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Sept. 25, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:41:59

Peter Foster

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	Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
	It's an old friend of mine.
	He's in an unlikely situation, which I'll describe in a moment.
	His name is Peter Foster.
	He is an English expatriate in Canada, so I'm really looking forward, Peter, to getting the Canadian perspective from you, because I haven't got many Canucks or Canuck residents on my podcast, and I think you'll be a very good guide.
	And the reason you'll be a good guide, of course, is that you're like me.
	You're a, what, you call yourself a Thatcherite, don't you?
	I call myself a Thatcherite in Trudopia, which is what Canada is essentially.
	A Thatcherite in Trudopia.
	So you'll be able to describe Canada from a perspective that I would understand, because I have to say, my first question to you, Peter, as an Englishman living in Canada, is...
	Why?
	Why would you?
	I mean, if I were living in Canada, God knows, England, Britain is bad enough right now.
	But I reckon that if I went to Canada, I would feel like Damien the Omen Devil Child when he goes into the church.
	Because I'm not sure I could handle living in Trudopia.
	So how do you cope?
	Well, how I got here really has a lot to do with Britain in the 1970s.
	And you were just a child, so you wouldn't remember that terribly well.
	But when I left Britain in 1976, it seemed to be circling the toilet bowl of history.
	I'd actually been to Canada, believe it or not, on a rugby tour and it seemed like a good place at the time.
	So anyway, I came here and in fact I made my name as a journalist by writing about what a mess the first Trudeau, Pierre Trudeau, made of the economy.
	So, yes, I mean, I wasn't saying bad things about Canada, but I was certainly saying bad things about the government at that time.
	And of course, we now have another Trudeau who's equally screwing up the economy.
	Yes, if indeed he is a Trudeau.
	I mean, where are you on the theory that he's actually Fidel Castro's son?
	Because there is a remarkable physical resemblance, isn't there?
	Well, yes.
	I think the timing was not quite right for that.
	I mean, certainly ideologically, both he and his father were very amenable to the thoughts of Fidel.
	But no, I don't think that's very likely.
	So, basically, you fled...
	Decaying England.
	And I can see that Britain in the 1970s was a basket case, wasn't it?
	And it must have felt like there was no hope.
	There was no coming back from where Britain had gone.
	You know, when the dead lay unburied and the rubbish piled high in the streets.
	The winter of discontent.
	Yes, no.
	We had, you know, Ted Heath in the three-day week, and of course, Maggie Thatcher hadn't come along.
	Now, if I'd known Maggie Thatcher was coming, perhaps I might have stayed.
	But as I say, you know, I mean, Canada looked like the land of opportunity, and it was a very rich place, and I mean, very attractive in many ways.
	In the Canadians, from my perspective, if they had something to do, they would just get on with it, whereas in Britain, British people seem to be brilliant at finding reasons why they couldn't do things.
	Yes.
	Well, I'm pleased to tell you, Peter, that that still exists.
	So that was why Canada was attractive.
	Yes.
	I can see that.
	I can see that.
	In a way, I wonder whether...
	Whether the experience of living in Britain in the 1970s is really rather like the experience of living in Britain now.
	I mean, I don't know how much you feel this, living across the pond.
	But I think we, on the conservative, the genuinely conservative side of the argument, or certainly the Thatcherite, limited government, etc., side of the argument...
	Look around, rather as you must have done when Ted Heath was there, and thinking, well, if even a Conservative Prime Minister can't do anything Conservative, if even he concedes to the left all the time, then what hope is there for Britain?
	Yes.
	Well, I mean, I, of course, I'm observing it from a distance and I'm much more concerned about what's happening in Canada right now.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I, I mean, the thing I write about in this collection of essays that we'll eventually get round to.
	Yes, you're going to apply, don't you worry.
	The world is threatened, is threatened.
	Sorry, I said the world is threatened by new forms of socialism now that didn't really exist in such a virulent form or indeed at all in the 1970s.
	They were just beginning.
	But now the whole world is threatened by, I think, by a Green Depression.
	One of the great things about the leftward twist on history is that the New Deal saved capitalism from itself in the 1930s.
	In fact, that's completely false.
	What made the Great Depression great was...
	The interference and the uncertainties of the New Deal.
	So those who are pressing a Green New Deal are in fact threatening, I think, a Green Depression, not just on both sides of the pond, but virtually everywhere.
	Yes.
	Just tell me, before we go on to environmentalism, which is one of our shared interests, concerns...
	You've studied economic history and I think you've written about it very entertainingly in your last book, which remind me what it was called.
	It was called Why We Bite the Invisible Hand.
	Yes, yes.
	Um...
	I can't remember whether you dealt with the New Deal and how it's been rewritten by historians as a kind of how capitalism was rescued when it's the opposite.
	Just explain to me a bit.
	Economics, I suggested in that book, has been going astray for well over 100 years.
	That obviously the economists who are favored by governments are the ones who can come up with interventionist ideas and new policies.
	So free market economists, you know, like Friedrich Hayek, obviously weren't going to be employed by governments.
	And that trend has obviously continued.
	But certainly, you know, I mean, the falsification of history goes back to The Industrial Revolution and, you know, the poor people in the mines.
	And then it goes on through the robber barons and the Great Depression.
	And, of course, it becomes a bit more difficult to falsify history as we get closer to the present.
	But you will find that still going on.
	I'm always amazed, or at least shocked, by just how easy it is to rewrite history.
	And it does seem to me that the liberal left has been controlling the narrative, well, you say for over a century, and I'd probably agree with you, but...
	How did they get away with it?
	How did they manage to rewrite FDR, who was ghastly, hyper-interventionist?
	As you say, he prolonged the Great Depression.
	How have they managed to rewrite history so that nobody has written a compelling...
	Why has nobody on our side written the compelling book which shows that actually this is rubbish?
	Well, actually, I mean, there are compelling books.
	There's a lady called Amity Schlaes who wrote a book called The Forgotten Man, which in fact points out that, you know, the history is completely falsified and the fact that the Great Depression went on for so long was because of FDR's interventionist policies and his demonization of the rich.
	Of course, which we see perennially with socialists, and bleating about inequality and not being concerned about how well the people at the bottom end of the scale are doing.
	I mean, it's ridiculous to say that the poorest people today have any comparison with the poorest people of 100 or 50 or even 20 years ago.
	They're infinitely better off.
	There's a great quote by...
	Matt Ridley, who points out that poor people today, you know, have running water, or most of them have running water refrigerators, televisions, telephones, etc.
	And he points out that the robber barons didn't have these things.
	But somehow we don't ever seem to be able to appreciate the material world.
	So, of course, this has gone, de-emphasized the material world.
	So now we talk about racism and systemic racism and so on.
	Yes.
	But, you know, I mean, the problem is people are not interested.
	People don't understand history.
	But what I said in Why We Bite the Invisible Hand, I explained leftism generally by the fact that people do not understand economics.
	They're morally confused about the processes and results of capitalism.
	And that economic ignorance and moral confusion is inevitably exploited by the left.
	And this is perennial.
	So, I mean, each generation is born as essentially as a hunter-gatherer because our views haven't had time.
	Our mind hasn't had time to evolve because capitalism has come along at such an incredible rate.
	So, you know, we're inclined to believe, you know, what a great economist called David Henderson called do-it-yourself economics, you know, which is inclined towards unreflective centralism.
	But the answer to economic problems is for somebody in the middle or somebody at the top to dictate things.
	And that is exactly what we see with the Green New Deal.
	Yes.
	I suppose it, yes.
	It is counterintuitive, isn't it, to imagine that, well, Adam Smith dealt with this, of course.
	It is counterintuitive to imagine that it is possible for the market to distribute things more fairly and more efficiently than anything else.
	It comes to us naturally to imagine that it's far better to have some presiding authority to split things up than it is to...
	than it is laissez-faire.
	Absolutely.
	Because, I mean, our minds evolved in groups of only 150 people, you know, where there was no money, no technological advance, no extensive trade.
	And to an extent, we're still haunted by the assumptions of that period.
	I mean, I suggested in Why We Bite the Invisible Hand that we're hunter-gatherers with iPhones.
	This inevitably has an impact.
	It was my favourite bit of that excellent book, which I occasionally wheel out, and I've probably misquoted or misrepresented your argument slightly.
	But just remind me, how long were we hunter-gatherers for?
	I mean, we were hunter-gatherers much, much longer than we were kind of civilised, living in cities and stuff.
	Yes, I mean, we were hunter-gatherers for over a million years, you know, for thousands of years.
	Thousands and thousands of generations.
	Yes.
	And we started, you know, farming only, what, 10 or 20,000 years ago.
	So the number of generations since settled society is minute.
	Yes.
	I mean, evolutionary psychology is based on that.
	You know, looking at the ancestral environment and seeing how those conditions might frame the way we look at things today.
	And in fact, since I wrote that book, I came across a wonderful piece talking about morality.
	And Adam Smith, you know, talked about the sort of mundane morality of the market.
	You just, you know, do the decent thing, You don't hurt other people.
	But magnanimous morality, on the other hand, is all about sacrificing for other people.
	And that's the sort of morality that was admired in the ancestral environment or that developed in the ancestral environment.
	I mean, and I think that's one of the reasons why corporate executives get into corporate social responsibility, because they want to be seen as magnanimous rather than merely mundane.
	But of course, they're being magnanimous with other people's money.
	That's getting ahead of myself.
	Yes.
	But did you...
	Maybe I'm sort of deling-polifying your argument, but I think what you were suggesting was that those of us with a conservative stroke free market stroke libertarian mindset have...
	More evolved brains than liberal lefties who are essentially stuck in the hunter-gatherer age and they are still stuck in the value system whereby if there is a mammoth and you've killed the mammoth and you've got 150 people in the village, then it really is important to give everyone their fair share because there's only one mammoth to go round.
	And what the mentality of the hunter-gatherer age doesn't understand is that Economies can expand through division of labour, through improved efficiency, through all the things that we recognise as having contributed to the growth of Western civilisation and Western industrial civilisation and our economies.
	The left are obsessed with this idea that things aren't fair because they imagine that there is only one mammoth to go round and everyone has to have their fair share.
	Is that right?
	Is that a fair representation of your...
	Well, absolutely.
	It's the zero-sum mentality which we're haunted by, which leads us to believe that profits are somehow subtracted from the common good.
	But of course, it's not just, I mean, leftist politicians may be innocent of economics, but they also subconsciously and automatically understand that they can exploit these feelings.
	And then they're not really, a lot of them are not really concerned with the welfare of society.
	They're concerned with power.
	Yes.
	And that is the important third element.
	You know, there's economic ignorance, there's moral confusion, and there's the lust for power, which automatically exploits the other two.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Tell me, before we go on to greenery, tell me a bit about your background.
	What was your career trajectory?
	Well, I was born and educated in England.
	You know, I studied economics at Cambridge, not terribly hard.
	In fact, I didn't really develop an interest in economics until about 10 years after I left Cambridge.
	Was Cambridge in those days very Keynesian?
	Did you get exposed to Hayek at all or Mises or anything like that?
	No, it was totally Keynesian, yeah.
	So, you know, Adam Smith didn't crop up in my economic education anywhere.
	Are you serious?
	At Cambridge?
	I did...
	Sorry?
	At Cambridge.
	Adam Smith did not crop up.
	No, no Adam Smith at all.
	I did somehow come across the road to serfdom, but I think that may not have been part of the curriculum.
	But anyway, as you say, it was totally Keynesian.
	So, I mean, after that, I wound up working for the Financial Times of London.
	For three years.
	And then, as I say, since I thought the country was circling the toilet bowl of history, I decided to come to Canada and I got a job with a newspaper here, which was a broadsheet weekly called the Financial Post.
	And then, having worked there for three years, I went off to write a book about the Alberta oil industry, and it was called The Blue-Eyed Shakes.
	And I continued writing books, essentially, and being a freelance magazine journalist until the National Post, which was related to the Financial Post, was started by Conrad Black in 1998.
	And I went there as a columnist, and I wrote columns for 20-odd years.
	I mean, in fact, I still can write when I want.
	It's just that I want to write a bit less...
	Right.
	Often these days.
	But I mean, you know, the National Post was a tremendous newspaper.
	And it was quite unusual in that it, I mean, it was populated by people from the Daily Telegraph.
	And it was much more conservative than anything else in Canada.
	Well, my friend Tim Rostron used to work for the National Post, didn't you, I think?
	I know Tim Rostron quite well.
	I mean, he's now in the publishing business.
	But yes, he was the arts editor, I think.
	He was my best man.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, I missed him greatly.
	And, sorry, just rewinding a second, because you've told me all sorts of interesting things there.
	First, can I just say how utterly shocked I am that Cambridge University, it kind of confirms all my worst suspicions about Cambridge.
	establishment but i mean really how can you how can you how can you call yourself the second best university in the world um if your economics course doesn't even teach only teaches you keynesianism i mean isn't i mean isn't that a terrible indictment of the kind of degree that you did well i think i should point out as i as i implied suggested before in fact i wasn't the most assiduous of students but i
	but i then i think that must be due to the fact that uh the courses didn't seem that relevant to me In fact, I went to Cambridge to read classics.
	Right.
	And I switched to economics the day before lectures began, because I thought economics was more relevant to the world, you know, and I've joked since that I might have been better off saying this.
	You probably wouldn't.
	You'd be Prime Minister.
	No, maybe not.
	Maybe not.
	But what I wanted to ask you was, the Financial Times.
	Now, I think of the Financial Times as pretty much the belly of the beast when it comes to the globalist New World Order, with Davos, with Europhilia, with the Green Agenda, the Green New Deal, everything that's wrong with the world economically.
	The Financial Times is after it like a rat up a drainpipe, isn't it?
	I mean, was it that back then?
	Yeah, no, I mean...
	No, no.
	I mean, you know, again, it's changed completely.
	It was much, much more genuinely conservative in the 70s, much more free market oriented.
	And as you note, I mean, I've noticed it going in this strange and dangerous direction since.
	Any theories on why that happened or how it happened?
	I mean, I had no idea.
	I mean, obviously it was just following the general drift of an increasingly bureaucratic, social-democratic world.
	I mean, as a fellow hack, a fellow conservative hack, one of the few, you must have noticed this trend that I've noticed, which is that even notionally conservative newspapers in the last 10, 15 years have drifted inexorably leftwards.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, except that the Wall Street Journal is still hanging in.
	I haven't seen the Telegraph lately.
	That seemed to be hanging in when I looked at it a few years ago.
	I don't know.
	The Economist seems to have gone.
	Well, The Economist is like a kind of glossy magazine version of the FT, isn't it?
	Of the Pinken.
	Yes, yes.
	Same politics, same problem.
	Yes.
	So, I mean, that's very much the case in Canada as well.
	I mean, the National Post soldiers on, but it's sort of not quite as right as it used to be, although it's still got some good columnists.
	No, no, it's still, you know, it still has Conrad Black and...
	And a number of other excellent writers.
	But the problem is that most reporters on most papers are becoming more and more woke.
	That's certainly true.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	But...
	Some of the columns in the National Post are just absolutely outstanding on a global level.
	I can't really say I read much of the Canadian press or much of the US press.
	We tend to be biased towards our own newspapers because who's got the time?
	But I quite often read columns by you and Terence Corcoran and Lawrence Solomon Yes.
	You three have been really at the top of the game when it comes to criticising this scary green agenda, which is interesting.
	Canada...
	You seem to have the best and the worst, almost, in Canada.
	I mean, who have you got?
	You've got lunatics like, I mean, eco-fascists like Climate Barbie, who I enjoyed your essay on her.
	What's her real name?
	Kath McKenna?
	Catherine?
	Catherine McKenna, yes.
	Catherine McKenna.
	Who else?
	You've got Suzuki, David Suzuki.
	He's another appalling greenie.
	You gave us, you exported to us, thank you very much, the appalling Mark Carney.
	So thanks for that.
	Tell me a bit about Mark Carney.
	I mean, tell me why I hate him, because I do.
	Well, yeah, no, I mean, I mention in the book that Justin Trudeau is obsessed.
	I mean, Canada has a chip on its shoulder.
	So Canadians talk about punching above their weight, which means essentially doing damage out of proportion to their own size.
	Unfortunately, damage is done to themselves.
	But I suggest that when it comes to climate, we have punched above our weight in producing people like Mark Carney and before him Maurice Strong, who is, I think, the most important man of whom nobody's ever heard.
	I think you're right.
	Yeah, no, I mean, Carney is a complete successor to Strong.
	You know, and I've been writing about him as a menace since he was governor of the Bank of Canada.
	Oh, really?
	So you could see this coming.
	Well, look, maybe we should, before we talk about Carney, just give me a...
	I wrote about Maurice Strong in my book Watermelons, and you're right.
	He is...
	I think he is the...
	He's the godfather of...
	Green New Deal, isn't he?
	Really?
	He's with communist sympathies.
	He was one of the first people to realise that environmentalism could be used to advance a new world order of essentially socialism.
	So tell me about him.
	Yes, and he was absolutely at the center of this.
	You know, and people haven't heard of him because he operated the stratospheric UN level.
	But he was the man who ran the first conference on the human environment in Stockholm in 1972, which was really the start of sustainable development.
	Then he was on the Brundland Commission in the 80s, a very important member, where they came up with this ridiculous definition of sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the needs of the future, when of course we have no idea what the needs of one person are, let alone of the entire present and future.
	Then he ran the conference at Rio in 1992, out of which the whole climate change bureaucratic Fandango came along with biodiversity.
	And he was idolized within the UN system because he was a genius at setting up agendas and programs and organizing conferences.
	I mean, he was the bureaucrat's dream.
	I remember I met his second wife, a mystic Scandinavian lady.
	And named Hannah Marstrand.
	And she said in front of Strong that before she met him, she'd heard that he was either a genius or a fraud.
	And I thought, well, why should those be alternatives?
	Why couldn't he be a genius and a fraud?
	And in fact, I think he is or he was a genius and a fraud.
	But no man was more important in embedding This sustainability corporate social responsibility agenda.
	I mean, he sucked in the private sector because he started the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.
	He was a big man at Davos.
	Of course, he fell out of favor a bit because he was involved in the Iraqi oil for food scandal when it was discovered that he had taken a million dollars of money laundered from Saddam Hussein.
	But still, he was still idolized.
	But he was the biggest menace.
	And to understand where we are, you have to understand his career.
	Yes.
	So he started out, didn't he, as a sort of on the lowest level at the UN and quickly worked his way up.
	Now somehow he managed to become a billionaire on the way, didn't he?
	No, he was never a billionaire.
	This is one of the myths that I think he liked perpetrating.
	In fact, he was never enormously well.
	He started as a pass officer at the age of 18.
	And how he got that job is remarkable.
	I mean, I've been working on a biography of Strong for a long time.
	But he claims he was obsessed by, you know, doing good and the UN. And he couldn't get into the bureaucracy in Ottawa.
	I mean, he was only at the UN for like a few weeks, and he couldn't get into the bureaucracy in Ottawa.
	So he decided he would go off and become a successful businessman, which he did.
	I mean, it's absolutely remarkable.
	So at a relatively young age, I think in his early to mid-30s, he wound up running a very politically influential company called Power Corporation.
	And he used that as a springboard where he wound up in the development business in Ottawa and he created the Canadian International Development Agency and remarkably managed to have himself appointed as the head of this UN conference in Stockholm in 1972.
	And he's been in the back rooms.
	I mean, he was described as a roadblock socialist, if anyone remembers what a roadblock was.
	But his list of contacts was absolutely incredible.
	So, I mean, in every way, he was a remarkable man, except Personally, somebody said you wouldn't pick him out of a crowd of two, and I suggest that, in fact, he might have a chance if Lord Stern was the other person.
	What do you mean?
	Was he not charismatic or...?
	No, he was anti-charismatic.
	I mean, he was a dull speaker, he was asthmatic, and he sounded as if he was delivering a message after running up several flights of stairs all the time, especially when he was justifying his beliefs.
	I mean, I interviewed him a lot over a 20-year period.
	Until I eventually wrote a magazine article with the title, Morris Strong Wants to Save the World, But Who Will Save the World from Morris Strong?
	Oh, nicely summed up.
	And he went off me after that, so we didn't see it.
	Did he now?
	Gosh, you...
	Well, listen, I want to read this book, Peter.
	That's really...
	I mean, you do owe it to the world to reveal who it is that's brought this stuff upon us.
	Because I... Carry on.
	Sorry, James.
	Sorry.
	Carry on.
	No, no.
	I mean, I say I'm one of the few people I know who knows a bit about him, but you sound like you've got his number.
	Well, I mean, I've been, as I say, studying him a bit more, and he has the most remarkable career.
	He came from abject poverty.
	Abject poverty.
	But I point out how at the age of 18, he met David Rockefeller, which in itself is absolutely remarkable.
	Yes.
	And eventually, I mean, there's this rumor that somehow Strong is part of some great corporate scheme to take over the world.
	But it's completely upside down.
	Strong merely used corporations.
	And ironically, the Rockefellers in the end came round to Strong's way of thinking rather than Strong coming round to their way of thinking.
	And the various Rockefeller foundations And funds are now completely devoted to sustainable development.
	Which of course is anti-development.
	We're going to have a break here because I've got to dash off and do this thing.
	And then we're going to continue this because this is just too interesting not to talk about.
	Okay.
	So, Peter, you were telling me about Maurice Strong, which I think we need to mine this scene a bit more, because I think you mentioned that word sustainability, which he effectively put on the world map, didn't he, at the Brundtland Commission in, when was it, you say, 72?
	It was in the mid-80s.
	I think 87 their report came out.
	Right.
	So from that little acorn, the massive, world-dominating oak tree of sustainability, which is embedded in every corporate structure now, every local council wants to be sustainable, every local government, every...
	Well, you name it.
	It's everywhere.
	It's inescapable.
	And it all starts with Maurice Strong.
	And you mentioned that he had a sort of negative charisma.
	Is there any...
	Do you reckon that this is common to a lot of people?
	Because you mentioned that Lord Stern, author, of course, of the infamous Stern Report, also has negative charisma.
	Do you reckon that...
	Yes.
	Do you reckon that negative charisma is part of their evil secret?
	Well, then you've got Mark Carney, of course, Canada's other great gift of the world.
	And he's pretty heavy on charisma, so...
	If you go back to Ban Ki-moon, the last Secretary General of the UN, he certainly had anti-charisma too.
	Can I say something about sustainability?
	Oh please do, yeah.
	Well, you know, the first victim under socialism is language, as we know, as Orwell pointed out.
	And sustainable has taken over from social as what Friedrich Hayek called a weasel word.
	That is, it doesn't just suck meanings from words it's attached to.
	It often reverses them.
	So social democracy is authoritarianism.
	Social market economy is a...
	It's an economy with crippled markets.
	Social justice is based on force.
	And now, of course, we have social license, which sounds as if, you know, social license to operate, that corporations apparently need this.
	But what it in fact amounts to is stopping.
	Corporations from operating.
	Anyway, sustainable has taken over as the great weasel word.
	And if you think about it, who could object to sustainability?
	So you have to look at what it actually means.
	And when you look at it, you find that what sustainable development means is bureaucratically, centrally controlled development.
	Mark Carney is a big fan of sustainable finance and what sustainable finance means is keeping finance away from fossil fuel companies.
	You know, we have to look at the meaning of these words, and they are often highly subversive.
	Again, corporate social responsibility has got social in there, plus responsibility.
	I mean, who can be against responsibility?
	Yes.
	So we have to look at the way the socialists use language to corrupt, well, not to corrupt thought, but just to stop thought, essentially.
	Well, another example, of course, is that brilliant slogan, Black Lives Matter.
	I mean, who could disagree that black lives matter?
	Who would want to set themselves against that noble precept?
	And yet...
	Yes, of course.
	But you mustn't say that all lives matter, because that's meant to be insulting black people.
	And, you know, I've...
	I don't want to get into the debate about the history of black people, but if you look at Black Lives Matter, this Marxist part of the movement, one of the demands is an end to fossil fuels.
	So you can see what we're talking about is social revolution.
	It's not It's not dealing with any systemic racism or police brutality.
	It's about destroying Western society.
	Yes.
	Most people still don't see that, do they, Peter?
	I mean, OK, so the man in the street probably thinks that...
	Imputes good faith to the environmental movement, I think still, despite the economic damage done by Extinction Rebellion.
	I mean, you and I, and people like us who've been writing about this stuff for years, we've swung around a few people, but still I would say the current of history is with the environmentalists, isn't it?
	Yes, and you...
	You mentioned Extinction Rebellion, and of course this is meant to be a group of idealistic young people, but of course it's manipulated by others.
	But this, you know, miseducating the young and using them as a tool, again, goes back to our friend Maurice Strong.
	If you look at his great socialist doorstop, Wish It came out of the Rio conference in 1992.
	It said very specifically that children should be educated about environmentalism and sustainability from the earliest age.
	But then it went on to say these miseducated children should then be invited into the political process.
	So what Greta Thunberg in a way is the ultimate result of this.
	Although, in fact, there was an example at Rio.
	I mentioned David Suzuki in How Dare You.
	Yes.
	He's probably not so well known outside Canada as people like, you know.
	But he's inescapable within Canada, isn't he?
	I mean, he's, yeah.
	No, he's, I mean, he's one of the most trusted people in Canada, which is actually bizarre.
	But that is because he reads the scripts of a programmer or People think he's this nice, avuncular figure that's concerned with the environment.
	But when he goes off screen, he's absolutely crazy.
	I mean, he's a rabid climate change fanatic.
	He thinks that countries like Bolivia and Ecuador and Cuba have valuable lessons to teach us.
	But anyway, getting back to the miseducation part, at the 1992 conference, his 12-year-old daughter, Severn Suzuki, Was allowed onto the podium to say that she was frightened to go outside because of holes in the ozone layer, and she was even frightened to breathe because of the chemicals in the atmosphere.
	Now, this to me seems like an example of child abuse.
	Yes.
	In fact, she seems to have survived pretty well and is now nagging her father not to fly, which is rather ironic.
	But, you know, this miseducation of children is absolutely central and Greta Thunberg is perhaps the latest and greatest example.
	I mean, I feel sorry for her.
	She's been exploited.
	She's a girl who has severe anxiety.
	Yeah.
	about matters of climatology about what she cannot possibly understand.
	And all she can do is regurgitate what she's been told.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And this use of children is, of course, straight out of the totalitarian playbook.
	I mean, the communists, you think of the Red Guard in Mao's China, you think of the Hitler Youth, you think of the young pioneers behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany and so on.
	Yes, and the young spies in 1984.
	Yes.
	Yeah, I'm sure in the French Revolution it happened as well.
	I suppose it's designed like so many of these, well, like the slogan, like Black Lives Matter or whatever, it's designed to circumvent thought, isn't it?
	It's designed to, here is a child, children are pure, children are the future, therefore you must listen to what they say and ignore any reservations because these are children.
	And that in a way is the Greta Thunberg appeal.
	Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely bizarre.
	But also, you know, I mean, the NGOs, non-governmental organizations are populated by young people.
	And these are all Morris's children.
	And the other very clever strategic thing he did was to make sure that non-governmental organizations, environmental NGOs, were allowed into, inserted into the policymaking process at the UN. Right.
	So, you know, it was very clever.
	If you look at his, he's been, I mean, he was a strategic genius, no doubt about it.
	And young people, and I mean, he was lecturing to young people at the 1972 conference in Stockholm.
	In fact, he encouraged a parallel, separate conference for young people, which significantly was Which was in fact related to a similar facility at Woodstock.
	So it was all part of the 60s revolutionary thing.
	And of course he understood that young people tend to be idealistic and revolutionary.
	So if you can harness that to your agenda, they're extremely useful.
	These people, they've been planning this for a very long time, haven't they?
	They've really been ahead of the game.
	You think about...
	Okay, you think about the Frankfurt School of the so-called cultural Marxists who came over to the US, I think, what, before the war, during the war?
	Yes, I think, yeah.
	And then you think that Maurice Strong was planning this stuff.
	Well, when...
	I mean, okay, in the 1970s, when...
	What was he doing in the 1970s?
	He was that thing in Norway, Sweden.
	Stockholm was the first UN conference on the human environment.
	Right, right.
	So, yeah, I mean, he was...
	But, you know, for Strong, it wasn't an intellectual thing.
	I mean, it's like political judo.
	You just use your opponent and you work out intuitively where their weaknesses lie And I think, you know, Strong was an intuitive genius at these things.
	I mean, he was completely uneducated.
	He left school at 14.
	And he had sort of, you know, 50-odd honorary degrees to make up for it.
	Right.
	But he still, he just picked ideas as they were useful to his agenda.
	So, I mean, what But they were all, you know, they were all in the same...
	Yeah, he didn't need to, really.
	He obviously understood it instinctively.
	But there were various parallel groups thinking on the same lines.
	I mean, there was the Club of Rome, wasn't he?
	I'm not sure how much he was associated with the Club of Rome.
	He was a member of the Club of Rome, of course.
	What else?
	Of course.
	Limits to growth.
	When did that come out?
	That was 1972, I think.
	And of course it said we were going to be running out of everything before the end of the last century.
	And none of it came true.
	But it just doesn't matter.
	Because, I mean, I think this sort of zero-sum mindset means that if we haven't had disaster yet, it means bigger disaster is coming down the road.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So you can't reason with these people.
	I mean, one of my favourite sayings from Jonathan Swift is that it is foolish to try to reason somebody out of something they were never reasoned into.
	So there's no point in us quoting facts and statistics.
	Yes.
	Because people are not listening.
	No, we almost may as well give up now, hadn't we, Peter?
	Because our efforts are largely...
	Well, I do have some hope, because in the end, I mean...
	The practical consequences become apparent.
	But the problem is that, you know, we go back to make mistake after mistake.
	And of course, I mean, if you look at the state of the world, we've done extraordinarily well.
	But socialism is bound to come back at regular intervals and have another So, the left-wing stroke, deep green caricature of people like you and me is that being of a free market, small government disposition...
	We don't like the so-called science on climate change.
	It doesn't suit our agenda because what it means is that governments have to take precipitate and expensive action, which is necessary, and we don't like this because we are so wedded to the free market that even if the world is about to burn up, we would rather preserve our ideological position.
	What would be your counter to that?
	Well, I mean, the simple fact that it's untrue.
	This idea that fans of the free market are somehow fundamentalist idiots who are opposed to any and all regulation.
	And the other canard is that we believe that people are rational and markets are perfect.
	Complete and utter nonsense, you know.
	Going back to Adam Smith, Adam Smith realized that people were anything but rational and that the market proceeded by the process of higgling and bargaining, but it served people's collective interests.
	And thus it was a good thing.
	Yes, but you can't persuade people on the left.
	I mean, what is easy?
	They call us deniers.
	what we're meant to be denying.
	I mean, no one denies there's been a slight warming in the global temperature over the last century or that there's a greenhouse effect.
	I mean, the point is the human contribution and whether we can do anything, whether we can and should do anything about it, which should be a matter of cost-benefit analysis.
	Yes.
	But of course, you've got people like Stern who completely corrupt the process of cost-benefit analysis.
	If you look at the actual science, you'll see.
	I mean, people like Bjorn Lomborg, of course, who's demonized somewhat, have calculated that if everybody kept their commitments under the Paris Accord, which of course they're not doing, and Canada in particular will not do, Then the impact on the temperature of the year 2100 is something like a fifth of a degree Celsius.
	Yes.
	We had Bjorn Lomborg on the podcast, a couple of podcasts ago.
	I like Bjorn very much, although I think he's rather too credulous and rather too willing to treat in good faith the prognostications of the climate establishment.
	He takes them at their word, and I'm not sure that he really should.
	Well, I think, you know, I mean, I think that's possibly strategic on his part.
	Well, I think so, too.
	I mean, he tries to feed the beast by saying, no, no, well, you shouldn't do this, but what you should do is just have huge programs of government investment and R&D. Well, if you look at the history of government investment and R&D, it really isn't terribly good.
	It's not good, is it?
	It's disastrous.
	It's called, strangely titled Sex, Science and Prophets.
	I can't remember the author.
	I think he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
	Anyway, I mean, it's a wonderful book that points out what a terrible record governments have.
	And one of the examples he uses was British society in the 60s when Harold Wilson was around.
	And he was promoting the white heat of technological revolutionaries And this gave us, you know, the first nuclear reactor, the first supersonic jet, and what they all had in common, they were financial disasters.
	So government has a, but as I said, I think Bjorn is trying to give something to the left.
	In fact, I sent an email to him, or, you know, to his website, because in his latest book, he says that a problem with media coverage was He said that.
	And I said, well, how could you possibly say that?
	It's nonsense.
	But I think he knows it's nonsense.
	But he thinks if he kowtows enough to his enemies, then they might acknowledge that he has a point.
	Yes, that doesn't happen.
	You don't pay Dengel to the game.
	He doesn't love you or respect you anymore.
	I've been watching Last Kingdom on TV and I can tell you those Vikings, they don't...
	You can't buy them.
	No, absolutely.
	So this bizarre idea that you can somehow achieve social licence, it's utterly naive.
	So many corporations have bought it.
	I mean, including the Canadian oil industry.
	Or maybe they think they have to buy it, but it's nonsense.
	Well, there's a cartoon in How Dare You of the NGO social license office with a big lineup of CEOs outside.
	And the point is, it's closed.
	And it will always be closed.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yes, I should point out to listeners who haven't quite grasped this that How Dare You is the title of your collected columns, which is being published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
	Policy Forum.
	Oh, sorry, Policy Forum.
	Yes, indeed.
	Yeah, yeah, God.
	The GWPF, yeah, the Forum.
	But great institutions, both of those.
	But isn't it...
	Have you noticed...
	This is just a digression, because you made a point earlier.
	I was going to pick up, and I completely forgotten what it was.
	Isn't it weird how here we are...
	Maybe 15 years on from when we...
	I don't know, I've been writing about this for 15 years, I guess, or more.
	And still it's the same people.
	There's you, there's me, there was Christopher Booker, he's now gone.
	You've got Donna LaFramboise, you've got Joe Nova in Australia, you've got a few Americans, Steve Malloy, Mark Morano.
	But there really aren't that many of us.
	We still are a very niche group of people.
	Of people fighting the sceptical argument.
	You know, we've got a few sympathisers.
	People like Charles Moore, I suppose, would be loosely allied to us.
	But they're not full-on, out-and-out, global warming, known sceptics.
	And I find this a bit disappointing, given how important this issue is.
	It's not marginal, is it?
	I mean, it's key to our global economic future.
	Well, I mean, we've been, as you say, the group is remarkably small.
	And it's amazing because we're meant to be the false front for a multi-billion dollar program of disinformation by the fossil fuel industry.
	We're all paid by the Koch brothers, apparently, although I'm still waiting for my first check.
	But I mean, this is partly the success of the movement in marginalizing us.
	I mean, that's why the National Post was so great.
	Because we had a page that was, well, it was full of sceptics, you know, and we had people like Ross McKittrick and Steve McIntyre, the men who broke the hockey stick.
	I mean, they were other contributors.
	Both Canadians.
	It was good that we had a...
	This comes back to our original...
	Do you know, really annoying.
	One of the bummers about doing these podcasts, the thing I really miss, pre-lockdown, I used to do all my podcasts face-to-face.
	I had a...
	Adamantine rule that I wanted to be able to read people's facial signals and so on, which you get when you're next to somebody.
	You don't get it on the phone, unfortunately.
	And I'd love to be able to be doing this podcast with you in the flesh.
	It would be...
	Well, you're not missing much, James, but no, I know exactly what you mean.
	Yeah, yeah, it's a shame.
	One does miss out there.
	Yeah, the Canadian thing, it's weird.
	That you have produced the worst in the form of Maurice Strong, David Suzuki, and I haven't asked you about Mark Carney.
	I want you to tell me about him at the moment.
	But you've also produced some of the best.
	I mean, the great Mark Stein, who's been fantastic.
	You've got Ross McKittrick and Steve McIntyre, the guys who slaughtered the hockey stick.
	Um...
	You've got Donna Framboise.
	Who else you've got?
	Vivian Krause, have you heard of her?
	Vivian Krause, yeah, absolutely.
	Donna Framboise we've mentioned.
	I was thinking about this in the gap between the first half and this half.
	It seems to be the kind of, what would you call us, the Commonwealth, which has been, or the old British Empire, which has been really fighting the fight best.
	I look at the Americans.
	Why is America not, the United States that is, Not produced more climate sceptics.
	I mean, we can name a few.
	Tony Heller is fantastic, for example.
	I mean, you've got the Heartland Institute.
	Yeah, no, but there you are.
	You've got the Heartland Institute, but you haven't got...
	There are some very good scientists in America, the late Fred Singer, Richard Lindzen.
	Richard Lindzen.
	Fantastic.
	Fantastic.
	But what I mean is there have not been any American climate books which are the equivalent of, say, My Watermelons or Christopher Booker's book on why it was all rubbish.
	For a nation of 300-plus million, they haven't really been...
	I don't get that.
	They didn't seem to be.
	And I've noticed this when I was thinking about this.
	When I write articles for Breitbart, because one of the reasons Breitbart recruited me is that they wanted a guy who could take the fight to the enemy on climate change.
	I mean, it's a very important subject.
	But I've noticed that there is...
	When I write about things like that meeting in La Jolla in California where the alarmists sat down and plotted things like the Exxon New campaign, I get zero interest.
	The readers just aren't interested.
	They like stories about things like No, I don't know.
	There seems to be a general lack of interest, which I think is the most interesting part of all about the climate change thing, which is why would so many people lie to us?
	Why would governments lie to us?
	Why would the oil industry fall for this stuff?
	Do you not find that?
	Are you not curious about that?
	Oh no, absolutely.
	I mean, but the thing is, I think a lot of them think they're not lying.
	They're telling moral truth, you see.
	So if you think you're saving the world, if you think you're saving future generations, then you can bend the facts a bit.
	And it occurs to me when you were talking about the...
	Canada versus the US. One of the reasons why we have reason to be or reason to generate skeptics is that the greatest attacks, two of the greatest attacks on the resource industry have come here, first in the forestry industry.
	And then in the oil sands, which has become a global target.
	And these attacks are in fact funded by US capitalist foundations.
	And ironically, they do much more damage, or maybe not ironically, maybe strategically, they do much more damage in Canada than they do in the US. So they're not, I think, as big a problem in the US as they are now.
	In Canada.
	That's interesting.
	Yes, that is probably the reason, isn't it?
	It's force majeure.
	It's just that you cannot help.
	If you're a capitalist in Canada, you really feel it.
	You really feel what the Green Movement is doing to you.
	Yeah, I mean, and that's why we have people like, you know, I mentioned Vivian Krauss, who did a great job of digging into the funding of Canadian non-governmental organizations.
	The Tides Foundation, I think you remember.
	It was all coming out of...
	Sorry?
	The Tides Foundation was one of them, I think.
	Yes, precisely, the Tides Foundation, but the Tides was just a front for lots and lots of other, often multi-billion dollar capitalist foundations, of course, which, I mean, and the irony is, of course, that these were founded by capitalists and now have become founts of anti-capitalism, although that really perhaps isn't too surprising, because the left is very good at accessing money.
	I've got to mention Patrick Moore, another fantastic Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace.
	They hate being reminded of this.
	He's an actually wonderful character who's been lambasted and had to put up with so much work.
	Abuse.
	And yet he's still fighting the good fight.
	And he's a very knowledgeable man.
	He is a scientist, apart from anything else.
	They often say that, well, you don't have a degree in climatology, so you can't talk about this.
	And of course, that's nonsense, because the real...
	The real basis of this is human psychology rather than physics and chemistry, I think.
	Yes.
	Yes, indeed.
	Before I forget, tell me about...
	You've been marking Mark Carney's card for some time, even before he became governor of the Bank of England.
	Tell me about his genesis.
	Well, I think he used to work for Goldman Sachs.
	Then somehow, I mean, he's a genius at climbing the greasy pole of bureaucracy.
	He became governor of the Bank of Canada.
	And I said at the time that he's probably the world's most overrated man because he was somehow meant to have guided the Canadian economy through the 2007 and 2008 crisis just by lowering interest rates and keeping them there.
	And the other thing he liked to do was lecture.
	So first he told Canadians that they weren't And then he told them that they were borrowing too much, but he's the archetypal global governor.
	So it was inevitable that he would latch on to climate change.
	Which, of course, now that he's left the Bank of England, I think he's the UN special envoy for climate change, where he's the big promoter for this concept, sustainable finance, which, as I said, due to the nature of the weasel word sustainable, actually means sustainable non-finance.
	Yes, well, no, because you...
	You've got an economics background.
	You might be the one person who can explain this to me.
	I'm very worried about the way that the financial sector has cottoned on to environmentalism and sustainability as a way of advancing what I consider to be a very...
	It's a dodgy, globalist, one-world government cause.
	And I'm particularly worried about this thing that's being pushed by people like Mark Carney, whereby fossil fuel companies need to be denied finance and finance should only be given to green enterprises and that every business should have a kind of release figures on its carbon footprint and all this stuff.
	In other words...
	Applying a layer of regulation to every industry and making it more expensive to do business.
	Just talk to me about that a bit.
	Well, yes, it's a brilliant part of the strategy that the NGOs went around and spoke to, or rather they browbeat big investors, the big banks, Into suggesting that they had to force those they loan money to, to get in line.
	And also get in, as you mentioned, the carbon disclosure project.
	Now, what that's designed to do is to not just admit carbon crime, but also they send voluminous forms to be filled in.
	And it's like What sort of injuries might they suffer?
	So then the companies have to list all the injuries that the husband or wife might suffer.
	And then they produce these documents saying, well, look, this is evidence that there's going to be a massive amount of spouse beating because this is what corporations say.
	So it's pernicious, but again, it's very, very clever.
	One of the examples in my book, Of the nonsense of carbon disclosure is that we all know about the California wildfires.
	A year ago, Pacific Gas and Electric went into Chapter 11 protection, allegedly having been responsible for a lot of these wildfires, which as we know are actually due to bad forest management.
	But according to the Carbon Disclosure Project, one of the biggest of these disclosing NGOs, Pacific Gas and Electric was in the very forefront of climate responsibility.
	And they gave them a glowing rating.
	So this suggests that their ratings are worse than useless.
	In fact, I said I couldn't understand why people hadn't sued the carbon disclosure project for suggesting that Pacific Gas and Electric was a good investment.
	Well, I mean, they're a classic case of power without responsibility, aren't they?
	They can lecture and leturists and swing markets and bully corporations.
	But at the same time, you can't sue them.
	You can't.
	They have no...
	They'll disappear.
	Yes, no, no.
	I mean, but corporations are comprehensively afraid.
	Oh, and there's one other thing about Mark Carney that...
	I forgot to mention.
	He is now Justin Trudeau's advisor for economic recovery.
	And this is almost satire, because this man wants to close down Canada's most important export-earning industry, the oil and gas industry.
	You know, I can't think of an analogy for how utterly ridiculous this is.
	So, well, yes, well...
	Of course, Maurice Strong was an advisor to a previous Liberal Prime Minister, so it certainly has precedence.
	So explain Canada to me, because I do not understand this basic problem.
	That I think of Canada as being, well, you know, people in lumberjack shirts, chopping down trees, avoiding grizzly bears.
	And I think of the oil men of Alberta, is that right?
	And Calgary.
	And I think of...
	I think of rugged, outdoor, no-nonsense, polite, but, yeah, no-nonsense people.
	So how come it's become one of the most egregious examples in the Western world of, well, liberalism going on full-on communism?
	How does that happen?
	Well, I mean, the thing, it's due in this country to political representation.
	Alberta is drained of resources, pays huge amounts of money to the rest of the country, but I don't think it has a single MP in Justin Trudeau's government.
	So he doesn't really...
	I mean, his base of power is Quebec and Ontario.
	And so Alberta has been almost literally persecuted, and not just by Justin, but by his father, Pierre, who had equally...
	Punishing policies towards the West, although then they just wanted to drain money from the industry, but now they want to close it down completely.
	So the problem is, you know, I mean, in fact, Alberta has been talking, some Albertans have been talking about the possibility of separation.
	I mean, I don't think it will come to that.
	But they say, you know, we have to do, we need either, we need more political representation.
	So that is a big issue in Canada.
	But how will it achieve that?
	Well, they could maybe reform the Senate to have it elected and accountable.
	But apart from that, it's difficult to see.
	How it will happen.
	I mean, they're talking about doing things as almost as a preparation to separatism in terms of, you know, adopting their own taxation and running the police force and so on.
	But I mean, there's a real asymmetry in the Canadian system between the sort of, it's the bureaucratic bilingual elite In the middle.
	Yes.
	And those at the perimeter.
	Although, I mean, Vancouver, I mean, British Columbia is complicated because they're extremely environmental.
	They're very, they're very left wing.
	Whereas Alberta has traditionally been, you know, conservative and right wing.
	And in fact, they are.
	I mean, you talk about, you know, lumberjacks and oil workers.
	They really are different.
	They are much more like Americans in Alberta and, to a degree, Saskatchewan.
	Yeah, no, I get all that.
	In the same way that Queenslanders, people in the outback of Australia...
	Generally, you know, like Australians used to be.
	And unfortunately, the metropolitan areas have been infested, a little bit like a zombie infestation with liberal lefties.
	Do you think there's any hope for any of these countries?
	I'm thinking also of New Zealand.
	I'm using liberal in the American sense of the word rather than the classical liberal sense.
	Do you think once the liberals have infested the system, is there any going back?
	I mean, Canada, when did you last have a conservative government, an actual conservative government?
	That was before Justin Trudeau, the government of Stephen Harper, which was a minority for a while.
	But that was a bit wet, wasn't it?
	Wasn't Harper a bit wet?
	Well, he was, you know, like all politicians, he did not dare to say he did not believe in climate science.
	I mean, before he came to power, he described Kyoto as a socialist plot.
	He couldn't say that once he was Prime Minister, but he was very clever in a way that he negotiated his way round these ridiculous international agreements.
	He did what is called ragging the puck.
	Which is a nice hockey term, which means that you keep hold of the puck so that no one can score.
	So, I mean, essentially, he controlled the agenda so that the opposition couldn't score in his net or so he couldn't score an own goal.
	But, I mean, generally, he was, I think, a pretty good prime minister.
	And ironically, I mention in How Dare You that I've got a few articles pointing out that he was absolutely hated.
	He was subject to Harper's Derangement syndrome which is a bit like Trump derangement syndrome except Stephen Harper could not possibly have been less like Donald Trump.
	I mean he was a mild-mannered man.
	Well, I mean he was meant to be a bit of a tyrant in the cabinet room but that's reasonable enough.
	But he never pursued extreme policies in any way.
	He did try to streamline the regulation process so that pipelines could be built I think we're going to talk a little bit about this.
	To any coast, the Gulf Coast, the West Coast or the East Coast.
	and this has cost Alberta literally tens of billions of dollars since their oil can only go to the US where it's blocked up and the price has plummeted that's awful so Stephen Harper was good but of course this is a revelation to most people because for most people Canada is more complex than interesting and I understand that but
	But yes, that was our last Conservative Prime Minister who was there for a while.
	Who managed to hold off the forces of darkness.
	Then he was followed by Justin.
	Think of all the leftist social programs you could fund if Alberta was allowed to achieve its full economic potential.
	I mean, I'm thinking like a leftist here.
	Well, no, I couldn't because I'd have to be insane.
	But you see what I'm getting at, don't you?
	Canada's liberal lefties are denying...
	Denying the poor, inter alia, the opportunity of having a better life, courtesy of Canada's great natural resources.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	And this was an argument that conservatives tried to put forward.
	They said, you know, the more buoyant our oil and gas industry is, the more funds it will provide for welfare and for hospitals and so on.
	But, again, that's a rational argument, and they're not dealing with rational people.
	They're dealing with people who just want to kill the industry.
	And a lot of cases have no concept of what that actually will mean to the industry.
	I mean, to the country, it would be a complete disaster.
	Tell me about Climate Barbie.
	Well, she's now moved on to another portfolio.
	And of course, we're not meant to say that because that's horribly sexist of us.
	But basically, she was hard left.
	And the Barbie part, to me, always seemed that what she said sounded like a ring pull tweet.
	Like, climate change is real and man-made, and that's the end of the story.
	There's another, actually.
	You probably haven't heard about, who is our Governor General.
	Tell me.
	Who is the Queen's representative in Canada.
	Oh, and she is wonderful because she has been behaving like a cross between Lady Macbeth and Imelda Marcos, spending money, terrorizing her staff.
	And of course, she's also weighed in on the climate issue.
	And the reason she is meant to have credibility is because she was an astronaut.
	And she's compared climate denial to believing in creationism and herbal medicines and various other...
	Astrology as well, I think.
	Yeah, right.
	But I point out in one of the columns in the book that if distance travelled from the surface of the earth was any qualification for opining on climate...
	Outranked by Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin, two skeptics who've been to the moon.
	Yeah, and I suspect, you know, being sexist but also accurate for a moment, I'm sure she only got on the programme because she had the right chromosomes.
	I'm sure she wasn't the best person available.
	No, perish the thought.
	But anyway, she's come back to haunt Justin somewhat because of these scandals.
	It's not the only scandal that he's got.
	I don't know if you know about his other scandals, but...
	Well, he's black.
	Have you heard of the...
	He likes blacking out.
	He's our first black Prime Minister, no.
	No, no, but there was also an enormous scandal with something called the WE, W-E, charity, which the government gave a contract...
	To dole out $900 million to university students to volunteer, rather strange, to be giving out, to be paying people to volunteer.
	But anyway, it then transpired that this organization, WE, had paid his mother and his brother as speakers.
	And that the finance minister, his daughter, worked for the organization and that neither of them had recused themselves from this decision.
	So there's been, you know, one of the reasons he prorogued parliament a little while ago.
	And the real reason was because he was getting some questioning from a parliamentary committee, from the Conservatives, that he couldn't answer.
	But the theory was that he prorogued Parliament so he could come up with a great new strategy for Canada's economic future.
	And this is due to be unloaded on us next Wednesday, September the 23rd.
	And that's when people are really scared that this Green New Deal might raise its ugly head.
	I think Covid A resurgence of Covid might stop that.
	Well, what would it look like, this Green New Deal for you?
	Well, you know, presumably it would be more about putting more money into wind and solar, which of course is, you know, it's almost beyond belief that you would take technologies that were inefficient and very expensive before COVID and somehow imagine they might become less expensive and more efficient after COVID. It makes absolutely no sense.
	But then again, so much of this makes no sense unless you see it as essentially a power grab To put the world under bureaucratic control.
	But yeah, that and presumably a bunch of other fiddling, maybe we have a carbon tax already.
	I think you've nailed it there.
	That environmentalism, the environmental movement is a power grab to put the world under bureaucratic control.
	And it's jobs for the boys and girls, isn't it?
	It's jobs for your people, for the clerisy, the modern clerisy.
	People with environmental studies degrees, which would otherwise be worth it.
	In a free market, environmental studies degrees would be absolutely worthless, so that sustainability would not exist, or at least it would not need to be imposed.
	It's as simple as that.
	And indeed, I mean...
	Again, we go back to Strong.
	I mean, Strong in many ways created the environment as a big time career.
	But we have every global international bureaucracy is on board with the climate agenda because it means power for them.
	I mean, bureaucracies don't grow by solving problems, but just by being seen to address them.
	So they have more conferences and studies and agendas.
	And they don't necessarily want to do anything.
	They just want to be seen to be doing something.
	I mean, if you look at the bureaucratic reality of sustainability within the UN, it's absolutely farcical.
	There was a study a few years ago that established that no one knew how many offshoots of the sustainable agenda there were or what they were doing or whether what they were doing made any sense.
	As long as there are bureaucratic offshoots and studies being paid for by someone, then that's all they want.
	And they don't see the damage I have to say, Peter, talking to you, via what?
	Is there some sort of cable under the Atlantic or something?
	But I do feel, talking to you, rather as I might have done in the late 70s, early 80s, talking to somebody...
	behind the iron curtain and i'm sure it's not that bad in canada and i know my our own country that the land of your birth is completely ruined as well now but tell me how bad is it to be uh somebody of our political persuasion living in canada how maddening is is justin trudeau is it as bad as i think um the amazing thing is that no matter how many what how much he screws up
	i mean he's clearly not not the brightest uh blade on the wind turbine but he's being completely he's being completely manipulated but since he has a certain charisma uh The Canadian people seem to want to forgive him again and again.
	But, you know, I guess at some stage he has to run out of credibility.
	I'm not quite sure when that will happen.
	We have a new leader of the Conservative Party who you would never have heard of, a man called Erin O'Toole.
	Who seems, you know, pretty reasonable.
	Of course, he's come out saying that he really is a believer in climate change because he can't say anything else.
	But I think Justin is frightened that there might be an election.
	He said he doesn't want an election.
	He's supported by the NDP, which is the hard socialist party because he has a minority.
	So, you know, there's always hope, but it takes the average citizen to catch on to the damage.
	And, of course, now it's messed up with COVID.
	So it's difficult to differentiate between bad green policies and, you know, the impact of the COVID lockdown.
	Well, you...
	So, you know, it's very uncertain at the moment.
	Well, Covid has been manna from heaven for the enviroloons.
	Certainly in the UK, for example, we've seen countless city councils, including Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, using the...
	Coronavirus as an excuse to strip away all that, well, to convert roads into cycle lanes and to declare city centres car-free zones and to remove parking spaces and so on.
	Because they know they can get away with this stuff.
	Because they're not being scrutinised.
	They're not having the full...
	Council meetings.
	We see this actually with Boris Johnson's government as well, that because the government is not, Parliament is not meeting in its full numbers, issues simply aren't being debated.
	So the green agenda is being pushed through willy-nilly.
	I'm sure it's the same in Canada.
	It's exactly the same here.
	It's exactly the same thing is happening in Toronto in terms of proliferating Well, I mean, you know, there's less driving because of COVID, but as you say, they've taken the opportunity to use bike lanes when it might make more sense to make it easier to travel by car rather than public transport.
	I mean, that's one area of the agenda that is in a bit of trouble.
	They want us all to travel by public transport, but that might be dangerous for your health.
	Well, Yeah, no, I think you and I probably disagree on that one.
	I think it's the most overrated non-story in the history of the world, and I think this is the biggest misuse of government resources in the history of the world.
	For me, this is...
	The whole green thing was a dry run for this.
	This is...
	It follows the same structure.
	It has the same structure in that it's based on models, not on reality.
	So you had Neil Ferguson with his modelled pandemic outcome, which is the basis for UK policy.
	And that actually probably frightened the Trump administration as well into taking action.
	I don't know who persuaded Canada, but...
	No, I mean, you're absolutely right.
	And there are lessons that we should learn from COVID. Authorities went with the most alarmist science and used it to impose the most draconian policies of lockdown.
	Which didn't work.
	And in some ways, you know, the climate situation, so they've used the most alarmist models, and now they want to lock down the fossil fuel industry.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Well, I think, you see, that none of this would have happened in 2020.
	There would never have been this overreaction to what is essentially just bad seasonal flu.
	There would never have been this overreaction if...
	People hadn't been softened up by 20 years.
	I mean, the Rio Earth Summit was in 1992, wasn't it?
	So we've had 18 years of people being drip-fed.
	We're all doomed propaganda.
	Government must do more.
	We must take action to save the planet, blah, blah, blah.
	And I think that's softened people up, ready for what we're experiencing now.
	Yes.
	I came across this great phrase that de Tocqueville used, you know, I mean, 150 years ago.
	And he talked about one of the dangers in American democracy that he saw was this thing called administrative despotism, which is a beautiful phrase.
	And I think that's now gone global.
	We have administrative despotism.
	Right.
	So what did he...
	How did he describe administrative despotism?
	Did he tell me a bit more?
	Well, he said...
	Gradually put more and more rules and regulations on society until in the end, people are incapable of action.
	They're like sheep.
	And that, I mean, is the long-term objective, I think, of the green agenda, certainly, that people should do what they're told.
	Yes.
	I mean, when it comes to that...
	Carry on.
	Sorry.
	No, no, carry on.
	I was going to say, when it comes to that bizarre definition of, you know, sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the needs of the future, as I said, no one can have any idea what our needs actually are, but their solution is simple.
	They will tell us what our needs are.
	Yeah.
	I'm very, very pessimistic, Peter.
	Aren't you?
	I mean, I've been fighting this fight.
	I honestly thought...
	I had this really depressing experience.
	I was going to write a piece for...
	On the 10th anniversary of Climategate, I wanted to write a piece for a magazine editor...
	And I voted for a conservative magazine, which I shan't name.
	And I said, you know, it's the 10th anniversary of Climategate.
	It was kind of my big scoop.
	I mean, I didn't invent the story, but I popularised it.
	And this was really key in our understanding of the environmental movement and blah, blah, blah.
	And he...
	He didn't want to run it.
	The bit he particularly objected to was when I started out by saying, I really thought that when Climategate broke, we had won the argument, that there was no way the Green Movement could come back from this, because the facts were out there.
	They'd been manipulating the data, that the scientists were...
	Intellectually and morally corrupt.
	They were torturing the data till it screamed.
	There was a whole industry which was pushing this agenda.
	It was clear they were shutting out honest science out of the debate by making sure they weren't published, by denying them peer review, etc.
	We caught them red-handed.
	And I thought, how?
	How can they get away with this any longer?
	Ten years on, I would say that it's got worse.
	They've more or less won.
	Well, you're right.
	I mean, the thing is, there were those bogus reviews of Climategate, which were all whitewashes.
	And then you had the mainstream media saying, oh, well, nothing to see here.
	They've been exonerated.
	And of course, it's nonsense.
	They weren't exonerated.
	But now, you know, if you mention ClimateGate, you're probably written off instantly as some sort of wacky denier.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, you know, having control of the...
	Well, there's this concept called the psychology of taboo, which is very important.
	Which is that some perspectives are framed as being beneath contempt and beyond examination.
	So that's the climate skeptics have been put in that category.
	So they must not be listened to.
	You are being morally tainted if you countenance anything that they say.
	Well, it's interesting, isn't it?
	So we've been, as I say, marginalised.
	We've been anathematised.
	Yeah, you're right.
	We've been put under interdict, if you like.
	Excommunicated.
	Excommunicated.
	We've been unpersoned.
	And it's noticeable, isn't it?
	I mean, okay, apart from Mike Schellenberger, who's coming at it from the left, from, you know, he's got his pro-nuclear agenda, which suits me, but...
	There really haven't been many new sceptics, have there, to join our ranks.
	It's the same people.
	And some of us, like Fred Singer, are dying off.
	In fact, quite a few of the people...
	The Heartland conference I attended in Chicago...
	A few years ago, a lot of the people have since died.
	It's generally people who've got, professors have reached that stage in their career where they don't need to worry about getting sacked anymore.
	But younger people, they've got too much to lose.
	Yes.
	I mean, and they're born into a world and they're educated into a world where it's just impossible to question the science or policy of climate change.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's the water into which they were born swimming.
	So...
	Scepticism is, well, you know, I mean, the most pessimistic view is that this will just go on to typical socialist disaster and then we'd have to start again.
	Well, again, to get back to Morris one final time perhaps, he wrote a biography called Where on Earth Are We Going?
	And in this biography he has a positively bizarre chapter Which is described as a report to the shareholders of Earth Inc.
	in the year 2031.
	And of course he foresees, he wrote this 20 years ago, but he, so 10 years in the future, he sees a world of complete horror, but he sees one glimmer of hope.
	And that's the fact that two thirds of the world's population will have been wiped out.
	Now, anyone who thinks that billions of people dying is a glimmer of hope Absolutely.
	Their whole hair-shirt mentality is anti-human, anti-prosperity, anti-fun, isn't it?
	It's about guilt.
	Yes.
	It was worse than guilt.
	It's about self-hatred, which of course is taken to extreme by the voluntary human extinction movement, which was actually real, wasn't it?
	People were sort of signed up to this thing whereby they were vowing not to have children and considering suicide themselves because, after all, we are...
	The earth has a cancer and the cancer is man, as the Club of Rome once famously put it.
	I think that was a pretty useful movement.
	I would encourage them to get on with that.
	Well, yeah.
	Get themselves out of the gene pool.
	You know, some documents were discovered.
	David Rose wrote about this for the Mail on Sunday, that some documents were leaked onto the internet from Extinction Rebellion.
	And as part of their next move, Extinction Rebellion, were planning to have some dupe commit suicide in public in order to raise awareness of the plight of the planet.
	I mean, that's what they...
	I suppose they must believe this stuff.
	Yes.
	Well, it just occurred to me, when you talk about sin and...
	Part of my book is a collection of so-called climateers.
	And the last one is the Pope.
	Now, if you read the encyclical that he wrote in 2015, or well, he didn't write, he didn't come anywhere near it.
	You know, it could be written by any UN agency.
	And in fact, it probably was written by the same people who write UN documents.
	But it's astonishing that the Pope would, as He doesn't read things.
	He doesn't listen to the radio or watch television.
	He just doesn't know.
	He's just being manipulated by the Curia.
	He's a creature of the age, though, isn't he?
	I mean, the Archbishop of Canterbury is no better, and he ought to be, because he's a former oil man.
	Although, having said that, the oil industry is about as green and woke as any, isn't it?
	I mean, you listen to the pronouncements of the CEO of Shell and the CEO of BP... And also the previous CEO of BP, you know, Lord Brown, who rebranded it Beyond Petroleum.
	All they want to do is tell shareholders about stranded assets and about how their key business model is completely screwed and how from now on they're trying to go and move away from oil but be prepared to take a hit, shareholders, because you're wasting your money, basically.
	Yeah, I mean, it's partly it's pure hypocrisy.
	I have the example in the book of Sir Philip Watts.
	Do you remember him?
	He was the head of Shell.
	He was the head of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development.
	He was a big man at Davos.
	And he said that Shell was defined by its promotion of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.
	And then he was found To be lying to the shareholders and to have cut the books.
	That's...
	So, I mean, hypocrisy.
	But beyond hypocrisy, I mean, a lot of them are simply scared.
	I use the analogy of mud wrestling with a pig when it comes to dealing with NGOs.
	The point is that they can't afford to mud wrestle with the pig because they'll get covered in mud.
	And the pig not only likes it, but the pig uses it as a fundraising opportunity.
	So this idea of enormous corporate power is nonsense.
	Big corporations cower persistently before NGOs.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And I wonder how...
	This is what Douglas Murray has been talking about a lot recently, that people need to grow a pair.
	Corporations need to grow a pair.
	Individuals need to grow a pair.
	I think Douglas is...
	It's easy to say that when you're Douglas Murray.
	He's found a very clever way of saying the things he does without putting himself so far beyond the pale that he can't earn a living.
	I think if he really told it like it was on every issue, I think he too would end up being cancelled.
	But I think, nevertheless, his broader point is well made.
	We really do need to stand up.
	I mean, you and I do it, but more people need to do it, don't they?
	Well, I mean, we can because we don't matter.
	You know, we're just journalists.
	But if you're running a large company and you know that if you express scepticism about climate change, then you'll have a mob outside your office.
	You'll have your customers intimidated.
	Then you begin to understand why, you know, Why they can't be such stout defenders of free enterprise?
	Well, of course, and the other thing is that one of the great misconceptions is that capitalism is what capitalists pronounce, when of course some of the biggest enemies of capitalism happen to be capitalists.
	I mean, capitalism is a system in which capitalists are the main actors, but that doesn't mean they have the slightest clue of how the broader system works.
	They know how to make profits and how to economize and how to market and so on.
	Yeah, how to suck.
	But they have no necessary knowledge of the invisible hand.
	No.
	Well, that's the joy of the invisible hand, isn't it?
	That none of us...
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	It's the inconceivable hand for many people.
	It's written off morally as being some sort of con job.
	It's considerable sophistication to begin to understand what it actually is and how it works and how it produces good from people pursuing their own interests.
	Well, yeah.
	Or it requires simple faith, doesn't it?
	It's like we can't understand it, but it does seem to work.
	And that seems to be an eminently reasonable position, that it works...
	That historically, it's been shown to work far better than planned systems, which is what, of course, Hayek was arguing.
	Yes, of course.
	But the problem is, since we don't understand how it works, we can benefit from it without understanding.
	I mean, I think I use the analogy that it's...
	In the same way that you don't need to read Gray's analogy in order to keep living, you don't need to read Adam Smith in order to operate in a market economy.
	You just, you buy and you sell and you work and you do stuff.
	Yeah.
	And there's no need for you to understand it.
	But that's, of course, dangerous.
	Because if you don't understand it, then it can come under attack and you might not understand what's going on.
	And before you know it, it's been lopped off.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Well, I think the point you made near the beginning about...
	I've completely lost my thread here.
	What did you say about the beginning?
	Yeah, that people prefer economists who argue for greater government intervention...
	Then for ones who say, no, just leave it alone.
	Just don't do anything.
	Don't create more jobs in order to monitor the economy and guide it.
	You don't need them.
	They're not necessary.
	Just leave it alone.
	Yeah, I know.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, not just Hayek.
	James Buchanan was another Nobel-winning economist who came up with the theory of public choice, which seems to make the startlingly obvious decision Claim that bureaucrats are every bit as self-interested as anybody in the free market.
	And he was absolutely ostracized for this observation.
	You know, they live in this, they dwell in this delusion or self-interested delusion that somehow they are above self-interest and they are just interested in the welfare of mankind.
	Whereas the capitalists are just grubby, greedy individuals Who must be tied in every way possible?
	I fear, Peter, that we are going to remain anomalous, that actually things are just going to get much, much worse, and that the only people who agree with the kind of shit that we're saying are the kind of people who are listening loyally to this podcast.
	LAUGHTER And I feel rather sad that that's the best I can offer, that it's just going to get worse.
	I don't see...
	I think we've set the controls for the heart of the sun.
	I don't think there's any way we can pull out of this journey.
	Well, no, I mean, until we see economic disaster, and then, of course, that will be blamed on capitalism.
	Yes.
	So, yes, I mean, it's easy to be pessimistic.
	I agree with you.
	Yeah.
	So we just have to keep up the good fight.
	Yeah, and just be jolly, which I failed to be.
	I failed on that score.
	I'm sorry for that lapse, people.
	Anyway, if you would like to buy Peter Foster's excellent collection of essays, how dare you?
	When's it out, Peter?
	I think it could be coming out next week.
	I'm not quite sure on the official day, but I think we're about to.
	That's good.
	Yes.
	I'm just flicking through now.
	I see Mark Carney's fundamentalist regulation.
	Mark Carney's threat of sustainable finance.
	Yeah, it's great.
	I'm...
	I'm glad that you're saying this stuff, so thank you.
	And by the way, if you like this podcast, and of course you do, don't forget you can get early access to it if you sign up to my Patreon or my Subscribestar and you join a delicious, delightful community of like-minded people.
	I mean, community is normally a shit word.
	It means bad things, but this is a good community.
	And, yeah.
	So I hope you enjoy this podcast and please support me and see you all next week.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much, Peter Foster.
	Thank you, James.
	Thanks.
	Bye-bye.

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