Controversial sustainability conference speaker cancelled, City of Regina still on the hook for bill
Patrick Moore will not be speaking at the Reimagine Conference 2020: Roadmap to Sustainable Cities
The speaker at the heart of controversy surrounding a sustainability conference in Regina will not be appearing to speak, but the city is still responsible for the bill.
Patrick Moore was listed as a keynote speaker at the Energy and Sustainability Conference set to take place in the Queen City in May. The former Greenpeace director disputes that there is a "climate emergency" or that man-made carbon emissions are harmful.
But he will not be speaking, according to Coun. Mike O'Donnell.
O'Donnell said due to a contractual obligation, the city is still footing the bill for Moore's appearance. Moore was set to receive $10,000, plus expenses, for his talk at the Reimagine Conference 2020: Roadmap to Sustainable Cities.
"We have a contract. We'll honour our contract," O'Donnell said on Friday.
"We are just now speaking with the National Speakers Bureau and so we will obviously have some discussions with them but we will honour the contract."
O'Donnell said the city didn't plan to make the conference about climate change and wanted to reshift the focus of the discussion back to sustainability.
Moore took to Twitter responding to the city's announcement on Friday.
"I have been de-platformed, cancelled, and round-filed by the great City of Regina for daring to question the God-Given wisdom of the catastrophists," Moore wrote.
"Actually, I don't want to be part of such a stupid exercise. It's impossible to make a city 100% renewable."
Moore, who is chair of a group that says rising carbon dioxide emissions "will be of great benefit to life on Earth," claims human-caused emissions are not responsible for climate change.
Leading scientists in the field, looking at years of evidence for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have high confidence the opposite is true, and that human activities are causing the planet to warm above pre-industrial levels and are likely to cause long-lasting or irreversible impacts.
O'Donnell said the city would not be exploring another speaker with views similar to Moore's.