Given the threadbare state of Canada’s remaining climate policies and the windfall profits the fossil fuel industries are poised to pocket from the attacks on Iran, you might think they’d be satisfied. Instead, fossil fuel boosters are doubling down on the strategy of predatory delay.

It’s a useful term, first coined by Alex Steffen, to describe a shift in tactics. Instead of sowing doubt about the science of climate change and denying the need for a green transition, the industries and their promoters play for time. They might even acknowledge the need for change — but not too much and not too quickly. Nothing that might transform the existing system or upset the shareholders.

It allows politicians and industry to perform an insidious double act — sidestepping outright climate denial while opposing climate action. In the hands of a shrewd practitioner, you can even push the timeline out to infinity.

And so we got Pierre Poilievre, over in Europe to rebrand himself more statesmanlike, but calling net-zero a “fraud.” We should note that this was several days after US President Donald Trump began bombing Iran. And he was sitting for an interview in the UK, a country that has cut emissions by more than half amid an impressive deployment of wind power. A country whose leaders were frantically pledging to accelerate the rollout of clean energy to grapple with the latest round of fossil fuel shocks.

Poilievre may be trying to distance himself from Trump, but he sure sounded pretty Trumpy, describing net-zero as “just the latest of many pretexts used to justify taking away everybody’s money and giving it to a treasured, privileged, few green grifters…..it’s all BS.”

European leaders might have taken that........

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