From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight purported human-caused climate change.
Skepticism about whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in the United States than in most industrialized countries.
As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and in other developed countries are much farther along the energy-rationing path that cutting carbon dioxide emissions requires than in the United States.
Residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under as a result of ever-increasing taxes on fossil fuels and government mandates to use expensive renewable energy.
For instance, in France in late 2018, protesters donning yellow vests took to the streets—and have stayed there ever since—in large part to protest scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement.
After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government canceled his climate action plan.
Also in 2018, in part as a backlash against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.
Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premiere in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.
In August 2018, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to resign over carbon dioxide restrictions he’d planned to impose to meet the country’s Paris climate commitments.
His successor, Scott Morrison, announced reducing energy prices and improving reliability, not fighting climate change, would be the government’s primary energy goals going forward.
Subsequently, Australia’s deputy prime minister and its environment minister announced the country would continue using coal for electricity and expand coal mining and exports.
The changes in 2018 were just a prelude for the political climate revolt of 2019.
In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections.
FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate-change hysteria.”
On April 14 in Finland, where climate change policies became the dominant issue in the election, support for climate skepticism surged.
Whereas all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit people’s energy use, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, gained the second-highest number of seats in the Parliament, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party’s 40.
The second-place finish was a big win for the Finns Party and its skeptical stance: just two months before the election, polls showed its support was below 10 percent.
After the Finns Party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared. The New York Times credited the Finns Party’s electoral surge, in large part, to its expressed climate skepticism.
In Alberta, Canada, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies took hold, voters on April 16 replaced Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party (NDP), which supports the federal climate policies, with the United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, who vowed to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan.
Among the other climate policies, Kenny said he will reverse in an effort to revive the economy are NDP’s plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants, and its plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions from the region’s oil sands.
In addition, Kenny says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering Alberta’s critical oil and gas industry, including restrictions preventing pipeline construction imposed by NDP.
Even as daily headlines in the lamestream media become ever shriller, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the public, especially the voting public, is becoming increasingly wary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom.
Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices which punish the most vulnerable people in society and do nothing to regulate climate change.
Read more at Heartland Institute
Won’t let comment be made
Scare stories have been around for centuries. In 1894 London had a scare story about horse manure getting so deep the manure from horses hauling away the material would pile 9 feet thick. Man’s ingenuity solved the problem replacing horses with cars.
I believe the Dutch FvD acquired 13 seats (not 12) in their electoral victory, a stunning turn of events! They attracted more votes than ANY other political party!!!
It’s hard to know how to take this in Ontario. There are enough people under the sway of climate delusion that Ottawa city council recently adopted a ‘climate emergency declaration’ — during a state of emergency due to flooding.
And the real reason there was flooding in Montreal is because the homes were built on an old lake bottom protected by a dike that was damage in 2017 and never fixed properly. Building on a flood plain is not the smartest thing to do. The water that came from the north in Ontario was the result of a heavy snow pack. The dam operators didn’t lowered the upper lakes soon enough to make room for spring run off and spring rains.
People have been bombarded with climate doom predictions that have proven to be complete crap .The absurd costs of propping up the earth has a fever fraud are really starting to tick people off and the promoters know it .
Time for a re brand or fade like the global cooling scare of the late 1970’s .
To bad so many people died from government policies that catered to the scam .
I was trying to get real data from our local college in Ontario. Real data is hard to find. Climate models are available but are not real data.
Models extrapolate data and make conclusions that are not true. And the weather stations are being influenced by radiant energy from buildings and asphalt.
From what I can figure he world has been cooling for the past while.
The whole world is catching on to the whole Global Warming/Climate Change Scam
My theory is that the average citizen is not aware of the impact of climate change taxes and mandates until they have to start paying for them. When their budgets are impact then the back lash starts.
Another thing often forgotten is of those willing to pay to fight climate change, the amount is usually pretty small. Yet the taxes and mandates have huge impacts.
If left of center election candidates play moderate on climate change and carbon taxes, voters should suspect that they’ll show their hand after election. The Left owns this fraud, and they are not to be trusted.