Ottawa, the age of wishful climate thinking is over

A boy kicks a soccer ball near signage for the COP30 U.N. Climate Conference in Belem, Brazil. Photo by Jorge Saenz/AP files

We’re entering what has become an annual fall ritual: the rush of national governments to shape the promises they’ll carry to the UN’s COP (Conference of the Parties) climate summit, being held this year in Brazil in mid-November. For Canada, this ritual has taken on a strangely self-defeating quality. Year after year, Ottawa bureaucrats produce the policies most ardently demanded by the climate lobby. Whether these measures actually reduce emissions is beside the point. The ceremony is about pledging allegiance to “net zero” — a term that grows vaguer and less credible with every passing year.

There is much nervous pacing as the big-emitting industries wonder wh