And as the youthful prime minister (who is rumored to have inherited his famous good looks from Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro) tries to foster a reputation as one of the western world's foremost climate warriors, Canadian courts have handed him a major victory.

As the world waits for a ruling on a major climate change case from the US Supreme Court, and President Biden prepares to unveil his sweeping infrastructure/climate program, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Thursday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's national carbon price, the cornerstone of his climate policy, is entirely constitutional.

The API, an influential organization representing energy firms, announced Tuesday that it supports a carbon-pricing scheme, the first time the US energy industry has nominally supported a carbon tax. However, the organization specified that the tax should be used to encourage green energy use, not pad government coffers.

Trudeau declared that a carbon tax would be a key policy goal back in 2016, but it wasn't until 2019, after he was reelected, that the Canadian federal government set a minimum price on carbon emissions in provinces which don't have an equivalent provincial price. The controversial program applies a price to fuel purchases by individuals and businesses with lower emissions, and on part of the actual emissions produced by companies that are responsible for large emissions, such as pipelines, manufacturing plants and coal-fired power plants.