to momentarily fluster Telles-Langdon, who then began rifling through pages of her briefing book in search of the big alarmist arguments Ottawa is advancing to support the imposition of a national carbon tax on all Canadians.

Once she got back on track, Telles-Langdon proceeded to summarize Ottawa’s standard claims about the need for urgent action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and how Canada, without a carbon tax, was failing to meet its international targets. Ottawa’s case is filled with political diversions. Global climate change is happening now, the science is “well established,” extreme weather is increasing along with risks to human health, Lyme disease, melting permafrost, and so on and so on. The factum also throws in the irrelevant and discredited insurance industry claim that carbon-induced extreme weather is “now costing up to $1.2-billion a year.”

Canada needs to cut 200 megatonnes from its carbon emissions, said Telles-Langdon, and without a carbon tax it seems unlikely to exceed a reduction of 50 megatonnes. Provincial action is not enough to solve this national and international economic, environmental and political problem. It’s time to invoke the peace, order and good government clause of the constitution and impose a carbon tax.

With a carbon tax, said Telles-Langdon, Ottawa is introducing a “price signal” that will prompt Canadians to reduce their consumption of carbon-based fossil fuels.

How deep into climate science and the international global warming political swamp is Ontario’s court of appeal going to descend? Are the five justices expected to reach conclusions on the merits of climate change science, the validity of scaremongering geopolitical activists at the United Nations, and the soundness of the economics of price-signalling taxes?

Is the court expected to make a decision on the basis of — or somehow in agreement with — an intervention from, say, the David Suzuki Foundation that claims “Canada and the world are engaged in an existential struggle against climate change.” A carbon tax, said the Suzuki Foundation, is “urgently necessary to address a national emergency.”

Full post
 
3) Allegations Netflix Film Crew Lied About What Caused Mass Walrus Deaths
News.com Australia, 17 April 2019 
Ally Foster

A Netflix doco’s disturbing “walrus scene” left viewers in tears, now there are claims the film crew weren’t entirely truthful about what happened.

From the moment Netflix aired the mass suicide of walruses in a David Attenborough documentary there has been controversy about the shocking scene.

The disturbing vision was filmed as part of the new nature series Our Planet and left many viewers horrified.

The scene shows dozens of walruses tumbling down a steep cliff in the Bering Strait, landing on the jagged rocks below.

The film crew were seen watching on in horror as the violent events played out before them.

There was immediate controversy about the graphic nature of the footage and whether or not it should have been included in the documentary.

Now the focus has turned to the cause of the mass death.

The documentary blamed the horrific event on climate change, with Atten­borough saying melting sea ice drove the animals to the edge of the cliff.

“Walruses’ eyesight out of the water is poor, but they can sense the others down below; as they get hungry, they need to return to the sea,” he said.

“In their desperation to do so, hundreds fall from heights they should never have scaled.”

However, many people have since refuted that climate change was to blame, suggesting polar bears, drones or the crew could be responsible.

Zoologist Susan Crockford has claimed walruses dying from falling from cliffs is not an phenomenon and suggested polar bears likely caused the event.

 “The lie being told by Attenborough and the film crew is that 200-300 walruses fell during the time they were filming, while in fact they filmed only a few: polar bears were responsible for the majority of the carcasses shown on the beach below the cliff,” Ms Crockford wrote on her website.

“This is, of course, in addition to the bigger lie that lack of sea ice is to blame for walrus herds being onshore in the first place.”

She claims the walruses were herded and chased over the cliff by polar bears and the crew used deceptive editing to leave that part out.

There was an incident in Russia in 2017 where polar bears were reported to have spooked a herd of walruses, causing them to fall off a cliff to their deaths.

Ms Crockford believes this is the event that was filmed by the documentary crew.

“The film crew have steadfastly refused to reveal precisely where and when they filmed the walrus deaths shown in this film in relation to the walrus deaths initiated by polar bears reported by The Siberian Times in the fall of 2017,” she said.

The show’s producer, Sophie Lanfear, refuted these claims on Twitter, saying “bears were not driving them off the cliffs” during the filming.

There have also been accusations that the film crew blocked the walruses exit and spooked the animals with their drones and other equipment.

A US Fisheries spokesman said walruses can flee en masse in response to “the sight, sound and especially odours from humans and machines”, The Australian reported.

Ms Lanfear defended how the film crew acted around the animals.

“When approaching the walruses, we made sure we were downwind of them and that we could not be seen,’’ she said.

“We only stood up when it was safe to do so and when we weren’t at risk of scaring any walruses.’’
4) Zoologist Sets the Record Straight After Netflix Tells Kids Climate Change Is Killing Walruses
The Western Journal, 16 April 2019
Benjamin Arie 

A screen can be a powerful thing. Whether we’re staring at a television or scrolling through a tablet, the screens all around us can change the way we see the world.

Conservatives have warned about the downsides of a culture addicted to media for decades, and liberal Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have been reported to limit the screen time their kids can view at home. 

The reason is that the content we absorb can influence us — and it can be used to make us believe half-truths and lies.

That’s exactly what one expert now says is happening with a video released by Netflix. A zoologist and professor is sounding the alarm after a much-viewed nature documentary implied that global warming caused the deaths of walruses in the film.

Susan Crockford, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Victoria, has accused renowned British presenter David Attenborough and producers of the “Our Planet” documentary of lying about a sober scene that showed walruses falling to their death. She believes viewers are being purposely deceived in order to push climate change propaganda.

“The lie being told by Attenborough and the film crew is that 200-300 walruses fell during the time they were filming, while in fact they filmed only a few: polar bears were responsible for the majority of the carcasses shown on the beach below the cliff,” zoologist Crockford wrote on her official website on Sunday.

She believes that deceptive editing was used to push a completely untrue narrative about the footage. The walruses that were recorded dying, Crockford alleges, were being chased over a cliff by polar bears — and the clip had no direct link to climate change.

The professor pointed to a 2017 incident in which polar bears were reported to have driven walruses to their deaths near a village in Russia, which she believes was shown in the nature documentary. Conspicuously, there was no mention of the polar bears in the released footage.

 “The film crew have steadfastly refused to reveal precisely where and when they filmed the walrus deaths shown in this film in relation to the walrus deaths initiated by polar bears reported by The Siberian Times in the fall of 2017,” Crockford wrote.

But she thinks the deceptive footage goes beyond editing, and that crew members have openly lied about what happened.

“The lie being told by Attenborough and the film crew is that 200-300 walruses fell during the time they were filming, while in fact they filmed only a few: polar bears were responsible for the majority of the carcasses shown on the beach below the cliff,” the zoologist said.

“This is, of course, in addition to the bigger lie that lack of sea ice is to blame for walrus herds being onshore in the first place,” Crockford continued. “Walruses dying in large numbers due to falls from cliff tops is not a new phenomenon.”

In other words, the polar bear expert with more than 35 years in her field thinks that the documentary set out to be deceptive from the get-go. If that’s true, then left-leaning documentary producers didn’t just make a mistake, they’re purposely pushing a falsehood because it matches a political narrative.

The footage was directly linked to the effects of global warming by the film’s director, Sophie Lanfear. She blamed the death of the walruses on “lack of sea ice” when asked by The Telegraph newspaper. This “global warming killed the walruses” claim was also pushed by media outlets such as The Sun and environmental groups including the WWF.

But Crockford isn’t alone. Other wildlife experts are now questioning the story.

Lori Quakenbush from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told The Atlantic that similar incidents between polar bears and walruses have happened many times before, even when sea ice is plentiful.

“Quakenbush and others also doubt that the climbs and falls are related to climate change, because such tragedies have been reported since before sea ice showed substantial declines,” the magazine stated.

Lori Polasek from the University of Alaska Fairbanks is also skeptical. “Walruses have shown similar behavior on the U.S. coastline when space and ice were not an issue, and the reason is unknown,” Polasek said.

If the documentary is truly deceptive, then its producers have some explaining to do. To push a political agenda in a documentary trusted by parents, students, teachers and kids to be accurate would be alarming — but in the age of editing, perhaps nothing is as it seems.

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.