I’ve noticed a genre in media coverage of Justin Trudeau's environmental politics, basically fan fiction shrewdly nurtured by Liberals, that disguises his steadfast support for oil barons and excuses woefully inadequate measures.

It’s The Story of the Thwarted Hero.

A thread..

The story: Trudeau is a climate warrior whose ambitions always founder on hard, unavoidable realities.

Its aim: lower expectations, marginalize visions like Green New Deal, and manufacture consent for a corporate environmental agenda, which is what Liberals are actually about.

This week: Trudeau is “itching to deliver” a bold climate plan but is supposedly stymied by the pandemic – except, hello, a major green reconstruction could simultaneously address crises of public health, joblessness, racial inequality, and climate breakdown!

Ironically, a few weeks earlier, Liberal sources were peddling the line that Trudeau was determined to use the “once in a century opportunity” created by the pandemic to “roll out bigger, bolder changes”, an opportunity supposedly slipping away because of the WE scandal fallout.

“Hesitating” did interesting work in this July headline, implying that Trudeau is some activist Hamlet unable to rise to his true purpose. It's a subtle propaganda: he might buy pipelines and dish billions to Big Oil, but he’s still a green champion...in his heart of hearts.

At the outset of the pandemic, we were also told Trudeau was on the verge of a green revolution. Then we got a multi-billion dollar bailout of the oil industry. https://twitter.com/Martin_Lukacs/status/1246908201787891712

What the media never asks is why Liberals didn’t launch a green transformation when given an undisputed mandate to do so in 2015, a majority with which to press the levers of power, and broad support that would've rushed to their defence against fossil corporate recalcitrance.

There’s always an excuse in this story. Now it’s a pandemic. Before it was minority gov, or distracting scandals, or troglodyte right-wing premiers. Could a climate warrior posture have been a cynical ploy to win office & cover for Big Oil? Naaah, answers our servile media class.