Michelle Sterling of Friends of Science critiques Trudeau’s 2024 Throne Speech, calling it a "carbon copy" of radical green reports like those from the Tides Foundation and NDP-aligned groups. While it pledged $15B to Alberta’s oil industry under a "transition" guise, she argues policies ignore India’s coal dependence and Alberta’s modest warming trends, dismissing claims of climate criminality by excluding China’s emissions. A University of Alberta report, backed by $3M in grants, falsely labeled her group as anti-science, despite its $150K budget and accurate critiques of wind energy feasibility. Friends of Science countered with billboards and debunked myths like biofuel’s carbon neutrality and hydrogen’s inefficiency, while addressing climate anxiety through playful videos. Sterling’s work exposes politically driven policies that risk economic harm and energy shortages, proving alternatives often lack practicality. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight my guest is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, and we're discussing the green new deal that was Trudeau's latest throne speech, as well as Friends of Science making a demand for a correction from the University of Alberta who got some facts wrong about the upstart climate skeptic group.
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Was Trudeau's latest throne speech the introduction of a Canadian Green New Deal?
I think it might be.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Trudeau's speech from the throne could have been written by the Tides Foundation, now known as Make Way, or the most green radical within the NDP party.
It was extremist and green, even by liberal standards.
The speech promised help for the oil patch.
Oh, but not to get back to work to fuel the country, fuel the economy, and export ethical Canadian fossil fuels to the rest of the world.
But rather, the help was to transition away from one of Canada's best industries.
It's crazy when the world demand for oil and gas is constantly growing.
The world is going to buy oil and gas.
Now they can buy it from oligarchs and tyrants, or they can buy it from Canada.
And I guess Trudeau is happy to help the tyrants oppress their people with the oil wealth that could belong in Canadian pockets.
Joining me tonight to talk about the green speech from the throne, CNN attacking Alberta as one of their top climate criminals, Jason Kenney's remarks on India and green energy, the U of A getting a climate change skeptic group all wrong, and how we can help little kids alleviate some of the climate fears the adults around them are injecting into their delicate psyches is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
I know I listed a lot of things here, so let's get right into it.
the interview we recorded together Tuesday afternoon.
Joining me now from her home in Calgary is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science and her brand new kitten Charlie.
Named after Charlie Hebdo, she tells me.
Michelle, thanks for joining me.
I guess we'll get right into it.
There's so much to talk about, the throne speech, the whole green restart, but let's start a little closer to home first.
Premier Kenney was recently criticized for his comments on intersectionality and India.
So the headline at 660 News reads, and a Calgary City Councillor is very mad about all of this.
Well, actually, I don't know about the Calgary City Councillors story, but I do know about Max Fawcett.
Please do.
I was just going to say there's a Ward 3 councillor in Calgary whose family originated in India, and he's very mad that Jason Kenney said that India cannot move forward with the green future that everybody seems to think that they can.
Oh, well, Dr. Kandakar, who's our scientific advisor, is also from India.
The Climate Hustle00:14:23
And he's told me several times that when the temperature drops in India and the risk of, say, a solar minimum is that people don't have central heating, so they go outside.
The poor people, of course, go outside and they burn anything they have-tires, plastic, dung, firewood, whatever chaff from the field to try and keep warm, you know, and huddle around these outdoor fires.
And I guess the controversy started because Premier Kenney pointed out that India has, what, a billion point three people, and they're primarily operating the country on coal, some nuclear, oil, and dung and biofuels.
But biomass, this is gathered biomass from the fields.
This is not something like here where we go and harvest a forest and turn it into wood pellets.
So the controversy is really about whether or not they're going to jump from fossil fuels and go directly to, you know, wind and solar and bypass the mistakes of the West, as sort of Max Fawcett tried to frame it.
But you can look at the International Energy Agency graphs and I'll send them to you.
But you can see that the coal use there is enormous.
The use of dung is at least 30% of the energy supply.
And, you know, places like India and Africa are being stymied by the West.
Actually, Robert Lyman did an article called Saving the Planet on the Backs of the Poor because the World Bank has refused to finance coal-fired power plants for them.
And coal is the most affordable and most available form of energy.
And in a modern plant, it's really not a pollution problem.
So, you know, that's what people should really be doing to help India get ahead, both with industry and to provide people with running water, pumped sewage, you know, industry jobs, all the things that people here take for granted.
Most of the people there don't have.
So, you know, I guess the whole controversy was about jumping into electric vehicles.
And Premier Kenney had said something to the effect that, you know, in 15 years, they won't all be driving Teslas there.
And that's quite true because you have to realize that if you're going to drive an EV, you need to plug it into something.
And usually it's plugged into a coal plant.
You know, people like to imagine, oh, I'll plug it in here and now I'm running in a clean car.
Well, it depends where your power is coming from.
And most of the time, a lot of it is coal.
So That's not going to happen overnight.
And if you look at Quebec, for instance, let's say, oh, wow, Quebec, all that hydro, you know, we could run all of Quebec on EVs.
No, you can't.
Actually, they don't even have enough hydro in Quebec for 8 million people with that massive James Bay Dam, the Robert Borissa Dam.
They don't have enough hydro to power all of Quebec.
So how would India, which already has blackouts, frequent electrical blackouts for days, hours and days, how would it run an EV fleet?
It's totally ludicrous.
So actually, we just did a little video about this issue for Canada because Canada doesn't have enough power generation for the present EV policy.
So just have a look at our climate Barbie takes an EV for a spin.
It's on our YouTube channel.
So I think that's a great example of the unintended consequences of green policies, these green finance policies, where they've refused to finance coal-fired electricity generation in India.
And that hasn't, of course, I mean, any thinking person probably could have seen this.
It hasn't prompted them to skip over coal and move to green energy.
It's actually caused a backtrack in, you know, how they produce their energy needs, using dung, burning anything that they can find.
Because people are always going, especially in the developing world, people will choose what's cheaper and what's available.
They don't have the luxury of going green because really, it is a first world luxury.
It's not something that is even remotely feasible in the developing world.
That's right.
And, you know, many of the problems in India where the West has tried to impose solar panels on them, for instance, they built a huge solar farm there.
Well, it's very dusty there.
It's quite a dry country in between the monsoon seasons.
So you have to clean those solar panels off.
And now it turns out that they're using water from an aquifer to clean off these panels.
But the people themselves don't have drinking water.
You know, this is taking away from the fundamental survival of the people just to try and impose some green ideology on the poorest people of the world.
Like it's really a crime against humanity.
It's ridiculous.
Now, let's staying close to home.
Albertans love when we are on the international stage.
And I suppose CNN attacking us sort of puts us on the international stage.
Yay, good for us.
But they did sort of attack Premier Kenny for investing in pipelines here in Canada.
They put us sort of in a along with like coal in India and coal in Australia and lignite in Poland and then the oil sands in Fort McMurray as some of the world's bad guys.
Yeah, they're pretty funny actually, CNN.
We called it the climate hustle.
We just sent out a press release across North America on it because, of course, Climate Hustle, the movie, just came out and CNN tried to climate hustle us to Albertans.
First of all, excuse me, they spoke with a researcher from the University of Lethbridge who has said that Alberta is warming faster than the rest of the world.
Well, where have we heard that stuff before?
Everywhere is warming faster than the rest of the world.
This is a very common headline to get a headline.
But when you look at his statistics, his statistics start in 1950 and they go to 2010.
Well, that's a period of a very low in 1950.
And so it gives you a skewed trend.
Now, if you look at the long-term record, which our people did, and Ken Gregory has done some graphs, I'll send them to you, you can see that actually the long-term trend for summers is cooling and the winter trend is warming.
But warming in winter for us is good because you use less heating, you know, it's a bit nicer out.
And of course, our idea of warming is, what, one or two degrees warmer, but when it's minus 30, it's not that noticeable.
But, you know, so it's actually not a big deal.
And one of the most important things that we said in that press release is something that Robert Lyman has brought to everyone's attention in his report, Futile Folly.
And that is that China emits in one month about what Canada emits in one and a half years.
Okay, so we're not the big problem on the planet in terms of global warming and emissions.
So, you know, Robert Lyman actually said at the time, Canada's climate policies in the global context are extraordinarily expensive and dangerous, political, grandstanding.
Canadians deserve better.
So, you know, CNN can flap their lips all they want, but we're not the problem.
And they're using skewed information.
Well, and, you know, they don't really address the problem of real pollution.
Like, they don't.
There's smog in Los Angeles.
New York produces a lot of smog.
That's real, actual pollution.
But CO2 emissions that happen downstream of oil sands production, as in people are burning it in their car or anything like that.
It's really inconsequential.
And you're right to point out that, look, when China, when CNN doesn't even put China on their map of big problematic emissions or big problematic emitters, that's really an agenda-driven article and dishonest.
It's completely dishonest.
Yes, it is.
Yeah, very dishonest.
Yeah.
Now, one more thing we wanted to talk about here.
You're actually calling on the U of A to issue a retraction.
You want them to set the record straight.
Yes, we ran across a paper which is called Assessing the Barriers to Wind in Alberta, which was done by the Resource Economics and Environment Department there, or faculty there.
First of all, we ran across it by accident.
It was kind of alarming and annoying to find that they had besmirched our reputation and that they were afraid of our small little group and Grassroots Alberta as if we were going to upturn policy in Canada as anti-climate science people.
That's how they termed us.
They replied, or they relied on a couple of newspaper articles which should suggest that we were funded by fossil fuels and therefore obviously could not be worthy of consideration.
None of that's true.
And you'd think that people who live in Edmonton and we have many members in Friends of Science who are faculty or sorry are alumni of the University of Alberta.
You'd think that they could pick up the phone or send an email and confirm whether or not these articles are true.
But they didn't do that.
These are graduate researchers.
So that's not very good research.
Then they go on to make up a lot of stuff about how wind could operate in Alberta.
And, you know, it's not true what they're saying.
And so it's too bad the engineering department didn't get a chance to go through their paper and advise them properly.
So another thing that they did in this report is they refer to an article in which Environmental Defense is quoted as saying, oh, you know, Friends of Science running a billboard campaign.
We could never afford to do that because, you know, we run on a paper-thin budget.
So this was from a few years ago.
Their paper-thin budget at that time was $3 million tax subsidized and foreign-funded.
And, you know, we don't have anything like that.
We operate on about $150,000 a year in volunteer power.
So, you know, honestly, these people should do much better research than they're doing.
But what people should really know about is this has been funded by the government.
So we have a government-funded university with a report that's funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant.
And the information is incorrect.
Like what happened to accuracy and critical thinking in universities?
It seems like it's a propaganda method to try and tell wind developers how they can encourage rural farmers, many of whom are skeptical of the climate catastrophe claims, how to encourage them, push them into adopting wind farms on their property.
So, you know, it seems more like an exercise in propaganda.
So we have called for retraction.
And ironically, it was the same week that our billboard campaign was running in Edmonton, which is really funny.
You can't afford a billboard, Michelle.
Well, we're very modest in our campaigns, you know.
And in this case, we did have one of our members help us out, but we're grateful for that.
But it's a very modest campaign, but, you know, something, get the message out there.
Well, and I think it's great that on your, I mean, it's the same with us.
On a modest little shoestring budget, you are punching above your weight to the point where you are spooking University of Alberta researchers into writing completely inaccurate things.
I mean, you're the boogeyman on your tiny little budget, which, I mean, just speaks to how effective you are.
Imagine if you had their kind of money, the other side's kind of money.
You know, dare to dream.
Now, let's move on to the national scale.
We've covered off three things about Alberta.
I wanted to speak to you about the speech from the throne, because when I watched the speech from the throne and this stuff about the green restart, and I found out that basically everybody is disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 recession, except for men who actually incidentally are dying at rates of three to two over women.
But I mean, let's disregard that.
But I wanted to talk to you about the green restart, because as I watched the speech from the throne, it really felt like an NDP speech from the throne with a lot of the environmentalism and socialism that was shoehorned into it.
I think that speech from the throne could have really been anything from, you know, the far left recesses of the NDP.
Green Restart Redux00:02:18
It could have been written by the Tides Foundation, really.
Well, you know, if you look at the run-up to this time period, in June, there were at least one or two reports that came out on climate accountability law.
One was from the Canadians, what is it for climate choices?
The other one was from a group of environmental law groups like EcoJustice, CANRAC, which is 100 ENGOs in one group, Equitaire, Pembina, and I think one other, I can't remember.
Then subsequently, a group of 24 ENGOs put out the proposal for a green budget.
And it's just loaded with green, And after that, there was another proposition put out.
And then on September the 16th, the Gerald Butz Task Force for Resilient Recovery put out a bold five moves report.
What do they call it?
Bridge to the Future, I think.
And it's almost a carbon copy of what's in the throne speech.
And, you know, Parker Gallant has done some very excellent research on the parties behind this task force.
So it's the Smart Prosperity Institute, International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the Ivy Foundation.
And so Smart Prosperity was founded by Stuart Elgy, who also founded EcoJustice.
And they received $155,000 from three Canadian foundations and was awarded $1.8 million over seven years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, that same group that funded the U of A report.
So it's based at the University of Ottawa, and they also got money from the McConnell Foundation, gave them $725,000.
Hydrogen Fuel Push?00:07:49
And SSHRCC falls under the responsibility of Navdi Baines, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.
So, you know, you have government funding groups that are already agenda-driven to give them a report that they can incorporate into their throne speech.
So there's no dissenting voices there.
These are all cheerleaders.
So this is, you know, no due diligence has been done on any of these things.
Like we did a rebuttal to Smart Prosperity's report in 2017 called Grounded in Reality.
Because again, at that time, they had promised 60,000 jobs a year through clean growth.
Well, that never happened.
And now they're promising a million jobs.
Well, that's not going to happen either because you can't turn around an economy when all of the proposals for resilient recovery are ones that rely on tax subsidies.
You know, none of the propositions deal with external trade.
And this is part of the thing that I think people don't quite understand about why, you know, Albertans are upset.
Because we, as people who produce energy for the world, understand that you have to reach those world markets and get money back in.
You have to have that trade going on before you can create real jobs that generate other jobs and other income.
So if you're building a wind farm, you're actually taking money and putting it into the wind farm.
And that money is coming from the pockets of the taxpayer.
Then the wind farm costs more money to run, to integrate to the grid, to generate power, and that puts up prices for the consumer and for industry and takes more money from the taxpayer.
And a lot of these climate clean programs, they're structured in such a way that taxes are greatly reduced.
Whereas when you have oil and gas type of jobs, there's royalties, there's taxes, there's land leases, there's all kinds of tiers of income that flow to all levels of government, and including the job creation.
So, you know, what is this green recovery going to be?
A bunch of climate kids, all the Greta followers running around in the woods planting trees?
Because we don't want that.
You know, we have an excellent forestry industry in Canada, very high standard of professionalism, probably the best in the world.
We don't need a bunch of, you know, high school dropouts deciding, oh, I'm going to save the planet.
I'm going to plant a tree.
You know, it's a profession.
It's not something that you do because you don't have any other job.
So anyway, everything in the speech from the throne is really not feasible.
No one's done any due diligence.
Hydrogen, for instance, you know, they're planning that we could go zero emission vehicles with hydrogen.
Well, you know, Samuel Farfari just put out a book in French called The Hydrogen Utopia.
It's going to be out in English soon.
He's been working on hydrogen since the 1970s, and it's a dead end.
You know, it has useful applications, but it's a form of energy that takes energy to create.
So every time you do something with hydrogen, you reduce the actual energy of this important molecule, and it should be reserved for other important uses.
So, you know, there's really just this tremendous depth of ideology, green ideology that's washed over Canada, and we're really, really not grounded in reality anymore.
And we're going to go aground.
You know, the Titanic is going to sink.
I wanted to ask you about this, even though it wasn't on our list of things to talk about.
And I've seen the push coming from the federal government now.
And I know that you and I both have a friend named Marian Pools who did some really great freelance work for us in Germany a little while ago.
There's this push from the federal government for farmers to produce biofuels as opposed to food as a means to bring down Canada's CO2 emissions and I guess get us off dependence on oil.
Can you tell us a little bit about what some of the consequences of a push to a push to have farmers produce biofuels on our limited arable land, what's that going to do to us?
Well, it's first of all, it's a crime against humanity.
And that was declared by the UN Special Rapporteur in 2007, Jean Ziegler.
And you can see the impact of biofuels on the world by looking at the NEXI site.
This is the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Excuse me.
And they did a study in 2013 because they wanted to find out what was driving the refugee crisis in Europe.
And what they found out is that the biofuel industry in the United States, which is stemming from a climate policy, took 6.5 megatons of food off world markets.
And that's food for cattle, food for people, corn.
It's a very, it's a staple in most parts of the world.
And they put it in fuel tanks.
Well, what that did is it drove up food prices all over the world.
And they could actually track and see, they could predict where the next civil unrest would be due to the price of food going up.
So most people, when they look at the whole issue of the Arab Spring, they think that that was related to the Arab world turning to democracy.
Well, most of it was related to the price of food going up and the lack of work.
And so those will be similar consequences here.
You know, biofuels are not a net zero proposition because you have to use fuel, as you know, you have to use fuel to seed the crop, to make sure that it grows with herbicides, pesticides, whatever.
And you use fossil fuels throughout that process.
And there's tons of QuickDick McNick videos on how much fuel is used.
But at the end, you don't end up with less carbon dioxide.
And it's just a waste of food.
You know, and we've had a couple of biofuel plants in Alberta.
I think 2015 or so, there was one that was worth $36 million of taxpayers' money, went bust.
It's just not what people think it is.
Unfortunately, people are theorizing about these things, making up models, and they're not actually asking farmers who would know.
Yeah, and I'd like to refer people to Marian Poole's documentary, The Uncertainty Has Settled, that's posted on the Friends of Science YouTube channel.
If you'd like to learn more about the unintended consequences of encouraging farmers and subsidizing farmers to move away from food production in favor of biofuels, it disrupts the local supply chains, local food, drives up the cost of food.
It's really quite a catastrophe.
And again, that's on the Friends of Science YouTube page.
Garden Gnome's Climate Hope00:06:09
Michelle, all sorts of films are up now.
Yes.
So we have Paradogma as well.
And also Return to Eden, his most recent one, just came out.
So all three of them are there.
Anyway, yes.
And I make a brief appearance in Paradogma.
Now, Michelle, there's something else that you're doing that I think is really quite wonderful.
There's a lot of hysteria.
We know that children are getting, I guess, climate anxiety.
And I don't think it's because of climate change.
I think it's because the grown-ups around them won't shut up about the impending doom of what they think climate change is going to do to everybody.
And you've done some really neat things on your YouTube channel, but also you've written some books to help alleviate some of that anxiety in children and show them that it's really not the catastrophe the grown-ups in their lives say it is.
Yes, we have a small series of little video vignettes and we're turning them into books as well.
But the theme is kid-friendly climate tales.
They're intended for parents or adults to watch with the kids because it's not detailed climate information, but it's just something to try and set things in perspective in a fun way.
And our latest one is The Garden Gnomes.
Grampy the Garden Gnome.
That's it.
Grampy the Garden Gnome Stops Boiling Oceans.
And this is based on the fact that James Hansen, the U.S. climate scientist who's pushing for Canada to have a $210 a ton carbon tax.
Anyway, years ago he wrote a book called Storms for My Grandchildren.
And there's a piece in there where he predicts when aliens come to see the Earth, it's all burnt up, it's a mess, that the oceans will be boiling in 500 years.
Well, he's now writing a new book and he's saying, oh, that won't happen in 500 years.
We should take that out.
Well, you know, you just scared a whole generation of people.
Scared them to bits.
And, you know, you're off by 999,999,000 years.
Like, that's a pretty big margin of error.
So anyway, we made this funny little garden gnome animation.
In the garden and uh, hope kids will like it, hope the parents will like it, and the idea just to start some conversation about uh, time frames on climate, context of climate, and that it shouldn't be that scary and that kids should have fun right I, I forget which one.
It was where I think it was with the rabbits.
You have a video with bunnies and it did put into context yeah, the tiny rabbits.
It put into context just how small we are in comparison to the sun and the climate change debate, completely takes out that big burning ball of gas out of the equation and says no no no, it's you, it's how you're living, it's your suv.
And that video was great because it reminded kids, by the way, that that thing that makes it warm outside, that probably has a lot to do with everything.
I thought that was really great.
Oh yeah yeah thanks yeah, it was fun.
Um Michelle, I want to give you a chance to let people know how they can support the work that you do at Friends OF Science.
We've mentioned the youtube page, but other social media, if you could.
Oh well, we're on Linkedin.
We're on Twitter, Friends OH Science.
We're on Facebook.
Uh, we have an instagram account and um, have I left anything out?
And our website yeah, and our blog yeah, our website and our blog oh, and actually we have a more recent report that Robert Lyman just put out that's very important for Alberta and that is the whole stranded assets myth by Mark Carney.
You know, Robert Lyman looked at the projections and trends for all the oil use around the world and again we're going back to that conversation that we had about Max Fawcett's article and premier Kenny's comments.
Oil demand is booming worldwide, so no stranded assets.
So um, you can find that on our blog, great.
And membership to Friends OF Science.
How do people sign up for one of those?
Oh yes, on our, on our homepage of our website, there's a donate membership button and you can just click there and you can choose whether to become a member for a year or for three years or just to donate.
Whatever you prefer to do, and you know, if you can't afford that, just uh, keep sharing our stuff and enjoying our stuff.
We love to hear from people as well, and we hope you'll just get out there and talk climate common sense.
I think we're all pretty lucky to have people like Michelle Sterling and the gang at Friends of Science advocating for a robust discussion on climate change.
And they're constantly under attack.
Facebook has tried to censor them and block their ads in the past.
Friends of science, they really punch above their weight and annoy all the right people.
And that's why I am a friend of Friends of Science.
They just want to tell the other side of the story of the climate change debate, much like we do here at Rebel News and with Friends of Science shoestring budget and their actual scientists.
I think they're making a difference.
They don't have big protests.
They don't have big budget media blitz campaigns.
They don't have big backers with deep pockets.
They just have the facts and the facts are on their side.
Well, everyone, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.