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Think Facts Matter? Try Attending a Friends of Science Event Headlined by Ezra Levant

May 16, 2016

Think Facts Matter? Try Attending a Friends of Science Event Headlined by Ezra Levant

 

We’re only a minute into watching a brief low-budget video — one that begins by alleging U.S. President Barack Obama is a bully because he suggests that climate change deniers should be “called out” — when Ezra Levant sits down in the chair next to me.

The Rebel Commander himself.

According to organizers, he’s the reason attendance of tonight’s $45-per-head fundraiser in Calgary — casually titled “Climate Leadership Catastrophe: Carbon Taxes, Job Loss, Freedoms Denied” and organized by the so-called “Friends of Science” — spiked from 200 to 445 people after he was announced as its keynote speaker.

And he’s the same intensely controversial pundit who I met in late November at another Calgary event called “Generation Screwed” which I covered for Vice Canada while wearing a “Dreamy Trudeau” sweater.

“Hey James,” he says, reaching out his hand to shake mine.

We briefly chat as the video moves on to clips of testimonies from human-caused climate change denying scientists like Roy Spencer and Willie Soon (the latter took $1.25 million from fossil fuel companies and lobby groups for his research). Levant relays a hilarious and self-deprecating story to me about his flight from Toronto to Calgary during which another person fell asleep on him.

I scribble a few observations in a notepad. He scrolls through his phone, probably Twitter mentions given he sports almost 50,000 followers.

After a few minutes he gets up to leave. I remind him that I tweeted at him a while back about how the Alberta NDP was elected on Karl Marx’s birthday, which seems like crucial information to include in his vehemently anti-NDP and pro-capitalist online show.

We opt to “follow” each other on Twitter. He wanders off.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chicken Little Meet the Friends of Science

June 29, 2015

Chicken Little Meet the Friends of Science

Canada’s leading climate conspiracy theorists, the Friends of Science, are out this week with a critique on climate change that would make even Chicken Little blush.

In a press release issued Thursday, the Friends of Science state that if plans proceed to move our country away from carbon-intensive fuel sources like oil and coal, “Canada would have to be completely shut down in order to reach the emissions reduction targets, leaving millions of Canadians unemployed.”

The Friends of Science are no stranger to hyperbole, which is on full-display on the homepage of their website promoting all sorts of pseudo-scientific climate science conspiracy claims.

The FOS is also no stranger to controversy.

Many longtime DeSmog readers will know that a few years ago this group was outed in an investigative piece by the Globe and Mail for its ties to the Alberta oil patch and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

I am reluctantt to address these latest Chicken Little claims by the Friends of Science, because arguing back at them is exactly what they want and could be mistaken for a sliver of a legitimate place in the debate about how to solve the issue of climate change and transition the world from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy.

And quite frankly, as I pointed out last week, a group like the FOS who still readily claim that climate change is “big green propaganda” and nothing to be concerned about, has no place in a debate about how to deal with a problem they don’t .

 

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