Smug Torstar stupidity

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Aug 23

RE: Bad news: Big Oil is feeling frisky again.  Opinion piece by Torstar columnist Linda McQuaig.  The Hamilton Spectator 26 Aug 23.

The folk wisdom, “get woke, go broke,” hasn’t penetrated the sanctum of Torstar editorial yet, and consequently opinion writer Linda McQuaig expresses annoyance, to the point of hinting at vengeance, against Suncor for the company’s upholding its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders, and sticking to it knitting.  McQuaig thinks Suncor should get into the green energy business, like Shell did several years ago.  Shell’s stock price suffered for it.  Meanwhile, ExxonMobil stuck to the oil & gas business, and that company’s stock price gained nearly 50 percent in value over the last five years.

McQuaig blames Big Oil for climate change, which is rather like blaming your supplier for your drug habit.  Never mind that climate “change” is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the world; McQuaid is smugly convinced of it.

It would waste time ironing out all her errors and logical fallacies, so let’s stick to this one.  Canada is responsible for 1.5 percent of global CO2 emissions; Russia, China, and India together account for 50 percent of global emissions.  If Canada disappeared tomorrow, there would be no detectable impact on global temperature in 2100.  Canada’s forest fires added more CO2 to the atmosphere that all that was saved by the carbon tax.

California, meanwhile, broke a ten year drought, and had the lowest season of burn acreage in decades.  It’s drought, a weather event, that decides susceptibility to fire, not climate change.

Smugness isn’t wisdom.

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