Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

https://financialpost.com/

The high-cost climate policies we have now need to be replaced by a search for cheap green fuels the world will switch to voluntarily

As climate policy increasingly drives up living costs with next to no results, voters are becoming wearier of expansive — and expensive — green promises. We can only hope this backlash could lead to better, cheaper and more effective measures.

After dealing with climate activists blocking roads and gluing themselves to airport runways, celebrities flying private jets while telling the rest of us to take the bus, and climate policies that cost the world but deliver little, voters are viewing climate policies with greater skepticism.

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https://financialpost.com/

Net zero talk is all about climate dividends and green opportunity. It’s time to get real about what doubling the electricity supply will cost

Governments across Canada and around the world have been promoting both electrification and net zero. That’s fine, go for it. But please stop saying it’s going to be cheap. It isn’t. And voters will find out.

Today, electricity fulfills about 20 per cent of our energy needs. That means 80 per cent of the energy Canadians rely on is from direct use of natural gas, refined petroleum products and other fuels. What is being proposed in Canada’s electricity strategy is not just fewer or even no emissions from our electricity systems. It is to have electricity provide that other 80 per cent.

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https://nationalpost.com/

We have been racing to destroy our standard of living to avert a crisis that never materialized

We must by now be getting reasonably close the point where there is a consensus for re-examining the issue of climate change and related subjects.

For decades, those of us who had our doubts were effectively shut down by the endless deafening repetition, as if from the massed choir of an operatic catechism school, of the alleged truism: “98 per cent of scientists agree …” (that the world is coming to an end in a few years if we don’t abolish the combustion engine).

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https://www.thestar.com/

As the planet notched a new hot streak and scientists predicted another grim milestone on the horizon, the secretary-general of the UN warned Wednesday that the world needs “an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

Europe’s climate agency announced that May marked the 12th consecutive month of record-breaking global temperatures, a fevered year that startled many scientists because of the dramatic margins by which old records were broken. At the same time, the World Meteorological Organization predicted that at least one of the next five years is likely to temporarily break the 1.5 C warming threshold.

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https://nationalpost.com/

Canada at risk of turning into Europe

I have written here and elsewhere countless times before of the dangers of responding prematurely to alarmist concerns about climate change. Dr. Benny Peiser of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation spoke to the Friends of Science Society in Calgary earlier this month, warning that Europe’s extremist net zero carbon emission policies may get to Canada even though they are now running into extreme problems in Europe.

The North American media has not much reported on the widespread and often violent farmer protests in Europe, which has caused every government that has been put to the test to scale back their aggressive climate change policies.

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https://financialpost.com/

All-in costs too high once you count fossil fuel and battery backups, land requirements and damage their equipment does

We are constantly being told that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity. Yet governments around the world felt they had to spend US$1.8 trillion on the green transition last year.

Wind and solar only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. When they are not, electricity from these sources is infinitely expensive and back-ups are needed. This is why fossil fuels still account for two-thirds of global electricity and why, on current trends, we are a century away from eliminating their use in electricity generation.

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