Leaked email reveals that Gerald Butts cashing in post-politics

Eurasia Group has a mandate to put “politics first”—a curious business model. Using climate change to make money is not a novel idea, but there’s no doubt that Gerry Butts and his friends will elevate this concept to an art form, especially given the past experiences of Mr. Butts.

For example, before leading the Trudeau brain-trust, he advised the Dalton McGuinty team in Ontario. That Liberal government was notably plagued with scandals and green mismanagement.

As Butts says in the leaked email, “there is much, much more to do in an unnervingly short period of time. If you trust the science (and it has been 300 years since the Enlightenment—we should all trust the science), economic actors have a couple of business cycles to plan for major changes to the natural world upon which all their supply chains depend.

Butts is right. It has been 300 years since the enlightenment. But the idea that we should always trust the science on every topic, at all times is insulting and preposterous even to scientists, who must always revise and correct their findings.

Take for example the 1989 Associated Press article that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” We were told back then to “believe the science,” but if that science was perfectly correct, then you would be reading this underwater right now.

Of course climate change is real, but so is alarmism.

Butts goes on to say in the email that “this is one of a small number of exciting projects I’m working on with people I like and trust, on issues I think will be definitional for my kids and yours.”

Overall, the leaked email reveals that Gerald Butts is going to be just fine. Just in case you were worried.