Lawrence Solomon: Justin Trudeau could face his worst nightmare in Ted Cruz

...In contrast to his huggy bromance with political soulmate Barack Obama, Trudeau would be matched up against a hard-edged ideological opposite his own age but with a history of jaw-dropping achievements. A legal scholar who was not only a repeat national debating champion representing Harvard and Princeton, but who also won an astonishing five times in cases argued before the Supreme Court of the United States.

In one area — the Keystone XL pipeline — Trudeau need not fear a loss of face. Although he failed to press for Keystone’s acceptance in Washington during his official dinner last month, Trudeau did publicly express his disappointment at Obama’s decision to reject Keystone last November. Cruz’s decision to approve Keystone would be an important area of agreement. But that’s pretty much where it would end.

On his signature issue of climate change, Trudeau would overnight feel marginalized as Cruz reverses every Obama climate change initiative, cuts climate change funding to NASA, universities and every other federally funded institution in the United States, and defunds the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But Cruz would go further than that.

As chair of the science panel of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Cruz grappled with the scientific arguments surrounding global warming and concluded that the current computer models used to understand global climate trends “are profoundly wrong … and inconsistent with the evidence and the data.” Cruz knows, for example, that there is no scientific consensus on climate change and that many top scientists believe that carbon dioxide is a boon for the environment. As Cruz has explained, carbon dioxide “is good for plant life,” the planet “is greener right now” than in the past, and “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever.”

At international summits with his presidential and prime ministerial peers, Cruz would be able to prosecute the case against global-warming alarmism as no other leader could, although by then he may not need to. Many influential countries — the U.K., Japan and Australia among them — have already distanced themselves from the global-warming ideology; most of the rest would need little encouragement. At a future G7 meeting, if a scientifically naïve Trudeau tried to argue the case for climate change, he might well be brushed off, or even laughed off. Knowing this, Trudeau will have to swallow his pride and accept that climate change was dead as a cause du jour...