Archive | Climate Change, Carbon Taxes and ENGOs

https://nationalpost.com/

Canada should take a more pragmatic approach that focuses both on environmental concerns and measures that will bolster, not retard, our economic prospects

Given the Supreme Court verdict validating the Liberals’ carbon tax and the awkward manoeuvre by Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole to emulate a “carbon pricing plan,” one would think the political debate about climate change is over in Canada.

But wait a minute. There are some myths to challenge and some other views to consider and evaluate. Many Canadians see their country as being in the vanguard of those committed to assuage what is widely proclaimed as an “existential threat” to the world.

And yet, despite the implementation of an increasingly costly carbon tax, Canada is, as Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and an ardent climate change advocate, has bluntly pointed out, “the only G7 country where carbon emissions have increased since the signing of the Paris Agreement (in 2015).” The carbon tax has not delivered and yet the economic costs to many Canadians are growing. Continue Reading →

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What Carney ultimately wants is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism

In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding.

Carney’s views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.” Continue Reading →

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Climate court cases undermine democracy, harm the poor and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate

Despite intense climate worries, electorates have been unwilling to spend the trillions needed to cut emissions dramatically. That is why climate campaigners have increasingly pursued a new strategy: forcing climate policy through courts.

Across the world, the UN now counts at least 1,550 such climate cases in 38 countries, including several in Canada, often filed by young people invoking a fear for their future.

Unfortunately, such cases undermine democracy, harm the poor and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate. Continue Reading →

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Upon being re-elected prime minister in 2019, albeit with a minority of MPs and fewer votes than his chief opponent, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that it was time to tackle “our greatest problem: climate change.”

It is routinely and endlessly bandied about by most of our politicians and practically all of our media that climate change is, in the second-most tedious and toe-curling platitude in the current political lexicon (after “systemic racism”), “an existential threat” — i.e., our existence as human beings is threatened by climate change.

Yet there is a great deal of learned dissent from that conclusion, and even those reports most frequently cited as evidence that the end is nigh if we don’t pull up our socks and, in the case of Canada, shut down Alberta, if read carefully, do not justify the terrifying headlines that the media normally attaches to them. Continue Reading →

https://financialpost.com/

Former Obama aide blasts politicians, media and ‘broken science’

The floods of catastrophic projections and raging wildfires of extreme policy initiatives must, at some point in the evolution of humankind, come to an end.

Not today, that’s certain, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit gives global politicians a platform to spread additional fear and even more extreme policies to rid the world of carbon emissions.

Biden lit the latest wildfire in his opening statement: “This is a moral imperative. An economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.” To fight the peril, Biden vowed to cut U.S. carbon emissions to between 50 and 52 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Continue Reading →

https://financialpost.com/

Irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future

This Earth Day, dramatic warnings about climate change will be ubiquitous. At his climate summit, U.S. President Joe Biden will undoubtedly repeat that global warming presents an “existential threat.”

But most of the hype will be vastly exaggerated. This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past few decades.

Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that, along with other environmental concerns, climate change could cause worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Continue Reading →