The newest threat that climate crisis activists are using to influence public opinion is the likelihood of human extinction by the end of this century.
The threat is disguised as a public service announcement but it’s a ransom demand: “Give us the climate justice we demand and we will give you back your peace of mind."
The Extinction Rebellion’s climate justice would be the end of the fossil fuel economy and its replacement by a job- and investment-creating cornucopia of wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear reactors.
The extinction rebels warn that there will be one million human climate-change deaths by 2050, accompanied by an extensive loss of biodiversity – the elimination of thousands of species of plants, animals, birds and other life forms.
The rebels claim that science, the proxy god of their end-times eschatology, supports the prediction that human life will be snuffed out by a combination of starvation, heat, drought, wildfires, polar thaws and ocean floods, crop failures and climate-incited pandemics that now beset the human race.
As 2020 begins, there is death and destruction from wildfires in Australia, floods in Europe and the Mediterranean, accelerating deforestation of the Amazon jungle, and more than a million climate-event refugees fleeing wildfires, floods, drought and crop failures.
Rebellions need a villain and the extinction rebels place the blame for human extinction on the corporate and government agents of the fossil fuel economy
There is less science to support the extinction claim than to support climate change theory but enough political traction in it to make examining it necessary.
Fossil fuel production is at odds with the rebellion and the climate change street protests.
On a list of what is at stake for Alberta, the completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the pace of investment in the oilsands are incidental
For the Extinction Rebellion, the victory in Alberta would be the province admitting defeat and walking away from the storehouse of fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
Alberta has minable coal reserves of more than 91 billion tonnes and two trillion tonnes too deep to mine but within reach of coalbed methane production methods. These reserves contain 500 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.
Canada has 71 billion barrels of oil reserves, 166.3 billion barrels in oilsands and 4.7 billion barrels in conventional, offshore, and tight oil formations spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic oceans.
Those reserves represent tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars of wealth, paycheques, taxes, schools, hospitals, roads and reinvestment for the future.
They are also billions of BTUs of energy for heating homes and fuelling transportation.
The extinction rebels are proposing that we walk away from all of that.
The rebels will never give corporations and governments credit for what they are doing to mitigate the impact of fossil fuel production and use on climate change.
The only justice they will accept is the rapid and absolute end of fossil fuel production and use.
No one says that to be a rebel you are required to be credible.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
