The false ‘choice’ of Kathleen Wynne’s high-cost, low-carbon Utopia – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – June 9, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

“As economist Ross McKitrick has pointed out, even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading light for climate-change scientists, has
suggested a point at which the economic costs of eliminating carbon are more
damaging to people and society than the climate impact from the same amount of carbon.”

Towards the end of the 86-page “Five Year Climate Action Plan,” officially released by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne on Wednesday, is an artist’s representation of what the province is intended to look like in 2050. Designed like a screenshot of a progressive policy-maker’s utopian video game, there are rows of condos — no sign of any single-family houses — cladded with solar panels and tapping the earth’s geothermal energy for warmth.

Towering wind turbines spin overhead helping to power “low-carbon” businesses, bearing trite signs on their buildings like “Kleen Tech” or simply a logo of a green leaf. Commuters are whisked about on electric rail and electric buses.

You have to look closely to find the cars being refueled with ethanol and renewable electricity; they’re outnumbered by the bicycles. Trees bloom everywhere, except in a small patch where they’ve been harvested “sustainably.” A sailboat coasts by the shoreline. And in the middle of all of it sits Queen’s Park, the control centre for this perfectly harmonious, carbonless Shangri-La.

This, finally, is the plan that’s been leaking out of Wynne’s government for weeks, early versions reportedly proposing lunacies like eventual bans on natural gas for new homes and policies to prevent Ontarians from owning more than one gas-powered vehicle.

Now that it’s arrived, the far-fetched schemes are still there, only now they’re engineered through bribery, not force, deploying thousands of dollars in subsidies to get “less fuel-efficient vehicles off the roads” with handouts for electric-car buyers, and to get homeowners to “purchase and install low-carbon energy technologies such as geothermal heat pumps and air-source heat pumps, solar thermal and solar energy generation systems.”

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