Alberta Premier Sheds Crocodile Tears After Jasper Is Destroyed By Fire – CleanTechnica

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Chutzpah, according to one definition, is when people who murder their parents plead for mercy because they are now orphans. Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, Canada, demonstrated the true meaning of chutzpah this week when she appeared to be near tears while talking about how a nearly 400-foot-long wall of fire demolished the town of Jasper.

According to The Guardian, last year, when wildfires ripped through Alberta, Smith attributed them to arsonists — a trope we have heard time and time again from extreme right-wing shills everywhere as they try in vain to assign responsibility for those fires to any cause other than global heating. It’s sun spots, it’s sex traffickers, it’s illegal immigrants, it’s wind turbines or solar panels, it’s women crossing state lines in search of reproductive health services, it’s pre-teens who don’t know which bathroom to use, it’s children not having the Ten Commandments hanging in their classrooms, it’s anything but what it is — climatic change brought on by rising temperatures around the globe.

The emotional response by the Alberta premier was shared widely online but failed to reflect her previous comments on wildfires or her government’s relentless fight against federal policies to combat global heating, which evidence suggests has made the blazes larger and more intense. Last summer, during a record-breaking wildfire season which scorched more than 18 million hectares (70,000 square miles) of land in Canada, Smith was asked about her government’s fierce opposition to federal emission reduction plans and the link between worsening fire seasons and climate change.

“It’s a real-life metaphor … happening in front of us with a historic wildfire season,” Ryan Jespersen said to Smith on an episode of his podcast, Real Talk. “Every expert that we talk to indicates the significant factor that climate change is playing on our susceptibility to wildfire and on the conditions that lead to these massive blazes that are happening earlier and earlier in the season.” Smith responded by referring to conspiracy theories that the record breaking fire season was the result of arson or government intervention, not climate change. “I think you’re watching, as I am, the number of stories about arson,” she told him. “I’m very concerned that there are arsonists.”

Alberta Knuckles Under To Fossil Fuels

Despite her comments, provincial fire agencies across Canada — including in Alberta — say that nearly all of the country’s major wildfires were caused by lightning striking the tinder-like condition of forests. And yet last year Smith slashed funding to the province’s wildfire response unit. She said it would allow for a “more nimble” force to respond quickly to fires, but critics pointed out her decision followed a string of cuts by the United Conservative Party, including scrapping Alberta’s elite aerial fire service team and cutting the number of fire watch towers. The New Democratic Party also reduced funding for wildfire services, but cuts under the governing UCP have been deeper.

Smith has spent her tenure as premier casting herself as Ottawa’s greatest foe, focusing her efforts on opposition to Canada’s federal carbon tax, which she she says hurts ordinary Albertans, as well as a nationwide plan to decarbonize the electrical grid. Recent research also suggests the oil industry, which dominates Alberta’s economy, has contributed to the more damaging fire season.

Commentary From An Albertan

In a blog post that was republished by The Daily Kos, Briana Amore writes that she grew up in the Canadian Rockies near Jasper where she went cross-country skiing and canoeing with her family, rock climbing, hiking, and camping. “The Rocky Mountains were my sanctuary, my playground, and where I truly learned to appreciate nature,” she says. She now lives in the US and writes passionately about the choice American voters will have this fall.

The US today “has one entire political party that completely refuses to accept the reality that climate change is here and it’s only getting worse. A party whose leader promised the oil industry an end to all climate change mitigation efforts if they would donate $1 billion to his campaign. A leader who routinely rails against green energy, wind farms, rants about batteries and promises an end to EV mandates and tax credits.

“A party that managed to tilt the Supreme Court in their favor and are now gutting as much environmental regulation as they can get their dirty hands upon. A party of greedy rich sociopaths who are fully willing to mortgage away the future of humanity in order to stuff the pockets of their corporate benefactors. A party that now includes a man who thinks colonizing Mars is a better solution than fixing the Earth, our only home and the only known planet capable of sustaining life.” Amore isn’t done. Not by a long shot. Lumping Danielle Smith in with the virulent climate deniers in America, she says:

These people are insane. There is no better word to describe them. Their complete and utter lack of concern over our planet’s fate puts them in the same category as some of the worst monsters humanity has ever produced. They are willing to commit ecological suicide all for the chance to earn more wealth even though they have more wealth than they possibly could need for several lifetimes.

So now we have ‘ecological grief’ in our lexicon because these people have stood in the way of climate change mitigation efforts for decades. Papers were written a century ago about how pumping CO2 into the atmosphere would lead to planetary warming. And now that warming has come much faster than anybody anticipated. We are now experiencing unprecedented disasters at an alarming rate, costing world governments hundreds of billions of dollars and displacing millions of people. In fact one of the major drivers of illegal immigration on the Southern border are migrants escaping climate change related disasters in Central America.

The Takeaway

Some readers will be shocked by Brianna Amore’s words, but you really shouldn’t be. She speaks the truth when so many dare not do so. We do not need fossil fuel stooges like Danielle Smith with their fake tears trying to appear in public like they have an actual soul, when as soon as the television cameras are switched off they go right back to doing the bidding of the fossil fuel corporations who paid to get them elected in the first place. What we need are leaders — people who are not ideologues but are willing to do what they were elected to do, which is protect their constituents from harm.

We need leaders with courage to stand up to the climate criminals and put the needs of the people and the Earth first. In other words, we need them to do what they swore an oath to do when they took office. John F. Kennedy once wrote a book entitled Profiles In Courage in which he told the stories of leaders who did precisely that, even when doing so meant jeopardizing their political careers because it was the right thing to do.

Today’s right-wing extremists have no idea what courage is. They are cowards who hide behind the shiny platitudes they are spoon fed by their benefactors. People like Danielle Smith are an embarrassment. She needs to quit with the fake tears and start doing her job. She was elected to be a leader, not a shill for Big Oil. It’s time fake politicians like Danielle Smith began attending to the people’s business — while there is still time.

Featured photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash