During a week of contentious trade issues between Canada and the United States, it was gratifying to see that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump actually did agree on one point--climate change was not even worth mentioning in their official Earth Day statements.
In his official statement, U.S. President Donald Trump said nothing at all about climate change, global warming or greenhouse gases. Instead, his April 22 remarks focused on real, well-understood issues, such as "keeping our air and water clean,... preserving our forests, lakes, and open spaces, and... protecting endangered species."
Earth Day has been hijacked by climate alarmism
Not surprisingly, environmentalists and their left wing allies in the press thrashed the president for ignoring climate change. Huffington Postcalled the omission "shameful." The UK's The Independentcomplained that, in contrast to Trump, former Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama both addressed climate change in their Earth Day statements. AOL News pointed out that Obama's 2016 Earth Day statement mentioned climate change five times.
It surprised no one that Trump would ignore man-made global warming on Earth Day. He has made it clear since early in the presidential campaign that, while he promotes real pollution reduction, he has no patience for the improbable hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing dangerous climate change.
But what was surprising was that, even though Earth Day has been hijacked by climate alarmism in recent years, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also made no direct reference to climate change in his 2017 Earth Day statement. Aside from embedding climate change-related web links into two words in his remarks, Trudeau said nothing at all about the topic that he called "the great global challenge of our time" in his 2016 Earth Day statement.
Surprisingly, Trudeau also joined Trump in promoting economic growth in his Earth Day statement
Surprisingly, Trudeau also joined Trump in promoting economic growth in his Earth Day statement, something bound to irk climate activists, many of whom will stop at nothing to block development in western nations. Again, this was no surprise for Trump. But Trudeau's Earth Day support of economic growth coupled with a string of recent decisions--giving the green light to the Trans Mountain and the Line 3 pipeline projects, and his enthusiastic support for Trump inviting TransCanada to reapply to build the Keystone XL pipeline--suggests that the Canadian government is starting to see the hand writing on the wall: where the U.S. goes on climate and energy, so, eventually, must go Canada, if, that is, we want to maintain a reasonable standard of living.
The reaction of climate campaigners to Trudeau's recent actions is especially encouraging. Green Party leader Elizabeth May said that she was ready to go to prison to stop Trans Mountain. 350.org founder Bill McKibben called Trudeau a "stunning hypocrite" on global warming in his April 17 piece in the U.K.'s The Guardian. McKibben summed up the environmentalists' argument when he wrote about Trudeau, "He's hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta's tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet."
To be sure, the Trudeau government has made some colossally stupid and expensive climate change-related moves in their first year and a half–their plans to phase out most of our inexpensive coal-fired power plants by 2030, and the upcoming nationwide minimum price on emissions of the benign gas carbon dioxide, for example.
But let's give credit where it is due. Both Trudeau and Trump gave us welcomed Earth Day presents on April 22: official environment statements with no mention of climate change. Bravo!
