EDITORIAL: The bizarre logic of the green radicals

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On the face of it, NDP MP Charlie Angus’ private member’s bill to fine people who say positive things about Canada’s fossil fuel energy sector up to $1 million and jail them for two years is absurd.

Angus says his Bill C-372 — “An act respecting fossil fuel advertising” — is “limited to corporate campaigns making false claims about the ‘benefits’ of burning fossil fuels” and provides exemptions for opinion and works of art as long as they’d aren’t financed by the fossil fuel industry.

Gas stations — thank heavens for small mercies — would be permitted to post signs saying they sell gas.

But the premise of the bill, which compares the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco sector in terms of threatening human life is so absurd — try wintering in Canada without fossil fuel energy and watch what happens to human life — that it should be dismissed as silly.

But alas, then there’s federal Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault, whose press secretary told the CBC:

“We welcome the NDP’s bill to the House. Advertisement has a big role to play in public perception, and the industry is racking in record profits. We will carefully assess their bill and look forward to productive debates and discussions around this important issue.”

This constant drive-by smearing of an industry which employs and supports the jobs of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Canadians and provides billions of dollars in economic activity and taxes to Canadian governments is foolish, reckless and politically irresponsible.

But it’s also nothing new.

No one was laughing, for example, when saint David Suzuki repeatedly called for former prime minister Stephen Harper to be jailed for intergenerational crimes against humanity because of his policies on climate change.

The Harvard Environmental Law Review last year published a paper by a law professor and environmental activist arguing fossil fuel companies and their executives should be charged with homicide, using similar logic.

George Monbiot, arguably the world’s foremost journalist on climate change, once wrote that, “every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.”

Actually, using Monbiot’s logic, everyone who flies should be drowned because without them the airline industry wouldn’t exist

But these arguments are never based on logic.