Danielle Smith weicht der Klimawissenschaft im Parlament aus

Some details:

>“I’m not a scientist,” she told the House of Commons environment committee Thursday in response to questions from Bloc Québécois MP Patrick Bonin. Bonin was pressing Smith to explain how Alberta can meet its net-zero by 2050 target while boosting oil and gas production.
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>Smith, who leads a province with the fourth largest oil reserves and ninth largest gas reserves on the planet and is an avowed oil and gas industry promoter, acknowledged the climate is warming and human activity makes some contribution. But, when asked if oil and gas are the main culprits — they are unequivocally the leading contributors according to climate science — she deflected by casting hydroelectricity as an emissions culprit.
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>“I know there’s a lot of methane emissions that come from hydroelectric development,” she said.
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>Smith isn’t wrong that hydroelectric power creates methane emissions. When land is flooded to create a dam’s reservoir, vegetation rots and can release methane — a potent planet-warming greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere. A 2016 Swiss study estimated these emissions mean hydropower isn’t as clean as many would otherwise assume, but was clear the amount is still much lower than fossil fuels. About half of Canada’s methane emissions come from oil and gas, compared to 27 per cent from agriculture, 18 per cent from waste and six per cent from other sources.
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>Bonin asked Smith if she had any emissions modelling that showed how it was possible to double oil production and reach net-zero.
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>“Well, I understand in Quebec you don’t understand the oil industry,” she snapped. “So you don’t know that there are 6,000 products that come from a barrel of oil.”
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>Throughout Smith’s testimony to the committee, which is studying Canada’s 2030 emission reduction targets, she framed new oil pipelines as a critical opportunity for the country’s economy that shouldn’t be passed up to address climate change.
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>For Alberta to double oil production and the country to become an energy superpower, Prime Minister Mark Carney must align with Alberta and dismantle a set of climate policies put in place over the past decade, she said. Those policies include federal impact assessments, the proposed cap on oil and gas emissions, the West Coast tanker ban and clean electricity regulations. But she also has her eyes set on something bigger: the country’s entire emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement.

The unmitigated gall of this premier to on one hand use her stated lack of knowledge on science to avoid answering questions she knows the answer to, and then on the other hand to use misleading scientific information to denigrate cleaner forms of energy production. She is speaking here in bad faith, and frankly her ‚testimony‘ should be entirely disregarded by serious people.