Pandering to woke culture won’t save the planet

Have you ever heard of Konstantin Kisin? I hadn’t until a saw his short, but brilliant speech on social media. The topic: woke culture has gone too far. Look it up. It’s really entertaining.

Kisin is described as a satirist, author and political commentator. As someone often billed as a comedian, you might assume he wouldn’t have much to contribute to serious dialogue.

Interestingly, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. Look what he has accomplished and how he is now regarded. Perhaps comedians know how to relate to people and more clearly understand human nature than the rest of us.

As Kisin explains in his presentation, for woke individuals their feelings matter more than the truth. Saving the planet from climate change has become a top fixation for many in the younger generation.

According to Kisin, Britain accounts for just two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so even if the country sunk into the sea and disappeared, emissions wouldn’t change much. Canadian emissions are typically pegged at 1.6 per cent of the global total, so the same applies here.

If you fully buy into the theory of manmade global warming, the fate of the climate is in the hands of poor people in Asia and Latin America, who don’t care about global warming because they are poor and just struggling to feed themselves.

Where do you think climate change ranks in the list of priorities where hundreds of millions of people face malnutrition along with the diseases that stem from poor nourishment? Economic growth and lifting people out of poverty is an overriding goal even in totalitarian regimes like China.

While I can’t vouch for his statistics, Kisen claims one-third of the world’s children living in extreme poverty are in India. Starvation is common and so is dying of preventable diseases. Parents want to give their children a better life and don’t have the luxury of worrying about their carbon footprint.

Wokeness brainwashing has young people in affluent countries complaining, protesting and throwing soup on paintings. As Kisin points out, that energy is misdirected. What we need to work towards is scientific and technological breakthroughs to create clean, cheap energy.

Kisin’s eloquent and often humorous presentation didn’t delve into what those breakthroughs may be, but some of the solutions being pursued have their own environmental problems. Just look at the push to replace internal combustion engines with electric.

Just because an electric vehicle has no tailpipe emissions doesn’t make it environmentally friendly. How is the electricity produced to charge the batteries? How many emissions were created in mining the rare earth minerals that went into the batteries? Crushing mountains of rocks and all the caustic chemicals involved in extracting rare minerals is nasty business.

Yes, electric vehicles have a place, but so do hybrid vehicles and so do internal combustion engines that use cleaner fuels, be that renewable diesel or hydrogen. Even wind turbines and solar panels have their environmental drawbacks, not to mention their limited capacities.

Here in Canada, the ever-increasing carbon tax is supposed to be the incentive to cut carbon emissions. It’s a flawed and failed policy.

Agriculture is touted as both a villain and a solution by our federal government. Unfortunately, it’s a government that panders to the woke and one gets the feeling that feeding the world and generating economic prosperity is secondary to their fantasy of saving the planet from climate change.