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Unless we buy billions of dollars worth of carbon credits, with taxpayers’ money, on fraud-ridden global carbon markets.

Despite all this, Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna insists, absurdly, that Canada will meet its 2030 target.

Conservative opposition leader Andrew Scheer insists, more absurdly, that his party will release a plan to meet Canada’s UN targets, without a carbon tax, before next year’s election.

None of this makes any sense based on real-world experience.

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Given the 30-year record of failure by Canadian governments on this file, and that it’s not helping us build pipelines or sell our oil to global markets, isn’t it time we said our emperors have no clothes?

And that the political debate about these issues in Parliament, in provincial legislatures, by academics, by pollsters and in the media, exists primarily in the realm of fantasy.

Which is to say nothing of the fact that even if Canada was meeting its emission targets, our impact on global emissions would be insignificant.

The best explanation I’ve read about the bizarre way in which Canada’s chattering classes and the Trudeau government today respond to climate change and energy policy comes from George Monbiot’s 2006 book: How To Stop The Planet From Burning.

As Monbiot writes of the western democracies: “Our response will be to demand that the government act, while hoping it doesn’t.

“We will wish our governments to pretend to act…They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about our failure to curb climate change, but that…nobody ever rioted for austerity…”

“For the campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance, but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.”

Which is exactly what has happened in Canada.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com