Tom Harris, from the International Climate Science Coalition, argues Biden’s Keystone XL cancellation lets Trudeau avoid economic fallout for Alberta’s 11,000 projected jobs while aligning with anti-fossil fuel ideology. Harris critiques CBC’s bias, including ombudsman policies dismissing climate skeptics as "100% wrong," and calls activists’ push for wind/solar "magical thinking." With Canada’s emissions dwarfed by China’s, they advocate adaptation over futile mitigation, like permafrost-resistant infrastructure. Gunn-Reed’s show, The Gun Show, recorded near Hardesty’s built pipeline section, frames this as a clash between climate activism and industrial reality. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
And this week you're in for a real treat.
Maybe you can hear some buzzing and whirring and humming in the background.
That's because I'm standing beside the cooler at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Mirror.
And my show is filmed on location here this week because this has become my office.
Now, the show is not about the whistle stop.
It is about Keystone XL and Joe Biden and how Canadian politicians are handling the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
And my guest tonight to discuss all those things and more is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition.
Now, if you like listening to the show, then I promise you're going to love watching it.
But in order to watch, you need to be a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's what we call our long-form TV style shows here on Rebel News.
My subscribers get access to, well, of course, my show, but also Ezra's Nightly, Ezra Levant Show, and David Menzies' fun Friday night show, Rebel Roundup, and Andrew Chapados' new show.
Andrew says it's only eight bucks a month to subscribe.
And with the addition of Andrew's show for the very same price, that's a bargain.
It's only $8 a month to subscribe.
Just for my podcast listeners, you can save an extra 10% on a new Rebel News Plus subscription by using the coupon code Podcast when you subscribe.
That's podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T.
When you subscribe, just go to rebelnews.com slash subscribe to become a member today.
And now please enjoy this free audio only version of my show.
Justin Trudeau's Dilemma00:15:05
Is Justin Trudeau happy to let Joe Biden be the bad guy?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Well, Keystone XL is officially cancelled with a stroke of the pen by new President Joe Biden.
It still feels gross to say that, doesn't it?
Now, Keystone XL was stalled by the Obama administration.
That was the administration that Joe Biden was the vice president of.
However, it was pushed forward nearly immediately by President Trump.
And I think it's a common misconception that the pipeline isn't built.
It is.
The cross-border section is in the ground.
But Joe Biden is undoing all of that, continuing to landlock Canadian oil and gas since that pipeline would take oil from the oil sands through Hardesty, Alberta, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, I have a friend, a guest on the show tonight who thinks that this is Biden's gift to Trudeau, that Trudeau gets to outsource his anti-oil nature to Joe Biden so that Trudeau doesn't have to be the bad guy.
My guest tonight is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
He has an incredible article in the Toronto Sun about Joe Biden, Trudeau, and their new anti-oil alliance.
And he joins me in an interview we recorded in my vehicle because I have been on a great burger steak out in central Alberta where there is a bit of a rebellion against the cancellation of dine-in food service here in Alberta.
So it is not the usual studio quality that you expect, but I will assure you, the content, it's there.
have a listen.
So joining me now from his home in Ottawa and me from my car in the middle of small town Alberta is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition.
Tom, thanks so much for your patience with me today, but also for taking the time to talk to me.
I read a really incredible article about something that I think is the top of mind for many Albertans, but many people in Canada who care about foreign influence in our politics and about energy security for all of North America.
And that article in the Toronto Sun was titled Killing Keystone XL: Is Biden's Gift to Trudeau.
And I think you know who wrote that.
Yeah, I wrote it because it suddenly struck me that, you know, Trudeau is constantly calling himself a climate warrior, you know, and he and Catherine McKenna dressed up in superhero costumes to try and show how they're really, you know, climate, climate campaigners, climate activists, et cetera.
And those are his primary friends when it comes to this file.
I don't think it is the oil sector workers.
But at the same time, he has to put on the face of looking like he cares about the workers.
So who's he going to alienate?
Is he going to alienate his climate activist friends by allowing the Keystone XL to continue?
Or is he going to alienate normal Canadians by canceling one of the most important projects in Canada?
So Biden has done him a huge favor because now he doesn't have to make any decision.
He doesn't have to annoy anybody because he just says, well, Joe Biden did it.
There's nothing I can do about it.
Sorry, move on.
You know, that it really was an easy out for Trudeau that, you know, he hands off being the bad guy over to Joe Biden.
And Trudeau thinks that he can skate unscathed for never actually ever supporting Keystone XL.
And I think it's been really remarkable as an Albertan to see the lack of support for what appears to be 11,000 jobs that were instantly nuked by the cancellation of Keystone XL versus how Trudeau was willing to break the law for SNC Lavalin jobs.
He backed a crooked Quebec engineering company, a company that is accused of buying hookers for Mu Mar Gaddafi's kids.
He was willing to break ethics laws for that.
And yet we get a, you know, it's Biden.
So it's whatever.
That's what we get here in Alberta when it comes to Keystone XL.
Yeah, exactly.
And of course, Trudeau has been laying the groundwork for the cancellation of this pipeline forever, really.
And in fact, it's interesting that in the French version of his speech just last week, he was saying, and he didn't say this in the English version, as far as I know, but regardless, he said that Biden's objectives and his perspectives actually align very nicely with Trudeau's.
So he's sort of saying it's okay for you to cancel the pipeline.
And also, of course, as I say, he's been laying the foundation for the cancellation by promoting the mindset that we have to stop, you know, go to carbon neutral by 2050.
And so, and out of one side of his mouth, he says, Oh, yeah, sure, I stand up for the Keystone Pipeline.
But the other side of his mouth, he's supporting the climate scare.
And of course, the climate folks want to end all fossil fuels.
And this is where I think Jason Kenney and a number of the American governors are really off base in their arguments in favor of the pipeline.
They're constantly saying, Well, you know, it's a much cleaner way to transport fuel than by trucks or by rail.
And they're right.
That's completely true.
But it's irrelevant to the climate activists and the people who want to kill all fossil fuels because, sure, they killed Keystone XL.
And if they start doing it by truck more, they'll try and kill that.
If they want to do it by rail or by ship or by doesn't really matter, their overarching objective is to kill all fossil fuels.
So the next thing Kenny says is, well, you know, if the Americans don't get the oil from us, they're going to have to get it from foreign dictators.
Well, yeah, that's true also.
But again, it's irrelevant.
And Sheila, you know, I made up a bit of an analogy, I think, that will show how silly their arguments are.
And their arguments are destined to fail because they're saying, on the one hand, we have this great climate crisis.
And, you know, the war room when they were defending the project after Biden's cancellation.
If you actually look at the statements they made, what are they called?
The Alberta, let's see.
Here we go.
It's called the Canadian Energy Center.
That's their war room.
They actually use language that boosts the climate scare in their rebuttal to Biden.
Okay.
And even the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Perimbidi, did the same thing.
So all these groups seem to feel that they can give virtue signaling to the climate scare and that there won't be consequences.
Well, of course, there are consequences.
The consequences are that Biden says, and he could assemble a very good television ad for Canadians if he wanted, go through YouTube, pull out videos of Kenny, of Scott Moe, of Trudeau saying, We have a climate scare, we have to go carbon neutral, put them together into an ad and say Biden would say to Canadians, okay, we're doing what your leaders want.
You should be thanking us for saving your poor starving polar bears.
But instead, you know, they use weakling arguments from Canada and the governors.
What they really should simply say is: look, you cannot run an industrial society on wind and solar power.
Because if you look at Biden's comments over the months, he's actually been suggesting you can replace oil with wind and solar.
You can't do it.
And the second thing is, of course, the Keystone is causing no climate crisis.
And that's something that they're all afraid to say.
And yet, without saying that, they're not addressing the major reasons that Biden killed it.
And of course, Obama in 2015.
So they're just skirting the issue and they're going to lose and they continue to lose.
And they will always lose if they don't address the primary issue.
Well, and I think it's even worse than just losing.
They're actually conceding too much of the battleground.
They're moving the front lines closer to themselves when they can see the language of the left.
Don't even talk about climate change then.
Just talk about the sheer economics of it, the sheer unreliability, as you point out, of wind and solar, that you cannot run an economy on wind and solar.
Tom, it has been minus 30 here.
Okay.
You got to thank God every day for the miracle of fossil fuels to keep Canadians alive in these extreme temperatures where we are.
I mean, it is really the miracle of fossil fuels that we are able to live and thrive and continue to dig up fossil fuels in this economy to help everybody else in this entire climate.
And that's really lost on people who are deciding that we need to get off fossil fuels from their cozy little cubicle in the Tides Foundation building in San Francisco.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, the whole concept that you can support an industrial society with wind and solar.
I mean, this is what I call magical thinking.
It's equivalent to New Age spiritualism, where they talk about New Age prism power.
You know, how soon, I mean, it's truly ludicrous.
And, you know, I made up a bit of an analogy I should explain.
Let's say when the government's ready to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, there's an anti-vaccination group who's opposing it.
So the government says, well, if you don't let us distribute it, people are going to have to go to the black market to get this COVID-19 vaccine.
And besides, we're working hard on prism power, which of course the anti-vaccines say will cause, well, it will solve COVID.
Okay.
So it's ridiculous.
I mean, obviously, the only way that you could win that argument is to demonstrate that the vaccine is safe, if in fact it's safe, to demonstrate it's safe.
And you have to state point blank, no, prism power, new age prison power is magical thinking.
It does not kill COVID-19.
But, you know, Jason Kenny and others, it's almost like they're saying, please forgive us for our oil because we're still working on wind and solar power, you know?
And it's just so pathetic, really.
Mark Garneau's statement, we respect and understand, I think is what he said, our foreign affairs minister.
Well, yeah, we respect and understand, we don't respect, but we do understand is purely political.
In the United States, you know, they're saying, well, you know, if the Canadians don't sell us their oil, they're just going to sell it somewhere else.
They're missing the point too.
The objective of the climate activists is to stop all production of the oil sands.
Yeah, sure, we could send it somewhere else if in fact big protests and pipelines, you know, go through and the protests don't stop it.
But people are not taking a strategic overview.
And the overview is simply that pipelines are one mechanism, but they want to kill all the mechanisms.
They want to blow up all the bridges of fossil fuels out of the oil sands.
Indeed, they want to blow up all the bridges of fossil fuels everywhere.
So a lot of the arguments are pretty darn weak.
You know, what they really should be saying is you need fossil fuels and here's why and here's their benefit and they're not causing a climate crisis.
So now we should move on.
You know, I'm happy that you brought up that the idea that we do need to take a broader overview of the environmentalist activist movement.
I was actually talking to my friend Robbie Picard from Oil Sands Strong yesterday, and he said he does not think these Americans understand really what's at play here.
That in Canada, I suppose because of our awareness through, you know, Stephen Harper's government wanting to audit these environmental charities.
And in Alberta, you know, we've, we see the activism from the environmental movement blocking our pipelines.
You know, it started with Northern Gateway.
It's continuing with Trans Mountain.
Energy East was a target.
Now Keystone XL.
We see the influx of foreign-funded money, how they use the Indigenous people as basically human shields for what they're doing.
And they round up the useful idiots to block pipelines.
And I don't think that they really truly understand what's about to be unleashed on them in the United States with Biden in power, because these are the people who put Biden and Kamala Harris in power.
These are the Green New Dealers.
These are the Naomi Kleins.
And they don't care about science.
They don't care about the economy.
They want to end fossil fuels.
And they are just those watermelons with the red center wrapped in a green outside.
And I think a lot of the American industry, the oil and gas industry is going to be really caught off guard at how quickly it's going to become very, very difficult to get a project done in the United States.
Well, yeah, yeah.
We don't take a strategic view on lots of things.
I mean, we fight these as individual battles.
The coal people fight by themselves.
Natural gas will even oppose coal because they think they can get a market share.
But I mean, it's like Ben Franklin said, we either all stand together or we all hang together.
I mean, the fact is fossil fuels are the target across the board of the climate activists.
They want to get rid of all of them.
And it may be true that in the short term, natural gas benefits from coal's demise.
But in the long run, bang, bang, bang, bang, they want to knock them all off.
And so you should support coal if you're a natural gas person because you're next.
And you should support natural gas if you're an oil person because you're next.
They want to end the whole thing.
Premier Kenny's Direct Climate Stance00:03:53
And in my opinion, Sheila, if Premier Kenny is brave enough to have a war room and to have this study into foreign influence, then he should be brave enough to say, look, there's never been a proper open public hearing in Canada about the science that we say or that the activists say is backing the climate scare.
So we're going to hold a hearing.
We're going to invite in scientists from different points of view.
We're going to have it available to the public.
I'm not going to judge, Premier Kenny could say.
I'm not a climate expert, but I'm going to let the experts, Professor Patterson from Carlton or Ian Clark from Ottawa U. Many, many experts know the climate scare is ridiculous.
And when the public would hear that, it would pave the way for him to start saying the things that he should say.
He doesn't have to do it now, but get it started because it's never happened in Canada.
That's the thing that he should do.
And as they say, if he's brave enough to write or to start the war room and have this report, which the Globe and Mail is completely attacking today, then yeah, you might as well do the right thing.
And the right thing is to try to show that there is no climate crisis.
And certainly, even if there were, the contribution of the oil science is trivial in comparison with what's happening in China, where they have no limits and they're going to build coal stations forever.
So that's what he should do.
Yeah.
And I agree.
Now, I do appreciate how vocal Premier Kenny has been, especially selling the plight of Alberta to our American friends.
He did a great job on Fox News, but again, he's sort of conceded too much ground to the environmental left.
He even went on MSNBC, that festering liberal hotbed, to sell the Alberta viewpoint.
And I think maybe they let him on because he was a Canadian and they just assume we're all socialists.
But I think it is fascinating to see how Premier Kenny is leading the charge on this issue.
And Justin Trudeau has just sort of shrugged his shoulders and put his head down.
And again, I think it goes back to how you describe that this is Joe Biden's gift to Trudeau.
This is Joe Biden.
He gets to be the bad guy in Canada because we can't vote for him.
And he gets to be the good guy to the environmental movement in the United States.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think Kenny is completely right to have no patience with Trudeau, with Garneau, with our ambassador to the United States, because their responses were extremely weak.
And as he said, if you compare it with other times when he was defending Eastern Canadian interests, it was entirely different.
But you know, in some of those broadcasts, it was really interesting because I was watching a few of them last night, including that one.
And they would have Kenny come on and he present the standard arguments, you know, cleaner, you know, Americans are our friends and all these things.
But then immediately after him, they would have an anti-oil sands activist come on and they would not emphasize that.
They would emphasize it's the climate scare, just like Obama said and just like Biden said.
And you think, oh, that's interesting.
Kenny didn't even really address that except to say, oh, please forgive us because we're working to reduce greenhouse gases.
He didn't really address the fact that their scare is ridiculous.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
So you hear these two arguments being presented.
It's like somebody saying, well, how tall are you?
Oh, well, I'm white.
Yeah, that's nice, but how tall are you?
And they keep answering something different.
And they don't answer that question.
And not just something different, but pardon me for being over five foot seven.
I'm sorry, I'm working on seeming smaller.
Exactly.
It says, please forgive us for our oil because we're working on wind and solar.
No, they should say wind and solar are hopelessly pathetic when it comes to really supplying proper energy.
Consensus Climate Clash00:09:10
So that's the other side of the equation.
He has to be direct on the climate.
He has to be direct on the real sources of energy.
If you go anywhere in the mushy middle, you're going to lose.
And that's why they continue to lose.
Now, I want to talk to you about something that is unrelated, but it is one of those fronts in climate skepticism that is under attack.
And that is our ability to talk about these things.
And you've had a 35-year battle with the CBC.
You've been fighting the CBC long enough for your fight with CBC to have their own kids in school.
Tell us all about this.
Yeah, well, it started in 1986 when they were covering the Space Shuttle Challenger launch that was coming up in January, exactly 35 years ago, tomorrow on Thursday.
And the interesting thing was that they kept saying, like many of the media, that NASA was not launching with the reliability and regularity of the French Ariane rocket.
And of course, it was very cold in Florida then.
In fact, there were icicles on the oranges.
So I called the CBC, the national, who were criticizing NASA on the TV for not launching with the frequency of the Ariane.
And I explained to the producer, I said, you know, you can't compare a manned booster with an unmanned booster.
I mean, if the unmanned one blows up, they lose a lot of money, but nobody dies.
He didn't really have any patience.
But the CBC kept pushing.
And of course, lots of media across the United States were doing the same thing.
So NASA eventually overruled their engineers who were concerned about safety with respect to the launch.
They hadn't launched ever at such low temperatures.
There are various components.
They didn't know how well they would work.
And so they launched anyway.
And on the 28th of January, 1986, we had the Challenger disaster where the whole crew was lost.
It was actually driven largely by media.
And so, you know, I called CBC up because then they started to criticize NASA for launching at that time.
And I called up the producer and said, well, you know, they're doing what you were saying they should do.
Now you're just cutting them up again.
So it was really bad.
And they had no interest again whatsoever.
So I realized at that time as an aerospace engineer, if I was going to get this covered reasonably correctly, I had to learn about how to be a media person myself.
So I took a course at Algonquin.
It worked out pretty well because I got into the climate area and space and all sorts of things.
But you know, one interesting chapter in the battle with CBC was in the year 2000.
I wrote a letter to them saying, You keep saying there's a consensus in the climate science community about the causes of climate change.
As far as I know, there is none.
Show me that there is one.
So the president of the CBC assigned the omsbudsman, who then was David Bazay, who's since passed away, to actually prepare a report to show there was a consensus in the climate science community.
And a little later, I got a 10-page answer.
And I thought, oh, this is great.
We'll see what he says.
And I went through it.
Not a single scientist, not a single scientific organization was referenced.
What he did is he looked at other media.
And what he showed was that in those 10 pages, he showed there was a consensus in the media that there was a consensus in the climate science community.
So I wrote to the president and I said, well, he hasn't demonstrated anything about consensus in the climate science community.
He's starting there's a consensus in the media.
Like, so what?
And the president was very satisfied the case was closed.
I got a job with Bob Mills as the legislative assistant for the opposition environment critic.
And of course, the party wouldn't want me to fight with the CBC when I'm working for the party.
So I had to drop it.
But since then, you know, there's even been one instance, for example, where I went in for an interview with Radio Canada, CBC's radio, and they took the audio of my interview and they rearranged sentences to make it say or make me say things I didn't really say.
Now, I got, I was able to give them a bit of a black eye because I had my own recording of the original interview.
Smart up along with theirs.
And I said to the public, is that fair?
And of course, I got a lot of people saying, no, it wasn't.
And even today, I mean, same thing.
They get on, they censor their comments pages.
You know, your content is disabled.
And I write to them and say, I'm not breaking any of your rules.
Like, why can't I talk about some of the benefits of Donald Trump?
Why can't I talk about an alternative perspective on COVID or climate change?
No answer.
I get on again.
I say, well, I'm trying again.
I'm not breaking any of your rules.
Delete.
So they continue to do it.
And people have got to appreciate that whatever they hear on CBC is extremely biased in these topics and often totally wrong.
And if you try and correct them, even if you're an expert in the field, as I was at the time, they just ignore you.
We have seen this firsthand.
We had a viewer of ours who knows a little something about something.
He was watching, I think it was the national, and they were talking about these islands off the East Coast that are, you know, constantly changing and being eroded by the ocean.
And so they're shrinking, but then they're growing in other places as these things tend to do.
The sand just doesn't disappear.
It moves somewhere else.
That's how, you know, those are the laws of thermal dynamics.
Things just don't disappear.
They get moved around and restructured and end up somewhere else.
So the viewer saw this and saw CBC presenting just one side of it saying, yes, indeed, these little islands are being eroded, but that's because of climate change.
It's because of, you know, rising tides, because things are melting, and this is all because of climate change.
And so he wrote to the ombudsman and said, actually, no, this is, you know, this has always been happening there.
And, you know, the shoreline changes all the time and the sand is deposited, deposited elsewhere, and complained that it was an unbalanced view of it.
And the ombudsman wrote him back and said that while that I suppose very well may be true, we will never present two sides of the debate when the topic is climate change.
Ever.
That is CBC policy, that there are not two sides, that the skeptics are 100% wrong 100% of the time on everything.
Well, and you know, they do it on other fields too.
I mean, I used to be a member of a church and CBC interviewed one of the top parishioners in the church and they asked him a question and he answered the question.
They asked him the same question again.
He answered the question.
They kept asking him the same question.
He finally got frustrated and he answered kind of angrily.
They took that clip and they put it on air because they were trying to show, I mean, presumably they were trying to show that our group was a right-wing, radical, angry church group.
And so they do it on all kinds of things, you know, like there's no way we should be funding the CBC.
I mean, if they want to stand or not on their own volition, that's their business.
But for the Canadian taxpayer to pay for that extremely biased coverage in many fields is just wrong.
Well, and they know the taxpayer won't pay for it out of their free will.
That's why they're so opposed to the possibility of having to go the PBS route.
Oh, yeah.
You know, just one quick point on the climate issue.
What Jason Kenney should be saying also is we can't stop climate change no matter what you believe about the science.
So we should work on adaptation.
We should help people adapt to climate change, whatever the cause, burying cables underground, you know, helping reinforce buildings that are falling down in the north where the permafrost is melting.
Of course, it's increasing in other places due to natural change.
So that's the thing.
But in Canada, there's only 13% of the money going to adaptation to helping real people today.
And the rest of it all goes to this fairy tale idea that you can actually stop climate change.
So that's where the emphasis has to shift.
It has to shift over to sensible adaptation to help real people now.
Well, and again, that's a great point to make that Canada is so small in the grand scheme of things.
Large country, tiny population, tiny contribution to greenhouse gas emissions if you think those are doing something to the planet.
So we are never going to compel China and India to deindustrialize.
So if indeed you do think that, you know, greenhouse gases are changing things, then let's figure out how to best deal with that change as opposed to deindustrialize ourselves, have no impact on anything, and watch China take over the world.
Sensible Adaptation00:02:59
Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly how I would put it too.
It's like you're in a lifeboat, an inflatable lifeboat, and you're puncturing it with a pin and somebody else is using a chainsaw and you get after the pin punctures.
And that would assume that the climate theory is right, which I don't believe it is.
But if it were, we're just a little tiny pinprick in comparison with China's chainsaw.
I mean, we're going to have no impact except ruin our economy for nothing.
Now, Tom, you're being very kind because I am on my phone in my vehicle at a diner rebellion and you are actually recording this Zoom call on your side.
So I don't want to take up too much of your time and I guess too much of your hard drive space.
But if you wouldn't mind telling everybody where they can find the work that you do, support the work that you do.
And please don't forget to tell everybody about your excellent podcast.
Yeah, sure.
My podcast first.
If you do a Google search for Tom Harris and Exploratory Journeys, you can hear the various podcasts.
The most recent one was Susan Crockford, a PhD in zoology who specialized on polar bears.
And she points out that the polar bear population has approximately tripled since the 1960s.
So they're not in danger.
But we have climate scientists and all sorts of people.
So that's where you can find it.
And our webpage for learning more about us is climate scienceinternational.org.
Great.
Tom, thanks so much for being so generous with your time and generous with your hard drive space and patient with me as I'm from my car.
And I hope we can have you back on the show again very soon.
Yeah.
And thank you to the Rebel for your work because without you, I don't think we'd have anywhere near the knowledge that we do of what's really going on.
Appreciate that, Tom.
Thanks.
I do think our American friends have no idea what's coming their way.
I think the Biden presidency has unleashed anti-oil, anti-fossil fuel, anti-human activism in a way that I think our American friends are completely unprepared for.
Best of luck to them.
We've experienced that for at least the last five years here in Canada and maybe even longer as anti-oil activists masquerading as the charitable sector move to landlock our oil and gas sector with foreign money.
Well, everybody, 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.
Maybe I'll be in my car on a burger steak out.
Maybe I'll be back here in studio.
Who even knows anymore in these unpredictable times?