John Rustad Is an Old-School Climate Change Denier

[Editor’s note: This is the latest in an occasional series by Mo Amir called Logic Check, whose focus is explained in a sidebar to this article.]

Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad neatly masks his climate change denialism when he says that climate change is real.

“Climate change is real,” Rustad told Catherine Cullen on CBC’s Power & Politics last month. It’s a phrase that Rustad has repeated so many times, it may as well be a slogan for the BC Conservatives’ election campaign.

“It is not a crisis. It is not an existential threat. It is something that’s real.”

A self-professed believer, he refuses to succumb to the “climate doom-cult” whose approach, he claims, amounts to “hype, scare-tactics and false promises.”

This is a stark contrast to the radical leftists who bully the world into believing that climate change is “perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity.”

That declaration was made by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in June 2007, calling for international consensus on climate change. (Fun fact: Canada’s oil and gas output grew faster under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau than it had under Harper.)

Rustad is built different. He is not a “new climate denier,” which Climate Emergency Unit director Seth Klein defines as a leader who accepts the science of climate change but obstructs any meaningful policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, Rustad says “climate change is real” — possibly to shield himself from being labelled as anti-scientific — but it is indisputable that he does not believe climate change, as understood by scientific consensus, is real.

John Rustad is an old-school climate denier — and he’s honest about it. His arguments prove it.

‘Nothing we can do’: Rustad

“Canada may be a small contributor to global warming — our greenhouse gases represent just two per cent of the Earth’s total — but we owe it to future generations to do whatever we can to address this world problem,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in that statement from 2007.

John Rustad agrees with the premise that Canada (or, in Rustad’s case, British Columbia) is a small contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. However, he departs from Harper’s position that even a small emitter has an obligation to do whatever possible to reduce emissions. “There is nothing we can do, as a province, to be able to address this.”

But it’s not fatalistic resignation that defines Rustad’s climate change position; it’s his expressed belief that human activity is a meaninglessly small factor causing climate change.

“We can’t make a difference, even if you think CO2 is the problem, many people still believe that,” Rustad insisted on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. Rustad invokes defeatism while implying that he — unlike “many people” — does not believe that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are the problem.

He explicitly confirmed this position with the Globe and Mail, saying that it was “false” that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.

In an official statement, Rustad conceded that “man is impacting our climate,” while insisting that human activity is “one of hundreds of potential factors” contributing to climate change. If human activity is just one impact out of hundreds to the climate, as Rustad argues, it could not possibly be the main driver of climate change.

He argued this same logic to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade: “The question to the degree of impact by human activity, scientists can debate that and scientists are debating that.”

(Scientists are not debating the main cause of climate change. A 2021 survey of climate-related studies found that 99.9 per cent of peer-reviewed scientific papers agreed climate change is primarily caused by human activity.)

Rustad’s anti-science approach informs his joke with a fellow climate science denier: “How is it we have convinced carbon-based beings that carbon is the problem?”

(Commentators have noted that this type of logic would question if drowning is a real cause of death since the human body is made up of approximately 60 per cent water.)

For a B.C. politician whose career resurgence — perhaps all the way to the premier’s office — was ignited by amplifying climate change denialism, Rustad is remarkably consistent in his views.

When Rustad says that climate change is real, he is strictly referring to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns. He is not referring to the scientific consensus that climate change is anthropogenic. In fact, he repeatedly rejects that scientific consensus.

Rustad is, indeed, faithful to this argument, as he recently told CBC’s BC Today.

“I haven’t changed my position at all.”

BC Conservative ideas speak to their beliefs

Rustad’s climate skepticism is — wittingly or unwittingly — a philosophical (not methodological) skepticism that casts doubt on commonly accepted knowledge by questioning the very foundation of knowledge. This epistemological approach rejects even the notion of “common sense” that John Rustad and the BC Conservatives ironically espouse.

But it’s an approach that spills over to the party’s policy proposals, many of which are, so far, half-baked.

While the Conservative Party of BC has yet to release its environmental platform, British Columbians should not expect much, if the party’s website is any indication.

Under its “Common Sense Plan for All British Columbians,” there are just three broad actions in its “Energy and the Environment” plan: scrap the carbon tax; expand liquefied natural gas production; get pipelines built.

The Conservatives offer nothing for the environment in their conceptual plan — not even climate change adaptation. This is vintage climate change denial.

If Rustad truly believed that climate change is real and if he were merely questioning some aspects of climate change, then he would still prioritize developing resilience to mitigate the climate risks faced by the province. But he doesn’t because, contrary to the scientific consensus embraced even by Stephen Harper, Rustad — in his own words — doesn’t believe that climate change is an existential threat.

There is no ambiguity: John Rustad and — by extension — the Conservative Party of BC are climate change deniers.

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