In 2007, Foster wrote of his daughter and her Grade 6 class being shown Al Gore’s apocalyptic PG movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Another column explores a Morgan Stanley Investment Foundation use of children to stage a policy session at a G8 meeting in Germany. “The political manipulation of children is age-old and disgraceful,” wrote Foster in 2007. “It has become particularly egregious during the modern age of environmental hysteria.”
Foster has more fun with Pope Francis, Mark Carney and David Suzuki than with Thunberg. A chapter sub-section, titled “Pope Francis: Papal Bull,” contains pointed commentary on assorted Papal declarations and concludes with the idea that the Pope sounds like “the theological wing of the Occupy movement.” A 2014 column asks “Is God green?” and in 2015 Foster declared the Vatican’s climate encyclical “The Pope’s Eco-munist Manifesto.”
Other icons of climate alarmism, sustainable development theory and corporate do-goodism are awarded their own chapters and sections. There’s “The nature of David Suzuki,” a 15-page run of six columns on the green activist, including an Oct. 31, 2007, column. “In Canada, the grand wizard of eco-fright is David Suzuki, who has been throwing around Halloween references himself recently.”
Five columns (from 2007 to 2016) are assembled under the heading “Naomi Klein: no logo, no logic,” including a 2015 review of the Klein-driven Leap Manifesto, still relevant today. Foster calls it the Great Leap Backwards and reports it is “taken up with peddling the fantasy of a total switch to alternative energy within a couple of decades, and demanding an end to fossil fuel activity.”
Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are still trying to make that great leap backward, evidence that Foster’s columns are as relevant today as when he wrote them for this page over the past two decades.
As a bonus, How Dare You!, which is published by the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum, enhances Foster’s wit with a collection of original and equally cutting illustrations by Josh, the British cartoonist, who cleverly captures the spirit of the columns — including the caricature below of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
HT/Paul H
Never was the term Papal Bull more appropriate.
Josh—- cartoon is funnier without the cannon. ..or gunpowder…
Perhaps just a long-underwater trapdoor?
With or without a fuse.
I just have to chime in with a LoL here too.
Actually the cannon is a good idea, especially if you understand that it is really Canada that Trudeau is doing his best to launch on a dubious trajectory..
That’s “underwear “. …not water! Ha.
I have read this commentary on Pope Francis. I am not sure whether the commentary accurately depicts the Pope’s opinions but, for whatever reason, I am reminded of the unibomber who actually made some good points.
There’s really very little difference between George Soros and Pope Francis. They are globalists against the individual and against individual nations. They would abort any number of individuals to install their ideals.
Yes, the unibomber did make some good points.
Scissor,
Hitler was a fairly intelligent man; but, like the Unibomber, he was a sociopath!
Could someone please explain how the Pope can be both a Marxist AND a Catholic? I don’t think that works in the real world! Is he going to imprison himself for counterrevolutionary thoughts? Maybe he could start by stripping the Vatican of all it’s art and treasure! I will volunteer to accept the Pieta as an important step towards equality! I understand he has some really cool hats, too!
Ahh Abolition, but you fail to factor in that The Pope adheres to the creed “sed discrimen aliquod pro te mihi” Redistribution for thee but not for me.
I am waiting for his Papalness to bring back indulgences in the form of fossil fuel payments so that the likes of Joe Biden, DiCraprio, ALBORE et al can continue to run a carbon footprint orders of magnitude above the average while receiving absolution from the Pope.
The Catholic Church and its Anglican offshoot are quite Marxist today.
Exemplified by both recent statements and the Catholic Bishops of Seattle a couple of decades ago.
‘Truth is stranger than fiction’?
Both can only be accepted on faith of course, they are so self-contradictory and so disproven in history. They are different forms of mysticism – Marxism more subtle than Christianity’s eucharist for example. Both explicitly anti-human, noting the ‘born sinner’ belief invented by St. Augustine circa 400AD.
Both rooted in denial of the effectiveness of the human mind for life, such as Marx’ fixed pie economics and drive-to-the-bottom ethics presumptions. Both believe in forcing people.
(The deep roots of both are in Plato’s error in trying to understand the human mind’s use of ‘concepts’ – he concluded there are two worlds: an unreal one we live in and a real one reachable only through years of dedication and study.
That lives as priests and the power elite that always arises from collectivism – Fidel Castro for example lived in luxury on a private island while residents of Cuba went hungry. Yet Kamala Harris and Trudeau Jr. praised him.
You can see the same attitude in the hypocrisy of climate alarmists like David Suzuki who thinks debate is beneath him, and the travel and house energy profligacy of alGore, the Greenpeace executive who commuted to work in Europe by air, and Suzuki.
Sunshine is needed media are a barrier to reaching voters, Vivian Krause nailed Suzuki on fish farms by getting in to print with identification of his errors, I had bit of success doing so with petroleum – in both cases Suzuki pulled false claims off his web site. But continues to lie, and be hypocritical – he advocates population control after siring five children.
The eco-loons should be identified by name and affiliation, and should be encouraged to sign a promise not to use fossil fuels or their derivatives from this moment forward…(eat no meat, etc. etc), and we should make sure they adhere to it. We should monitor where they live and how they live. Take them off the grid. No heat pumps, no oil. Monitor their lifestyles etc. After they have lived, and survived that way for five years, then we may be able to believe that they were sincere… if stupid. Iisten to them sing a different tune when cold weather, hits.
They are hypocrites of course, but we must hold their feet to the fire. There is no more conspicuous of a hypocrite than Suzuki and his lifestyle.
Odd that the London based GWPF does not mention the actual author of the Papal Bull, Sir John Schellnhuber CBE, ex-chief of the Potsdam Climate Institute.
That is a serious omission – after all the Queen herself dubbed Dr. Schellnhuber in 2004 at the Berlin Embassy.
This good Commander of the British Empire, is also the author of Chancellor Merkel’s Great Transformation.
Well, they do mention Mark Carney, Canadian ex-chief of the Bank of England, now UN Climate Finance Advisor. Carney calls their planned Great Reset , “Regime Change”. And Prince Charles is supposed to be the Davos Keynote speaker for the Great Reset.
The British royal family are thick with environmental alarmism, from Prince Phillip through Prince Harry.
Charles will probably be King soon, of Britain and most Commonwealth countries (by a general agreement though administrative/legislative confirmation is required in at least some such as Canada).
And Prince Charles is involved in promotion of some notion of central planning.
It’s the Uni (University) Industrial Complex. Research their PC history.
In the Pope’s defense, he actually is a creationist. If you believe that God made the world and people are evil then it is easy to believe that anything people have done to God’s world is evil. The dishonesty is on the part of ideologues who believe the world is billions of years old and has been through many sudden changes, the most recent of which was the ending of an ice age only 10000 years ago, yet preach that any departure from the conditions of 1850, or 1970 or whatever is somehow a sign that people are destroying the planet.
Good point, Starman, that is not addressed often enough. In a self-generated, haphazard and ultimately purposeless material cosmos of congealed atoms, what possible importance do some further ‘jolting changes’ make on this single small rocky planet where it is anticipated that its central star will inevitably swell and sear its surface to a crisp? So its likely that all the abundant anguish over continuing transformations is actually borrowed without due attribution from a “how it has been revealed by its Author that it’s meant to be instead” viewpoint that they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge as they manifest a logical non-sequitur. But I suppose that people who so wish to duck accountability to a Maker still have considerable difficulty embracing the uncaring oblivion that their impersonal outlook prescribes for their own destiny.
You can see the ‘man has dominion over the earth’ thread in many fundamentalist Christians – several are prominent climate skeptic scientists.
But the ‘born sinner’ thread is also strong.
Thus like politicians their actions vary somewhat.
With bias, the ‘man has dominion over the earth’ teaching is being used to support eco-alarmism, not in a ‘steward’ sense.