Tom Harris, attending the June 23rd "Just Recovery for All" Zoom rally by LeadNow and allies—including Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Liberal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson—criticizes its radical push to dismantle fossil fuels via wind/solar, despite citing colonialism, racism, and Indigenous sovereignty. He highlights Spain’s turbine bird/bat deaths (200+ per year), Ontario land displacements like Shelly Correa’s, and China/Africa supply chain abuses, while dismissing "runaway climate change" claims against UN forecasts and 1°C warming since 1880. His new group, Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy, champions adaptation over restrictions, urging conservatives to counter leftist coordination with evidence-based opposition. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition, and he's really been doing the Lord's work lately.
He sat in on a Zoom call online environmentalist rally of a thousand environmentalists, and he's going to bring us the inside scoop.
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What is the environmentalist movement organizing online when they think nobody is watching?
And what on earth are conservatives and freethinkers doing to stop it?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Normally, I don't tell you who my guest is until after my little blurb here, but I'm going to tell you right now.
My guest tonight is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
And he did something that most conservatives who are concerned about the government and the left using climate change as a means to rob our pockets don't normally do.
He listened to the left and the government.
You see, Tom sat in on an online Zoom environmentalist rally hosted by far left-wing activists from Lead Now and joined by Elizabeth May of the Green Party and Canada's liberal environment minister, Jonathan Wilkinson.
This thing was completely normalized.
Tom joins me tonight to tell us what he heard the environmentalists plotting for Canada with the full endorsement of these mainstream left-wing politicians.
Tom, though, also offers an antidote to these radical, left-wing environmentalist organizations like Lead Now, because we know Lead Now has been up to their anti-conservative baloney for the better part of a decade.
And by and large, the official conservatives have been asleep at the wheel through it all.
So my guest tonight, in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon, is good friend of the show, Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
He now from his home in Ottawa is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition and another organization, which Tom will tell you about at the end of the show.
Now, I wanted to have Tom on the show today because he's written a couple of really great articles since I talked to him last, but he also did a really incredible piece of journalism that involved going to a Lead Now rally that was held on Zoom.
And Tom was the eyes and ears of normal people into, I guess, this climate strategy that Lead Now is trying to put together.
So joining me now is Tom Harris.
Tom, thanks for coming on the show.
Please tell us about what happened in the Lead Now Zoom rally.
Yeah, exactly.
On June 23rd, they had a mass online rally.
And when I say mass, I really mean it.
There were 40 pages of 25 persons per page.
So that's a thousand people.
I've never been on a Zoom call of a thousand people before.
And apparently on Facebook, there were others.
So there was easily way over a thousand people.
And they called it Just Recovery for All.
It was organized by LeadNow, 350 Canada, and Climate Action Network and Sierra Club BC.
Now, they're just four of hundreds of groups that are calling for what they consider a just recovery out of COVID-19.
Now, the just recovery, you know, it's kind of interesting.
It's not just climate.
Mass Online Rally00:08:06
In fact, here's what they say.
For years, we have witnessed the results of chronic underinvestment and inaction in the face of the ongoing pre-existing crises of, number one, colonialism.
Okay, so they're incorporating not just climate change, but what they consider racism against black people.
And there were lots of shout outs to Black Lives Matter throughout the Zoom call.
They're also talking about native sovereignty and all sorts of rights that natives should have in addition to, you know, what they already have.
They were talking about human rights abuses, migrant workers coming to Canada.
And oh my goodness, they're not getting all of our services, even though they, whether they should be here is another question.
Social inequality, rich versus poor.
There was a support for socialism being broadcast throughout.
And then, of course, they're linking it all together to environmental degradation and climate change.
So they want to reshape our entire society, not just a little bit, but radically.
And I'll tell you a little later why we should be quite concerned about this, because, you know, when they can get a thousand people on a Zoom call, they can bring in the Minister of the Environment actually appeared, Elizabeth May, various other MPs that we can talk about later.
We have to take them pretty seriously because, boy, they got a big movement.
So the Minister of the Environment, the federal minister of the environment was involved in this call that's basically denouncing Canada as racist and basically saying for a complete and total phase out of the fossil fuel industry here in Canada, a major segment of the Canadian economy.
And I also think it's quite interesting that a bunch of white environmentalists are who are actually, I would suggest, doing real acts of colonialism by damning Canada's Indigenous communities to generational poverty by eliminating that really aggressive vehicle to wealth creation called the fossil fuel industry.
I mean, we know the largest employer of Indigenous people in Canada is fossil fuels.
It's mining.
It's oil and gas.
It's really a way out.
And in Alberta here, a lot of our Indigenous groups partner with industry.
They incorporate their own businesses.
The bands own businesses like the Miccasu Cree in oil and gas.
And so when you have these largely white environmentalists telling them that they need to get out of the fossil fuel industry, that feels a little bit like colonialism to me.
But please tell me what the environment minister had to say in all of this, because this is crazy.
Well, the environment minister gave a pre-recorded presentation to the group, but he does obviously take them quite seriously because he's trying to appease them.
It was interesting, though, as soon as Elizabeth May got on, she attacked the minister and she said, oh, these words, you know, and we're still in a climate crisis.
And it's interesting, if you actually look at the LEAD Now Just Recovery for All, one of their axioms, they say that we should be making the transition towards a low carbon economy.
Canada will therefore be more prepared for any future crises.
Well, how can you be more prepared for future crises if you get rid of your least expensive, most abundant, most reliable sources of energy?
I mean, they want us to rely on wind and solar power.
And then they go on about all the jobs that will be created.
But you know, it's interesting, Sheila.
The people leading this call were all very young, either late teens or in their 20s, early 20s.
And yet, when I scanned the group, you know, as I say, a thousand people online, when I went page after page, many of them, if not the majority, were late middle-aged people learning and watching and seniors.
Okay, so what you have is a little bit like the Children's Crusade.
You have these extremely young people who are advocating causes and charging off in different directions, really not knowing what they're talking about, but they're very good at organizing and activism.
And this is where conservatives should be quite concerned because, I mean, real conservatives, not like Peter McKay, who in many cases will actually support what these people are saying.
But, you know, they are talking about organizing Zoom calls with MPs across the country from coast to coast with hundreds of people and hundreds of constituents.
And I've signed up actually to be involved in these so I can hear actually what goes on because, you know, they say they want to be nonpartisan and they want to be, you know, open-minded.
Well, will they be open-minded to alternative points of view?
That'll be interesting to see.
But, you know, the conservative movement has generally speaking not taken these groups seriously enough.
What we need is to have opposing groups who also meet with their MPs, have Zoom calls, sign petitions.
I mean, this petition that they just sent to the government had over 100,000 signatures.
Okay.
And, you know, people who are on the line, like the NDP environment critic, Laura Collins from Victoria, I mean, they're taking it very, very seriously.
They really want to reshape Canada, not just from an environmental perspective and energy, getting rid of our least expensive, best energy sources.
They want to bring in all kinds of other causes like I listed at the beginning.
Essentially, they want to see a utopian or maybe dystopian is a better way to put it, a socialist government and socialist society in which many of their ideals are being lumped in with the climate scare.
So I think we should take this quite seriously and to the best extent we can, organize opposition to this because, you know, they otherwise left unopposed with 100,000 signatures to their petition, 1,000 people at least in that one Zoom call, you know, they're going to actually start to really sway our society and change the way we operate.
I mean, they're vehemently anti-capitalist.
They want to have socialism, not recognizing that the source of our income is our success in the capitalist fossil fuel industry.
So, you know, we can talk about later some of the things that we're doing to get ready to oppose this.
But indeed, it is serious when these groups are so vocal and so confident, even though they really don't know what they're talking about.
You know, you raise two very important issues in the things you just said.
First of all, the fact that this environmentalist Marxist revolution, I think this is just another prong of the Marxist revolution happening all around us when you factor in like BLM and these Occupy Redux autonomous zones that are popping up all over the place, including Toronto.
And then, you know, this Marxist environmentalist revolution that's happening online.
And like you say, conservatives are asleep at the wheel.
This is being led by young people, and we should have been prepared for this, knowing full well that Greta Thunberg is going on her second year of scolding adults.
It's fascinating to me to see the number of adults who are willing to be scolded by young people who absolutely have zero life experience at all.
I mean, a lot of these people, like you point out, sitting in on these calls, they're older people.
They've raised teenagers.
They know that teenagers know next to nothing about a lot of things.
So why are they sitting there taking advice from these young people?
It's very strange.
It is strange.
I mean, I was struck by how very young they were and how idealistically driven they were.
You know, many of them are probably still living with their parents.
I mean, they don't actually have to earn a living.
I mean, in many cases.
And, you know, one of the things they say here, they say there's no way we can go back to normal.
Normal was gross inequality and runaway climate change.
Well, it was interesting that Elizabeth May corrected them on that.
You know, obviously there isn't runaway climate change.
She's trying to avoid that.
She says we have a narrow window.
This is what the website says.
Liberals' Vision for Post-Pandemic Restart00:04:36
We have a narrow window of opportunity to shape the government's plans so that we come out the other side of the pandemic, better equipped to take care of each other and the planet.
Well, you know, it's going to be very difficult for Canada to get back to normal even without these changes.
Okay.
It's a little bit like you're trying to rescue somebody and somebody else is pulling them underwater.
I mean, the bottom line is we've had a huge impact of this COVID-19.
And if we can get back to normal, we'll be very lucky.
The last thing we need to do is pile on top of the requirements for recovery all these demands, and they call them demands of the left-wing groups.
I mean, as I say, the best thing we can do is focus on getting back to normal as soon as possible.
And these groups, you know, they can work on their causes later, but they want to incorporate them all into the actual recovery.
And the government, sadly, is listening.
Oh, yes, the government has written this sort of stuff into some of their big business loans, the bailout loans, that they have to have a climate plan if they want to qualify for any sort of government help.
It's like having a values test before they put you on a ventilator.
It's very ridiculous.
Yeah, that's actually a really good analogy: a values test before we save your life.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, imagine if we did that in other government services like healthcare.
And yet nobody seems to bat an eye when Justin Trudeau shoehorns all this stuff into the life support for these large job creators.
You did point out that this is by LEAD Now.
And lead now, conservatives should have done something to prepare themselves for lead now.
Since Lead Now has been at this for, I would suggest the better part of a decade.
They organized the Vote Together campaign back in, I believe it was 2015, that they identified key.
They say they're non-political, but they helped identify key ridings where the conservatives would be benefiting from a vote split between the left and organize progressive voters to vote together, be it for the liberals or the NDP, whoever could stop the conservative.
And so they're doing that sort of work again right now.
You can see they're working with the NDP.
They're working with the liberals.
They're definitely working against the conservatives.
And where were conservatives and conservative groups and just groups who would present an alternative to whatever LEAD Now is offering?
Where have they been the last 10 years?
And when Conservatives were in power, they didn't do much to deal with these sort of foreign-funded third-party groups meddling in our democracy.
Yeah, and when the Conservatives got into power, they changed their position entirely on climate change.
I mean, it's almost like they want to be with the in-crowd, you know, and the in-crowd is defined supposedly by our media.
But, you know, I think that there are huge numbers of Canadians who are totally fed up with this.
And if you had a politician stand up, whoever wins the Conservative leadership, if they were to stand up and say, look, this is ridiculous.
We're not going to restart the economy with all these shackles attached to us.
We're going to get back to a strong society in which we take advantage of our really bountiful fossil fuel resources to build Canada into a country that we're proud of.
And, you know, I think conservatives, generally speaking, are far too complacent.
You know, these groups, they advocate that they're non-partisan.
In fact, this was a big point in the whole Zoom call.
Oh, we're non-partisan.
But then, of course, you look at the screens.
They said, everybody, hold up your signs so that we can actually give the minister a message.
Well, I held up my sign, which said something like, adapt to climate change.
It'll be interesting to see if that gets sent to the minister.
But, you know, I really do think that conservatives have got to be more active because these people are radically trying.
Well, they're not just trying.
They're succeeding in changing our society in ways that will ruin Canada, quite frankly.
Now, I want to go into your article that was published in America Out Loud.
You wrote it with Dr. Jay Lair.
It was published on the 16th in America Out Loud.
And it deals with some of these shackles that you are referring to when we restart our economy.
Forget Wind and Solar Power00:03:36
And the article is titled, Forget Wind and Solar Power for COVID Recovery.
And it seems as though green energy is the focus of the COVID recovery.
This is their moment in time where they want to rewrite our economy instead of restart it in a way where it can grow back to where it once was.
And you sort of dissect the problems with this sort of green recovery focus that we're seeing from the liberals.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, in many ways, perhaps unintentionally, I don't know, but the left are often sabotaging causes they hold dear by promoting wind and solar.
I mean, think about it, wind turbines in Spain alone, and we talked about this when we were being, you know, we were at the COP meetings in Spain.
They're killing millions of birds and bats in Spain alone.
200 birds per year per turbine, 400 bats per year per turbine.
So if you care about nature and conservation, you should really oppose wind turbines.
Similarly, if you really care about social justice and the poor, you should oppose wind turbines because they're jacking the prices up hugely and we're forced to pay for it because of course there's so much government subsidies.
If you're concerned about people who don't have the wealth to live or to just simply move when a turbine is put up, you should be against wind turbines.
Because Shelly Correa, for example, from Lincoln County in Ontario, she moved to Lincoln County.
It's very much like, you know, Andy of Mayberry's country area.
And she was promised that they wouldn't put up a wind turbine near her house.
This was during the Kathleen Wynne administration for Ontario.
And sure enough, they put up a 60-plus story wind turbine only 550 meters from her house approximately.
Okay, so they just did it anyways.
And of course, she can't afford to just simply pack up and leave.
I'm sure her property value has gone way down because who wants to live beside one of these monstrosities?
So, you know, in many cases, the causes that the left say they hold dear are being sabotaged by these wind and solar projects.
And of course, if you're building a massive solar station in the middle of the desert, you completely upset the desert ecosystem.
In California, they're building something called Project Gemini, which is a huge solar station.
Believe it or not, under the Trump administration, they have actually approved what will be the largest solar station in U.S. history.
And they have to collect up all these endangered tortoises during the construction phase, hold them somewhere else.
Half of them will likely die, and then put them back in under the solar panels.
So, yeah, you talk about environmental destruction.
And where do you think all these materials are coming from?
In many cases, they're coming from China, okay, with these rare earth elements from China and from Africa, mined under incredibly bad environmental conditions, often using coal as their source of energy to make the wind turbines, which I always find kind of ironic.
And of course, there's human rights abuses where they use slave labor and child labor.
So, again, these are causes the left say they hold dear, and yet they're advocating energy sources that are not only inefficient and will cost us a fortune, but will hurt the people they say they care about.
And, you know, I think that what's happening here is because the movement is largely led by very young people, they just really haven't put two and two together and realized that they're really being bamboozled, that in fact, it's sabotaging their own causes.
Historic Weather Records Matter00:02:27
Yeah, it's funny that the movement, the environmental movement is led by people who really have only paid attention to the weather, maybe the last year of their life.
They don't actually have experience when you think about like, okay, well, five years ago, we had a really terrible winter, or three years ago, we had a lot of rain.
And then four years before that, we had a drought and our crops didn't grow.
They don't really have that sort of anecdotal historical data to put what they are seeing and experiencing today into context.
And then they're turning that lack of historical knowledge into an entire political movement.
And they are running roughshod over the rest of us because we're letting them.
Well, that's right.
They're very brave, you know, and I will give that to them.
They are showing to some extent what we should be doing.
I mean, having the courage to speak out for what we believe in.
And, you know, if they were to do fundamental research, they would understand very quickly that their causes don't make any sense, not just in the climate, but in all sorts of areas.
And I'll give an example.
I'll send you a link to what is probably the very best database in the world of extreme weather events.
And that is the records that are kept for every state in the United States, all 50 states, and they record when the highest temperature was, the lowest temperature, the most snow, the most rainfall, all that sort of thing.
And what you'll find is that in the whole of the 21st century, only two states set their maximum temperature record, just two out of 50 in that whole 20 years.
If you go back to the 1930s, I believe it's 1936, where you had something like 15 states set their all-time high records, and those records still stand.
And, you know, I find it quite interesting because 2018, for example, there was only one record set in the whole U.S.
And remember, this is a pretty big area for statewide records.
And that was the largest hailstone in the history of Alabama.
It was actually five inches in diameter.
If you can imagine hail coming down, if there was one at five inches, there must have been lots of them at three and four.
So, I mean, it would have been real bombardment.
But I mean, the bottom line is if they did some research, they would realize that the actual statistics that are there that go back through the historic record show that hurricanes and tornadoes were far worse in the past than they are now and all the other extreme weather events that they get all excited about.
Preparing for Climate Change00:08:00
And that doesn't mean we shouldn't address climate change.
We should.
And in fact, the new group that we're starting, one of the things we're going to focus on is adaptation to climate change because climate will change no matter what we do.
The biggest fear, of course, is global cooling, because in a country like Canada, there's nobody farming north of us.
So whose farming practices do we adopt if indeed it gets a lot colder?
If it gets warmer, well, so what?
We can actually use the farming practices in Arkansas.
So yeah, we should prepare for climate change.
But mainly we should be preparing for cooling, quite frankly.
You know, I'm glad you raised farming practices because I've always thought it to be quite ironic that the same people who are opposed to, I guess, if you care about climate change, and depending on how you look at it, sometimes I do.
It's the same people who oppose like drought resistant or short or seeds that are GMO modified to deal with a shorter growing season.
It's always the people who are opposed to GMO seeds that would help us adapt to climate change if it is indeed going to create shorter growing seasons or longer growing seasons or more droughts.
Those are the same people who are ringing the alarm bell about climate change.
It's very strange that they would oppose the very things that would create a solution to the problem they say we're all going to face.
Yeah, I think largely they're anti-Western civilization.
Thank you.
And the best way to do that is to cripple us with incredible restrictions on how we operate, not allow us to use the things that would actually help save us if there was a climate crisis, which there isn't.
I mean, you're talking about just over one degree Celsius rise since 1880.
So everything they're talking about really has to be sometime in the future based on computer models that don't work.
Because if you actually look at the real data, there's nothing going on.
Yeah, I read somewhere the other day that Alberta hasn't had, or at least where I live, my region of Alberta hasn't had a day over 28 degrees Celsius since I think it was 2018.
So, I mean, they told me that every year it's going to get hotter and hotter and hotter and we're all going to die.
And yet, the last two years with more people, more fossil fuel usage, more fossil fuel mining, we haven't seen that play out.
And yet they tell me the threat is immediate, 12 years or 10 years or 11 years or whatever it is.
Now, Tom, you've been very generous with your time, but you have an exciting new thing you want to tell us about because you are offering us a solution to these uninformed, youthful activists who are sort of running roughshod over the rest of us.
You, instead of just pointing out the problem, you're offering a solution.
So please tell us about that.
Yeah, we're just on the verge of launching a new group.
We're not going to use the name Climate Realism Canada as we were before.
I mean, you know, there's various problems with that name.
It sounds a lot like Al Gore's group, Climate Reality Canada.
But what we're calling the group, and it's a not-for-profit incorporated corporation that's just about to start, and we'll be making a big announcement about this.
It's called Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
Okay, because that's what we want.
We want sensible climate policy, policy that actually matches the economics and the resource availability that we have in Canada and the science.
Now, we're not going to focus so much on the science.
We're going to actually direct people more to the International Climate Science Coalition or to Friends of Science who are really superb.
And people should check that out at friendsofscience.org, I believe, is their website.
And we're going to work with them quite a lot in Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
And we're really going to focus hard on the policy aspects and what it would happen to Canada if we actually did what these environmental groups are advocating that we do.
And for that reason, we have Bob Lyman, who's working with us.
He's extremely good on policy formulation.
And, you know, it's interesting, the World Economic Forum and others keep talking about net zero by 2050.
So we're asking, well, before the Canadian government imposes yet more climate restrictions on us, increases more tax and everything else, don't we have a right to ask them for their evidence?
Because like you said, their forecasts are not coming true.
None of the UN forecasts for climate change have come true.
And yet we're basing Canadian government policy on the supposed authenticity of these forecasts when you look at the future.
So surely Canadians have a right to say, look, you have the onus to prove to us that it's worth spending all this money on trying to stop climate change.
And of course, we're going to point out things like Canada's contribution to greenhouse gases in the world is trivial in comparison with China.
But more importantly, we're going to point out that to a large extent, CO2 is a great thing to want to increase.
And in today's America Out Loud, and if people go there, AmericaOutLoud.com, we have a new piece about to come out as to how conservatives have to change the way they use language.
Because right now, we're supporting our enemies by calling it carbon pollution or carbon emissions.
It's not.
It's carbon dioxide.
That is one of the greatest hoaxes of the whole climate debate, that we could have tax against the gas that you breathe out.
I mean, it's really amazing that they could have bamboozled people so thoroughly on this.
So yeah, Canadians for climate, let's get it right here, eh?
Canadians for sensible climate policy work on adaptation and continue the research so that someday we may be able to forecast what the climate will do in the future.
And that's our group.
We're about to start.
And I'll let you and everyone know as soon as we're ready.
Please, I'm looking forward to that.
One of the things that Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science is so great at doing is breaking down these really large, complex ideas and, you know, with words that you don't use in your everyday parlance and digesting it in a way that normal people can both understand but arm themselves with.
So I'm very excited to hear that Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy will be doing the same because I think people really need to understand.
We hear net zero and we think it sounds good, but what does that mean for your family?
What does it mean for your SUV?
What does it mean for your bank account?
There's not enough of that out there.
So I'm very excited.
Please let me know when you launch because we're going to have you back on the show for sure.
Well, it's going to be a great group and we're going to be helping coordinate all the various climate realist groups together so that we have a unified approach.
One of our main supporters will be Friends of Science.
Oh, that's fantastic, Tom.
Thank you very much for coming on the show today.
You're always, like I said, so generous with your time.
We'll have you back on very, very soon.
And have a great Dominion Day.
Yes, exactly.
Thank you, Sheila.
I like what Tom Harris is doing.
He realizes it's not enough to just be against the radical environmentalist plans for your life and your money.
You have to actually do something about it.
And you have to do what the left does.
And that's network and organize and build opposition to something to build a real unified movement.
So I wish Tom the best of luck with Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Have a wonderful Dominion Day.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next weekend.