Canada is teetering on the verge of plunging headlong into a state of political anomaly unique among large and sophisticated countries. We appear to be about to elevate to the de facto position of interim prime minister someone who would then be one of the last government leaders of serious countries still urging backbreaking public sacrifices to eliminate fossil fuel use and thus strangle into painful extinction our greatest industry (petroleum) and the key to the economic prosperity of Canadians over the next 50 years. Everybody in the world is opposed to the pollution of the world’s air and water, and to that extent, everyone in the world is a conservationist. But the advocates of the abolition of the oil and gas industry, even though natural gas is a relatively clean fuel (as is nuclear energy), are not seeking a realistic balance between the economic welfare of the population and the security of the environment. They take no account of the fact that the leading offenders of their perfectionist standards of avoidance of carbon use — China, India and Russia, in particular — consider all of these climate change warnings to be unmitigated rubbish and make virtually no concessions to them whatever.