CHELSEA, QUE.—News of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unmistakable retreat on existing climate and environmental protections blew through town like an early spring thunderstorm last week. But, so far, it doesn’t appear to have done serious damage to his standing in the polls.

To the climate, however? That is a different and more troubling question. And the answer is certainly ‘yes’. In fact, the stories of extreme heat and wildfire risk (Nova Scotia), destructive winds (southern Ontario) and year-round subterranean burning (western and northern Canada) have already started.

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Carney’s team can blow off negative reaction to his latest efforts to win over Alberta’s chronically peeved governing class as fleeting collateral damage, knowing that Canadians are massively focused on the tornado of destruction south of the border right now. And, for many, watching the cost of everything increase, seeing the job market shrink (especially for younger people) relegates climate change to a back burner, at least temporarily. The issue surfaces episodically, seasonally, earlier and earlier; firefighters are called in, water bombers deployed, then everyone heads back to the barbecue—or, in suffocating inner cities, to a cooling centre.

But some see through the woodsmoke. A parade of this country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists and green advocates roundly condemned Carney’s invidious deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, which is expected to produce an oil pipeline proposal by this fall, intended to carry more Alberta crude to the West Coast and on to Asia by 2033-34, but the route is still uncertain and there is no known private builder.

That is the central deliverable of last week’s tumble of environment-related news. There are only two things that will potentially stop a new pipeline: a cold-eyed calculation by industry that the costs outweigh the payback, given the uncertain nature of the oil market; or the mounting reluctance of major oil producers, previously known as the Pathways Alliance, to proceed with a........

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