Is It Time We Chaperoned Our Politicians

Where Alberta Fossil Fuelers Go to Shop

Yes, Christy, this is about you - and the rest.

Christy Clark, Canada's  Queen of Cash has been known to be a grateful recipient of campaign contributions from those friendly funsters known as the Calgary Petroleum Club but, of course, that doesn't mean that her government's acceptance of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion had anything to do with cheque-stuffed envelopes.  Still, the skeptical might just wonder.

Hell, even the New York Times has taken notice of Grifty Clark and splashed her around on the pages of The Grey Lady.

It's fair to say that Canada is a nation of petro-pols. Our House of Commons is chock full of them save, perhaps, for that little lady way over there in the corner. And provincial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia are also sinking under the weight of their own petro-pols.

It's timely help then from a friendly Deutscher,  Arne Jungjohann, an energy analyst from Germany.  His message - if Canada wants to make progress on climate change, if Canada's governments are remotely serious about that, they have to get fossil fuel money out of politics (and, I might add, government subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry).

There are no two ways about it, according to German political scientist Arne Jungjohann: if you want to make meaningful progress on climate change, you have to get big money out of politics.

“Then you get fossil fuel money out of politics,” said the author and energy analyst. “It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create this stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people.”

Hold on a minute, Arnie. Fossil energy is already a non-partisan issue. Did you ever hear of the industry's latest Alberta champion, Rachel Notley? The Tories are in the fossil fuelers' bag.  So too is environmental hypocrite extraordinaire and Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This is already a non-partisan issue and that is the problem. 

Jungjohann offered “lessons" from the German clean energy story, also called the Energiewende. It’s the German word for the country’s clean energy transition, and Jungjohann co-wrote a book about it: Energy Democracy — Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables.

If Canada has anything to learn from Germany's Energiewende, he said, it's that corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan. He called it the "democratization" of clean energy.

What works in Germany won't work in Canada. At the federal and the provincial level our fossil energy corruption is now institutionalized, embedded.