Sheila Gunn-Reid exposes The Fifth Estate’s misleading portrayal of Drax Wood Pellets, a UK company using B.C.’s 18M sq km of beetle-killed deadwood to offset coal amid energy shortages from the Russia-Ukraine war. CBC ignored industry audits and framed wood pellets as unsustainable, despite their role in dispatchable power—while activists like CAPE’s Dr. Joe Vipond push impractical policies like a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Gunn-Reid warns of Canada’s $170/ton carbon tax hike by 2030, calling it eco-dictatorship, and criticizes media outlets like Globe and Mail for unchecked climate advocacy. Friends of Science’s grassroots approach contrasts with lobbyist-funded ENGOs, urging public pushback against policies she claims harm healthcare and economies. [Automatically generated summary]
Dunking on or rather debunking CBC's fake news about the wood pellet industry here in Canada.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
On this edition of The Fifth Estate, wood from B.C. is being burned for fuel in the United Kingdom.
We're on the verge of losing these forests.
Literally on the verge of complete destruction.
The landscape scarred with clear-cut after clear-cut.
And in the middle of it, a UK company hungry for more.
We've got a power station that's burning 25 million trees a year.
But at what cost to BC's forests?
The claims that these companies are making that they're green and sustainable, this really turns that into a massive lie.
We're creating local jobs directly and indirectly, and we're creating a product that goes to offset coal.
We need to see it for what it is.
It's a money-making machine for a few people.
And who is really calling the shots in British Columbia?
This government, this institution in British Columbia is entirely captured by industry.
That right there is a clip from CBC's keynote long-form journalism show, The Fifth Estate.
The show itself has been around forever and it makes you wonder how many other things they've gotten completely wrong.
In that episode of The Fifth Estate, they were talking about Drax Wood Pellets.
It's a company that uses Canadian wastewood to make wood pellets.
And some of those wood pellets end up in the UK being burned for electricity because the environmental climate activists have forced the UK to get off reliable coal-fired electricity.
And with a war between Russia and Ukraine driving up the cost of natural gas, Drax itself has pivoted away from coal because they were told to.
And now they're burning wood pellets for electricity.
If you care about the environment, this might actually be a win-win-win because they're using wood waste that could just end up as garbage to create electricity.
And wood is a renewable resource, but it also creates carbon emissions, which means that environmental activists hate it enough to lie about it.
And the company itself, Drax, and CBC was happy to go along with it.
Now, my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science saw this outrage and did a series of videos pointing out, I don't know if you could possibly point out everything that CBC got wrong.
I mean, that's a really, really, really big job.
But she pointed out some of the larger fallacies in CBC's completely unbalanced piece.
And she joins me tonight to discuss that.
But also, we're talking about the latest UN climate change conference taking place in the resort town of Shar Mel Sheikh, Egypt.
Yes, they never hold these things in the likes of Fort McMurray or Leduc or Swift Current, Alberta, do they?
So joining me now is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science to break down exactly what she saw, I think immediately, wrong with CBC's Drax Wood Pellet story.
Michelle, thanks for doing this bit of journalism that the CBC state broadcaster just refused to do.
When I saw your video, I went back and I watched CBC's Fifth Estate and it was so outrageously flawed and anybody with a little bit of common sense could see through it.
But I guess we're talking about CBC and climate activists here.
So that common sense is going to be hard to find.
Tell me, give us a breakdown of what you saw wrong with that story.
Well, first of all, it appears to be kind of an offshoot of a tar sands type of campaign where they're intending to do reputational damage specifically to a company called Drax.
And full disclosure, we have no relationship with Drax.
We have no money from Drax.
I'm speaking as an individual who's been watching CBC for a long time and their bad productions.
So, well, they destroyed the reputation of the Alberta oil sands with the tipping point.
So here they are destroying the reputation of Drax.
So Drax is a British company that used to have a big coal-fired power plant there.
And with all the renewables push, they said, okay, you don't want us to do coal anymore.
We'll switch to biomass, which is considered green by all of the authorities, the powers that be, because trees grow back.
And so biomass in this context is wood pellets.
So wood pellets are made from the remainder pieces and old dead wood of forests.
And so it's actually the perfect green thing because they're actually, you know, recycling, reusing the very last scrimpy little bits of wood and packing them into tiny little pellets.
And they do that so that they don't spontaneously combust, but they also get a better burn.
And then they're using that.
So what happened in the CBC documentary is they start off in England.
They show the Drax plant like it's a big nasty thing.
Look at this.
It's spouting steam.
That's what's coming out the top, kids.
And they have an activist flying down a train and jumping on top and making their case.
And then they have all kinds of activists from BC saying, oh, we know for sure that Drax is, look, we saw logs there.
They're actually using real logs.
Well, you know, people don't understand that British Columbia and Alberta have about 18 square kilometers of 18 million square kilometers of dead pine from the pine beetle.
So this is just a wildfire, a catastrophic wildfire waiting to happen.
Now you have this company, Drax, and a few other companies who came forward and said, you know what, we can use that stuff.
So they have independent companies that go and cut the wood.
And it's true, they're not only cutting the dead wood, but they are cutting a suitable forest.
And the suitable pieces of wood, the suitable logs are scaled, they're weighed, they're sized, and they're sent to the appropriate sawmill because you can make a lot of money from selling lumber.
Right.
You know, so if you have a big log, then you cut that into planks.
But there's actually a really great visual that's in one of the two pieces that we did that shows how within the log, you know, they can cut the big planks in the middle, then they can cut a slimmer one by six, say, on a side, and then you can cut some small trim pieces.
And then there's just the bark on the outside and some little tiny pieces left that gets all ground up and turned into wood pellets.
So that claim that they're using real logs, yes, they are real logs there, but they're deadwood or they're bent, they're convoluted, they won't go through the industrial sawmill the way they're supposed to.
So they just really took everything completely out of context.
They took all of the activists at their word.
They showed pictures from space saying, wow, look at that.
You can see all these spaces are being cleared.
The forest is being just eaten away.
Oh my God.
Well, because it's full of deadwood.
You want to get rid of that.
You don't want to have wildfires.
You think that climate change is going to cause more wildfires in DC?
Then get rid of that deadwood.
Here's a company that wants to pay to do that and you want to reputationally shred them and shut them down.
It's absurd.
So I was furious when I saw it.
And we also have some forestry people that we consult with.
So, you know, I said, like, what's the deal on this?
You know, give me the data.
And they sent me some reports, reports that had been issued before the show was done.
Resolute Defense of Forestry00:09:44
That independent audit and another report by the Wood Pellet Industry of Canada, both of which are very detailed.
They're independently audited.
None of those facts were in the CBC show.
And we are paying $1.4 billion a year for this nonsense, for these activists to destroy the reputations of companies that come to this country to invest here, to make money for themselves, and to also make money for the communities.
You know, a lot of these forestry jobs in BC are in remote communities.
But, you know, you give 25, 150 jobs here and there in these remote communities.
That's a huge, huge benefit to those little towns.
So, you know, and these activists who are funded by, you know, green billionaires from offshore, they're all blabbing off.
And you can tell that it's, you can tell that it's a coordinated campaign because BBC Panorama run an almost identical program a few days before.
And then Greenpeace out of the UK started running a thing about Drax operations in, I think it was in Louisiana.
And they interviewed, it's a very poor area.
And so the claim was that the air quality is terrible there.
And there may be some infringement on air quality.
Every industrial operation has that.
But I mean, they actually interviewed this one very overweight woman who said, about Drax, I can't breathe.
You know, the George Floyd thing.
I mean, come on, people.
This is obviously a coordinated attack on this company and on the biomass industry.
And I suspect, you know, there may be promoters of wind there.
I mean, what's critically important for the UK is that Drax is one of the sole companies that provides in the UK dispatchable power.
And, you know, wind is not dispatchable.
You can't control it.
But biomass or coal or natural gas or nuclear is dispatchable.
You can control the flow of it and it hardly ever goes out, unlike wind and solar, which does this.
So, you know, UK is already facing critical shortages of energy this winter.
Electricity prices are skyrocketing.
This is the last thing you want to do is to attack a provider of dispatchable power.
People are going to die this winter.
They're going to die of heater eat poverty.
And it will mostly be pensioners.
But there will be many other people, children, who suffer malnutrition because of the heater eat poverty.
And so, you know, it's actually criminal what they're doing.
That's how unbalanced the show was.
That's my rant.
No, it's great.
And it's it goes to show that even if you try to play their game, the environmentalist game, they will come for you eventually because Drax pivoted from coal.
They said, you know what, we need to be creating renewable electricity.
Drax is doing that using wood pellets, which is essentially garbage.
That they've turned, like if you're an environmentalist, an actual environmentalist who believes in using as much of what we harvest as possible, all parts of the buffalo, as they say, Drax is doing that.
Drax is taking the garbage parts of the wood and turning it into reliable energy for UK citizens who are forced off coal thanks to climate policies.
And yet still, that's not good enough.
And there was a thing in your video that really struck me that was left out of the CBC piece.
Drax doesn't harvest the wood.
Drax, they don't have a contract to go out and harvest the wood.
So they are only getting wood from companies that are paid to harvest lumber.
Those companies are naturally not going to sell their wood for waste as pellets.
Lumber is outrageous.
If anybody's trying to build something in the last 18 months, you know that lumber is at an outrageous price.
So these companies are not going to say, okay, well, this usable old growth forest, we're just going to turn into pellets and sell for at a reduced cost for electricity.
It was just so flawed.
But as you say, CBC is so ideologically blinded that they just went along with the narrative.
Yeah, and I don't know how they can get away with it.
I don't know why the company itself hasn't said anything.
I haven't seen anything.
Maybe they will.
But to me, like we just wrote a letter to the Competition Bureau about eco-justice and their complaint to the Competition Bureau, excuse me, about RBC, Royal Bank of Canada supposedly greenwashing.
And in that complaint, we noted to the Competition Bureau and the Charities Directorate that Todd Paglia of the Forest Ethics Now Stand Earth at one point had said something to the effect that, you know, if these companies want to do things, don't want to do things the easy way, then we'll make it hard for them and we can do a lot of reputational damage.
So I would say that that applies in this instance.
I don't know what they're trying to get out of Drax or what, you know, they're typically trying to get some compliance issue like forest certification program or carbon credits or there's always something in the background that the public is not aware of.
But, you know, these groups have shredded the reputation of so many companies in Canada and the US on environmental grounds.
I mean, they're just basically reputationally kneecapping companies.
But that means people lose jobs, companies lose money, they lose share value.
You can see that immediately after this came out, Drax share value dropped like a stone.
You know, and maybe it's because actually in Europe, there are many people in the UK who are saying, you know, let's open up the coal again because we're all going to freeze to death.
So maybe they're trying to prevent drax from saying, well, we have this coal plant, you know, we could turn back.
I don't know.
It probably would cost a fortune to do that.
But why don't we as Canadians embrace them and say thank you for taking all that deadwood off our hands?
Yeah, take the deadwood off our hands and create Canadian jobs and help our UK friends not freeze to death this winter.
It seems like a win-win-win.
But of course, you've got the environmental activists in the middle of this.
And this is not the first time they've done this to a forestry company.
Let us never forget what Greenpeace did to Resolute in Quebec.
Resolute to their credit immediately.
Instead of taking it lying down, they started fighting back instantly.
They've got a website that's still up.
If you want to see all the things that Greenpeace tried to do with their lies to Resolute Forestry, they put up a website, resolutevgreenpeace.com.
You can see all of their filings.
You can see all of their rebuttals.
They filed a racketeering case against Greenpeace in U.S. federal court.
They're very transparent.
They are calling Greenpeace liars and they lay it all out.
The purpose of the website is great.
We established this website to catalog information and progress reports on the case and also, when necessary, to set the record straight as the facts warrant.
Standing up for our integrity is a moral obligation.
We intend to see it fully through.
And I think in 2020, although it was a small monetary award, a great moral victory for truth when Resolute was awarded a $1 million judgment against Greenpeace.
Again, not even close to the reputational damage that Greenpeace did to them, but it's a moral victory.
It shows that, you know, they were lying.
They did damage this company.
And Resolute is not guilty of those things that Greenpeace said they were, including they said they abandoned First Nations communities that they said they would work with.
And Resolute works directly with First Nations communities to provide jobs to them in their own communities, which I think is a great benefit to Indigenous communities.
They get to stay.
Their young people get to stay and have jobs in the place where they grew up, which is something everybody wants for their kids.
Right.
And I think also in the U.S. case, but you know, I'm not 100% sure, but at one point, Greenpeace said, well, you know, these are just opinions.
Nobody believes us because they know we're just, you know, we're just saying things off the top of our head.
Why would anyone believe that?
You know, that we're like spreading propaganda.
It's just like, holy dinah, unbelievable.
Yeah, there is one like Resolute.
If anybody gets a chance to read this website, it's kind of funny and snarky at the same time, but also full of facts when they say, among the other things, the complaint explains that far from being a forest destroyer, as Greenpeace calls Resolute, Resolute has planted well over a billion trees in the boreal, which is a billion more than Greenpeace, which is what they say on the website, which is pretty funny.
Attacking Our Main Industries00:03:33
But I mean, for those people out there who think that these attacks are only directed at oil and gas.
They are directed at the next carbon-based fuel, and that's forestry.
That's wood.
And they won't be satisfied until we've all reached net zero, which is net zero jobs, net zero money in your bank account.
And green murder, which takes me to my next topic I wanted to talk to you about, and that is the ongoing UN climate change conference in, well, authoritarian regime, Egypt.
It's in Charmil-Sheikh this year, which is the sort of the Cancun of Egypt, of course, because these things have to be held in very nice places so that people don't, the people making decisions don't have to see the poor people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions.
They'd rather have it in a resort community.
But that's a big push this year at the UN Climate Change Conference.
They call it COP27, the Conference of the Parties.
It's net zero health care.
And as you accurately describe it, screen murder.
Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting in Alberta and Canadian taxpayers should be aware that there's a whole contingent of Canadian doctors who are part of CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
Albertans will know the president, Dr. Joe Vipond, who is very active at full phase out and lockdown.
Yes, well, he's traveling over there to present, I think it's on November the 10th at the Canadian Pavilion.
And guess what these doctors are advocating for?
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They want to phase out fossil fuels.
I mean, do these people not know where modern medicine runs on, what it's made from, what makes it possible?
Do they really want to go back to kitchen table surgery and using, you know, boiled blankets and sheets for bandages?
And I mean, it's absurd.
It's totally absurd.
And we taxpayers are paying for it.
And I don't understand why tax-funded paid doctors and medical associations, and some of these are also funded by tax-funded charities.
I don't understand why they are allowed to denigrate the oil and gas industry, which actually pays their salary and builds their hospitals and provides them with all the PPEs and all the other sterile use, single-use plastics that you need for modern day surgery and all the pharmaceuticals.
You can't make medicine without oil, gas, and coal.
So you can't make a CT scanner without it.
You can't build a hospital without it.
So it's endlessly frustrating that these people are there promoting climate change solutions, all of which rely on oil, gas, and coal.
Yeah, and demigrating on one of our main industries.
I think it's completely wrong.
It's immoral.
It's immoral, exactly.
And they're on the African continent.
So if they want to see what net zero health care really looks like, they don't have to go all that far where they can see the infant and maternal mortality rate compared to the Western world just hit the absolute rock bottom.
And that has a lot to do with the fact that you cannot fuel an autoclave on wind and solar.
Can't Build Without It00:03:38
Right.
And, you know, they like to say, oh, well, you know, fossil fuel emissions are causing millions of deaths around the world.
Well, no, actually, the place where there's the most deaths in the world from air pollution, noxious air pollution is Africa and India and China.
These are places where people are burning animal dung, bits of wood scraps, biomass.
They probably wish that Drax was there.
And they're burning it over open flames in their little huts.
And that's where people are breathing in all these noxious emissions.
If they had grid-scale power, they would have pumped water, they would have proper sanitation, they would have lighting 24-7 so they could have real industry and have real jobs.
And in fact, despite the fact that many people are critical of Egypt in terms of its human rights record, you know, we also did a video about Nomi Klein and Bill McGibbon.
They were promoting that kids, climate kids, should make public complaints about the case of this one young man who is in jail there.
His case is related to the Arab Spring of 2011.
And I'm not going to go into the details of his case.
Of course, any family member with someone in jail would want to free them.
But Egypt's situation is very, very complex.
And Bill McGibbon actually said, well, you know, there's going to be three or four thousand journalists sitting around with nothing to do.
So why waste that opportunity, you know, to make a statement?
Well, the reason is because you might get thrown in jail.
Why doesn't Bill do it?
That's right.
Why doesn't Nomi do it?
This irritates me so much.
You see this in pipeline protests all the time.
You've got people like Sappora Berman saying to other people, more easily influenced people, chain yourself to the pipeline, chain yourself to this, lay on the ground, do this, do that, get yourself arrested.
But it's very rarely, almost never, the well-funded climate activist at the top doing the things.
They rake in the cash.
They make low liability statements for themselves, while other people, the useful idiots, unfortunately, they're the ones who end up putting themselves in jail.
And to advise young people to do this in a place like Egypt, where they have jails full of political dissidents, it's outrageous and irresponsible.
Right.
And not only that, in that same webinar that Klein ran with McGibbon, there was another fellow there who mocked the Egyptian government saying, you know, yeah, well, you know, LCC is really making the effort to keep the lights on.
And it's kind of like, yay, you know, everyone across Europe and in the UK would wish that their government would be making an effort to keep the lights on.
And, you know, he was that they were complaining, oh, you know, they've got a lot of cement production there.
They're doing a lot of building.
Well, you know, they don't have trees.
That's true.
And also in 2006, the World Bank issued a report stating that by 2020, there would be 100 million young Arabs coming to age without jobs.
So, you know, this is a government that's saying, you know what, maybe we can't get you all into high-tech, but here's a job.
You can build this building.
Like, you know, you don't need a lot of high-tech skills for many building jobs, but you do get work and employment.
You can feed yourself.
Egypt's Role in Energy Supply00:09:47
So we did a fairly comprehensive review of that.
And, you know, Egypt is a really critical partner to the world right now.
People have to realize that.
They're a big supplier of natural gas to the region, to Europe, and to Asia.
And there's a shortage of natural gas because of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
So they're a critical supplier of that.
They are a critical supervisor and manager operator of the Suez Canal, which allows shipping from Asia to Europe and North America without having to go around the south of Africa, you know, the Cape down there in South Africa, which is another, I don't know, thousand miles or something.
It's a lot.
It extends the trip a lot.
But they're also, you know, a very unique country in that almost all of their plus 100 million population live along the Nile Delta.
You know, so that compromises kind of how they can manage the country and what they can do there.
And so I think we have to understand that they're facing different challenges than North Americans.
Like imagine if the U.S., with its 300 million people, had everyone living only along the Mississippi Delta.
You know, that's kind of a comparable quandary, if you like.
So as much as everybody would like the world to be, you know, democratic, we've seen in Canada that when people complain too much, the Emergencies Act is invoked and innocent people are thrown into jail on very nominal charges.
So I'm not sure that we in North America and particularly in Canada now are in a position to make bombastic statements about how other states run their human rights and justice systems.
You are right.
Also, I noticed from our friends at Climate Depot who are there, I see that Mark Murano and Craig Rucker glued themselves to museum glass on the outside.
They didn't damage any artwork.
So, but every year they do something where they take the activism of the left and then flip it on its head and see how everybody reacts to it.
So they glued themselves to museum glass in Egypt and they were removed by security.
One year they tried to board a coal or no, sorry, Greenpeace had boarded a coal ship the night before in Bonn, Germany.
So then they were the next day dressed as the captain from the love boat and tried to board the Greenpeace ship and the cops, Greenpeace called the cops.
They like to point out the hypocrisy of the left, but on their website today at climatepot.com, they're talking about how really this thing again is not actually focused all that much on climate change, but as always on the wealth transfer from the Western world, where now, apparently, my comfortable and reliable SUV has done it again.
So that when the developing world faces a natural disaster of some kind, a tsunami caused by an earthquake or some sort of typhoon, that the Western world has to pay climate reparations.
It's just a wealth transfer, really.
Well, it is a wealth transfer.
And it's, you know, when they talk circular economy, what I think they really mean is that they say to a country, we think you should build a solar farm.
And the country says, well, we don't have the money.
And they go, okay, here, we'll give you the money, but you have to use our engineers and you have to buy our equipment.
So they create a circular economy.
And who's paying for that?
It's you because the carbon taxes are being skimmed off to finance this whole charade.
And of course, the wind and solar in most cases is virtually useless.
It's only ever complementary on the grid.
You always need to maintain a real power grid using conventional power.
So, you know, it's really a charade.
And actually, we have a new report by Robert Lyman called The Unstoppable Growth of GHG Emissions.
And in it, he assesses work by Andrew Roman, excuse me, who's a retired lawyer.
And they looked at the original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
And in it, basically, none of the developing nations ever have to reduce their emissions.
Only the West.
And the West has done that and we can't really do any more because we'll all die.
So, you know, and no cost-benefit analysis has been done on this claim of net zero.
There's a fellow named Simon Michaud, who's from Finland, from their geological survey group.
I think it's called GKS or something like that.
And he's done a very detailed analysis.
His background is as a mining engineer.
So he started saying, well, if we wanted to flip the world to net zero, then we'd have to mine more minerals and we'd have to, you know, the numbers that he comes up with is that it would take like 7,000 years to mine sufficient copper at the rate of 2019, but that would be the copper required for this net zero transition in the next eight years or 20 years.
And he notes that most mines, you know, take at least 15 years to get up and operating, let alone delivering to market.
So, you know, it's an impossible scenario.
And as you say, it's really just, you know, impoverishing people in the West.
It's not really helping the people in developing nations.
It's just exploiting them, denying them conventional grid-scale power.
And in the middle, we have these climate activists moralizing.
So you may be wondering why I'm wearing my t-shirt and hat.
Of course, this is in honor of Charmiel Sheikh.
I'm not there.
It's minus 22 today here in Alberta or feels like that.
But I'm wearing my t-shirt because Greta's book just came out.
You know, on the cover of her book, the climate book, are a bunch of stripes.
Well, her stripes are over here.
But my stripes are 2,000 years.
And you can see very clearly that climate is cyclical.
So it's not you and it's not CO2.
And, you know, the public are just being royally scammed by the climate community.
And that doesn't mean that we don't affect climate.
We do.
There are constructive things we can do for climate change and for the environment.
The biggest thing is, you know, urban heat island.
That's a very real thing.
But, you know, there's a new presentation out by Clintel with Professor Wiss Yim, and he very convincingly shows that underwater volcanic activity is really what's driven the recent warming.
You're not going to stop that by taxing CO2 from your SEV or by making us eat bugs.
Yeah, and people seem to forget the very real tangible thing.
You point out the weather here right now.
There's this strive to get to net zero in the Western world, but the Western world is cold and the developing world is not.
We can only get down to a certain emissions level.
And beyond that, like you say, people start to die.
But the people pushing this stuff, a lot of them don't have a plan to get to net zero themselves.
I did a story wherein I asked CBC for their net zero plan and they said they didn't have one.
And so I went on their website and at that moment they had nearly 2,000 different stories pushing the benefits of net zero.
But when I asked them, what's your plan to get to net zero?
Oh, we don't have a plan.
So then I started poking around saying, okay, well, they're getting new cars at CBC.
What kind of cars are they ordering?
Their only requirement was that they be white and roadworthy.
They weren't even electric.
So I'm like, what a bunch of hypocrites.
I'm supposed to drive a car that will definitely not start in this weather and might not get me to town and back.
But CBC with net zero pushers, not for them.
Yes, I want to issue a warning to your viewers, and that is at COP27, the Canadian government is expected to announce that they're going to try and introduce legislation that will make it impossible for any subsequent government to cancel the carbon tax and the carbon tax rise to $170 a ton.
So Max Fawcett did a story on this, and it was part of the recent Net Zero 2030 In Focus presentation.
And we did a short video explainer showing why this was a very dumb idea.
And we included some of Robert Lyman's comments.
Of course, he was a federal public servant for 27 years, a diplomat for 10 years, and he was outraged by the hubris that these people think they can put a law in cement in a Canadian constitutional monarchy democratic context that no other government could ever change.
Gun Show Letters Needed00:06:16
And this whole idea of the contract for differences is really a way to, I guess, make us into carbon serfs for the rest of our lives.
So people better watch out for that and better speak to whoever they can to make sure that doesn't happen.
I mean, really, we're slipping toward an eco-dictatorship when those kind of moves are happening.
Yeah, we're worried about Egypt being undemocratic, but that sure seems like it's disenfranchising every single voter going forward here in Canada if you cannot vote down the previous government's bad policy.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
And it's absurd.
And they're cheerleading it.
CBC was cheerleading it earlier in the year and now National Observer is cheerleading it.
The corporate Knights, of course, are cheerleading it.
And, you know, people have to start to see this whole network of green ENGOs and groups like the Corporate Knights and even their tie-in to, say, the Globe and Mail, which are, it's really a climate activist newspaper.
People have to see these things for what they are.
They're just consensus-making groups, and they really have no interest for you at heart.
They are self-interested.
It's how they get funding.
It's how they raise donations.
And it's how they're going to destroy the life that we enjoy today if we let them.
Now, Michelle, you are up against the corporate knights, the federal government, who often funds a lot of these ENGOs, the foreign money flowing into the NGOs.
And you guys are just a little, I don't want to say mom and pop shop because you have experts on staff and experts that you rely on, but you don't have big federal funding.
I don't think you'd take it anyway.
So tell us, how do people support you in your pursuit of providing a counterbalance to the constant fear-mongering?
Well, if you'd like to become a member, you can do that on our website.
It's $40 for one year or $80 for three years.
And that would get you our CLISI and extracts, which are kind of roundups of recent climate science or climate politics and policies from around the world, news that you probably won't see in the mainstream.
And you can also just give us a donation if you like.
We've been asking people to just give us a $20 donation because it's our 20th year of operation and we know people are tight for money right now.
And you can share our material.
So that would be great.
You know, we really need people taking our stuff to others because we're not in Ottawa.
We're not registered lobbyists.
We don't lobby the government.
There are hundreds of ENGO lobbyists in Canada.
You just have to go on the Canadian lobbyist registry site and you can see that every single one of these big ENGOs has five to 12 lobbyists and they're in and out of every single department every week.
So if you wonder why your world is turning upside down, that's why.
Yeah, and I really appreciate your YouTube channel.
You take these big, I think purposefully complicated arguments from the environmentalist left and you just cut through the baloney, cut the jargon out and make it very easy for normals like me to understand what these crazy policies are going to do to you, your family, your bank account, and your lifestyle.
So friends, do not neglect the Friends of Science YouTube page.
It's just an absolute gold mine of arguments you can carry with you into the rest of the world.
Thank you.
Well, Michelle, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
You're always so generous with your time and you have a heart for the people affected by these policies.
It's not just financial for you.
You really see these as something that will endanger life as we know it.
So I think that's what makes you unique in the landscape.
Thank you.
I just want to mention one more thing.
Sure.
Freedom Talk is coming up in mid-year on the 11th and 12th of this week.
And there will be a memorial service at Freedom Talk on the 11th in honor of Remembrance Day.
But, you know, if people want to join in, you can go online, freedomtalk.ca.
I understand that the Premier was going to speak, but there's a conflict of interest, or a conflict of timing, you know, of meetings.
So I don't think that you will be able to appear.
But there are many other great speakers.
And of course, I'm one of them.
But I'll be talking about stop making our kids feel guilty.
You know, it's all about family.
So you can sign up to go online or you can go in person.
Yeah, it's a great Freedom Talk.
It's called Family and Freedom, Our Choice, Our Future.
And Danny Hozak always puts on a great event.
Lots of different speakers and there's always something there for everybody.
And I'm happy to hear that you're speaking again.
I always look forward to your speeches.
Thank you.
Thanks, Michelle.
We'll have you on again very, very soon.
Okay.
Thanks, Sheila.
Well, friends, we've come to the portion of the show where I invite your viewer feedback.
I actually care about what you think about what we're doing here at Rebel News, but also what you think about the people that we're talking to as guests.
It's the reason I give out my email address at this portion of the show.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line if you want me to see it.
That's G-U-N-N.
Don't put gun show in the subject line.
I'll never find it because as you know, based on my personal interest, there are a lot of emails probably getting dumped into my inbox relating to gun shows in general and guns in general.
Encourage Comments00:05:26
Anyway, I would also encourage you to leave comments on some of the other platforms where you might be watching us.
For example, if you're still watching us on the censorship platform of YouTube, leave a comment there.
And maybe you're watching us on the free speech platform of Rumble.
Do leave a comment there.
I do go looking at those places to find my comments and even show ideas to put them in there.
I like to hear what you guys are thinking.
Now, today's comments are actually from the censorship platform of YouTube because while I intensely dislike YouTube and the big tech oligarchy of which they're a part, I like the people who watch us over there, by and large.
Some of you hate watching me, but that's fine too.
A click is a click.
Now, the comments that I'm taking today are on my interview with Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
He had been organizing Ottawa residents to turn up at the mayoral forums to put questions to the candidates about the tangibles of climate change policy, about what climate change policies mean for human rights in the developing world when you have young children mining for cobalt in the Congo, or, you know, just how much is all of this garbage going to cost us for absolutely no impact on the global temperatures.
Now, in Ottawa, and I think Tom played a real part in this, they actually voted for a centrist.
And I would say he's a progressive centrist.
He's definitely not a conservative, but he's not a wild-eyed radical like his competition, Catherine McKinney, who has been featured prominently at the Trucker Commission as one of the bizarrest anti-convoy local politicians that I think anybody could find on the ground in Ottawa.
If you want to see our coverage, by the way, it's truckercommission.ca.
Anyway, Mark Sutcliffe, who as I say is a progressive centrist, he won the mayorship in Ottawa.
And frankly, I think that's really as good as it gets in Ottawa.
I don't think you're ever going to see a conservative elected there.
I think you just want someone who's not going to be pushed in a more radical direction by local activists.
So let's go over to YouTube.
Let's take a look at some of the comments because as I said, I like the people who watch on YouTube.
But YouTube, I don't like you very much, or frankly, at all.
Anyway, obnoxious oyster rights.
Three comments to make.
Maybe ICSC's Tom Harris, that's International Climate Science Coalition.
Tom Harris helped play a part in this win for common sense as he appeared about three weeks ago on Fox News.
Yes, he did.
He did indeed.
But you know what, Fox News?
Back off.
We saw Tom first and we liked him first.
Although I'm happy to see Tom get featured prominently on Fox News for some of his great work.
Number two, when is Calgary City Council's next climate conference?
Calgary City Council is more progressive than Ottawa's right now.
Mayor Giodi Gondik is a wild-eyed radical akin to Catherine McKinney, the city councilor in Ottawa who lost the mayor race.
And their climate change plan is more expensive than Ottawa's.
We fancy ourselves to be very conservative here in Alberta.
And by and large, we are, but we are not watching municipal politics closely enough.
And that's, you know, why I think Tom was so successful is when people started watching.
They started realizing how gross it was and just how much it matters.
And number three, the point.
I have to thank Sheila for actually reading many of the comments on her posts.
Well done.
Thank you, Sheila.
You know what I do?
I try to read some of them.
Some are just trolling comments and literally who cares?
But every trolling comment you make also puts more eyeballs on my work.
So I guess, you know what?
Thanks again, trolls.
Thanks again.
Second comment is from Flying Beaver.
Not sure if that's a real name either.
Flying Beaver writes, great job, Tom.
I'm an Ottawa citizen.
I definitely saw Mark Sutcliffe, the actual mayor, as the only choice for mayor.
He was speaking some rhetoric early on in his campaign of overhauling all city vehicles to electric over an aggressive timetable.
Not a great idea.
I hope he's reconsidering this waste of taxpayer funds to follow the climate change narrative.
I would welcome connecting locally with you.
Well, if you go back and watch my interview with Tom, he actually gives out his contact information.
So if you're interested in replicating what Tom and the gang did in Ottawa in your own community, you can do that.
Tom will help walk you through it.
And you know what, frankly, as I said to Tom, even if you are a true believer in climate change, just the cost-benefit analysis should turn you off the idea of these massive climate change policies.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.