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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

After deliberately turning itself into a climate-change martyr, Canada needs some basic common sense – by Gwyn Morgan (Financial Post – January 7, 2020)

https://business.financialpost.com/

For all the economic, social and national unity pain inflicted, our sacrifices will have no perceptible impact on global climate change

It’s been almost three decades since delegates from 172 countries, meeting at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, adopted the Climate Change Convention. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show that since then the Earth’s temperature has risen an average of 0.03 degrees Celsius per year.

At that rate, the planet will warm 2.4 degrees by 2100. That’s a sizable amount over 80 years but it’s certainly not the “climate emergency” needed to galvanize people into making life-altering sacrifices like giving up cars or air travel or switching to “eco-friendly” food.

The answer to every climate activist’s prayer came in the form of 17-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg. Her transformation to the world’s pre-eminent climate-change warrior began with Fridays spent demonstrating outside the Swedish Parliament and gaining the attention of financially capable fellow warriors.

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Anxiety about the environment has become the plague of our times – by Rosie DiManno (Toronto Star – January 3, 2020)

https://www.thestar.com/

When I was in Grade 1, our teacher informed us that the sun was actually a star and would burn itself out within a billion years. Which sent me into paroxysms of terror. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.

For months afterwards, on overcast days, even when a cloud passed over the sun for a few seconds, I was convinced the end was nigh. Oceans would boil, Earth would become uninhabitable. A neurotic kid, me.

Miss Waddell was off the mark. Scientists say our sun will continue to shine blessedly for another 4 billion years or so before it begins to dim, the hydrogen at its core running out so that it can’t burn helium, and it morphs into a red giant.

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Empty Gestures on Climate Change – by BJØRN LOMBORG (Project Syndicate.org – December 20, 2019)

https://www.project-syndicate.org/

When climate campaigners urge people to change their everyday behavior, they trivialize the challenge of global warming. The one individual action that citizens could take that would make a real difference would be to demand a vast increase in spending on green-energy research and development.

MALMÖ – Switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, wash your clothes in cold water, eat less meat, recycle more, and buy an electric car: we are being bombarded with instructions from climate campaigners, environmentalists, and the media about the everyday steps we all must take to tackle climate change.

Unfortunately, these appeals trivialize the challenge of global warming, and divert our attention from the huge technological and policy changes that are needed to combat it.

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Coal Endures as World’s Favorite Fuel for Electricity Generation – by Will Mathis (Bloomberg News – December 16, 2019)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — Coal consumption is set to rise in the coming years as growing demand for electricity in developing countries outpaces a shift to cleaner sources of electricity in industrialized nations.

While use of the most polluting fossil fuel had a historic dip in 2019, the International Energy Agency anticipates steady increases in the next five years. That means the world will face a significant challenge in meeting pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

“There are few signs of change,” the agency wrote in its annual coal report released in Paris on Tuesday. “Despite all the policy changes and announcements, our forecast is very similar to those we have made over the past few years.”

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‘We’re going to die’: Toronto mother says young daughter terrified by school presentation on climate change – by Aileen Donnelly (National Post – December 18, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

A Toronto mother says a confusing school presentation involving teen activist Greta Thunberg and a ticking clock left her young daughter fearing Earth’s imminent demise, and schools should be more careful about what they’re teaching seven-year-olds.

At least one child yelled “I don’t wanna die” during a presentation on climate change delivered to a Grade 2/3 class on Oct. 4. A group of seven- and eight-year-olds had gathered in the library of Elmbank Junior Middle Academy in Etobicoke to watch a video of a speech Greta delivered at the UN Climate Action Summit on Sept. 23.

In her remarks, a visibly upset Greta accuses world leaders of failing future generations, ignoring climate change and stealing her childhood.

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Goldman Sachs Curbs New Lending on Coal and Arctic Oil – by Russell Ward (Bloomberg News – December 15, 2019)

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has tightened its policy on fossil fuel financing in a move welcomed by environmental groups, just as global talks on climate change faltered in Madrid over the weekend.

The Wall Street firm’s recently updated environmental policy framework includes pledges to decline financing that directly supports new thermal coal mines and upstream Arctic oil exploration and development. The company is targeting $750 billion for “climate transition and inclusive growth finance” over the next decade, according to its website.

Goldman’s stricter stance came as climate discussions in Madrid reached a disappointing end, with delegates from almost 200 nations watering down language on issues they had agreed on in previous years. While agreeing on the “urgent need” for countries to make deeper cuts to greenhouse gases, they shelved work on adding market mechanisms to meet their goals and failed to agree on finance needed to fix the problem.

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OPINION: It is anything but business as usual with climate changing so quickly – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – December 16, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

It was all about the climate this week. At three big climate conferences around the world, there was a tension missing from previous events. The climate is changing fast, and societies, economies and corporations can forget about business as usual. The issue no longer has shades of grey – it’s all fire-engine red.

In Madrid, the United Nations held a carbon-markets negotiating session at a site the size of a major airport. At the same time in Brussels, European Union leaders were bashing out a highly ambitious agreement to commit the world’s largest trading bloc to carbon-neutrality by 2050.

And in California, the annual convention of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest collection of Earth and space scientists, was presented with more troubling evidence that extreme weather events are not just freaks of nature; humanity’s paw prints are all over them.

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Here are the signs of hope Greta’s so ‘desperate’ for that show there’ll be no climate apocalypse – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – December 13, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

The latest carbon emissions data and forecasts suggest the UN’s climate catastrophe scenarios are way off the mark

In the dying days of the two-week United Nations’ 25th Congress of the Parties (COP25) in Madrid, a meeting described as Kafkaesque in one report, Time magazine Newsmaker of the Year Greta Thunberg said she and her Extinction Rebellion cohorts are “desperate for any sign of hope.”

Well, here are two big signs of hope for today’s youth: The latest carbon emissions data and forecasts suggest the UN’s climate catastrophe scenarios are way off the mark.

Thirty years ago, when Time’s apocalyptarian editors declared Earth as Planet of the Year for 1988, they warned of the global environmental meltdown to come. Oceans will rise, deserts will grow, and human existence will be threatened. According to computer projections, claimed Time in late 1988, “the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could drive up the planet’s average temperature 3 F to 9 F by the middle of the next century.”

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Canada’s new climate minister makes global debut, and faces momentous decision on oil sands – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – December 12, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s new Environment and Climate Change Minister, points out that he has been on the job only three weeks. Translation: Cut me some slack, please, I don’t have all the answers.

But he’ll have to learn quickly. At the end of February, he has to decide whether to approve Teck Resources Ltd.’s enormous Frontier oil sands project or refer it to the wider Liberal cabinet. Either way, it will be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t moment that will be instrumental in defining the federal government’s carbon-reduction trajectory and its relationship with Alberta.

If the project is approved, as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney so desperately wants, Canada’s plan to transition to a low-carbon economy, then to a “net zero” emissions economy by 2050, might go from the difficult to the virtually impossible without miracle technology or shipping fortunes overseas to buy carbon credits. Turning down the project would ignite a war with Alberta.

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Capt. Kenney journeys to the heart of the Obfuscation Galaxy – by Rex Murphy (National Post – December 11, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

Trudeau might want to rev up the (free) Enterprise and go where no Liberal has gone before — to the galactic outpost of Fort McMurray itself

Early this week Captain Kenney and at least eight other explorers travelled from the Alberta Belt to spend all of Monday and Tuesday in hoped-for meetings with the space-time continuum lifeforms that cosmologists and political science interns refer to as the Ottawa Confabulation.

They populate a region housing a concentration of civil servants and politicians that forms the dark centre mass of the Obfuscation Galaxy. Kenney and his crew had just emerged from their space vehicle, Greta II … (Ed. Stop it. Now!)

Well, if I must yield to a purely terrestrial account, Premier Jason Kenney and his ministers made a second visit in less than two weeks to continue urging the case for some “rearrangements” in the Confederation, in part to ward off the deep and pervasive disenchantments in their home province.

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Greta Thunberg is Time’s 2019 Person of the Year – by Safia Samee Ali and Elizabeth Chuck (NBC News – December 11, 2019)

https://www.nbcnews.com/

Greta Thunberg, the soft-spoken Swedish teenager who became a global conscience for climate change and environmental activism, has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019. The magazine announced the 16-year-old as its choice Wednesday exclusively on the “TODAY” show.

“She became the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet this year, coming from essentially nowhere to lead a worldwide movement,” Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal told the show, adding that Thunberg is the magazine’s youngest choice ever to be named Person of the Year.

Thunberg quickly bloomed into one of the world’s most notable climate change activists, sparking a collective movement to fight the issue after protesting alone outside the Swedish Parliament during school hours on Fridays when she was 15. The teen held up a now universally recognized hand-painted sign that read “skolstrejk för klimatet,” which translates to “School strike for the climate.”

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Why the left loves a climate crisis – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – December 4, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

We had major breaking news Tuesday out of the United Nations’ 25th Conference of the Parties (COP 25) climate change summit in Madrid: Greta, the self-described “angry kid,” had landed. Her boat docked in Lisbon, just as the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2019 had been a cold year for Canadians.

The Greta news drowned out the WMO report, which also found 2019 produced record levels of frigidity in many parts of North America, including “the coldest February on record for several regions in Western Canada, including the city of Vancouver.

It was also a rather cold first half of the year in parts of Eastern Canada. There were further outbreaks of unseasonable cold and early-season snowfall in the western and central interior of North America in late September and late October.”

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Coal Exports Choked by Green-Minded Towns on U.S. West Coast – by Will Wade (Bloomberg/Financial Post – December 3, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

(Bloomberg) — Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. It’s about to get harder for America’s miners to ship coal to Asia.

On Tuesday, the city of Richmond, California, is expected to approve a ban on coal at a terminal that accounts for almost a quarter of exports from the U.S. West Coast. The prohibition will shut miners out of one of the few places in the region willing to handle the fuel and limit their access to one place in the world where coal demand is still growing.

That’s exactly what Richmond city officials want. “This is something we can do that will almost certainly result in less coal shipped from the U.S. to Asia, and maybe less coal burned in Asia,” Richmond Mayor Tom Butt said in an interview.

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Trudeau’s ridiculous, holier-than-thou climate policies are making emissions much worse – by Diane Francis (Financial Post – December 3, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

For every pipeline and well and LNG plant that is not built in Canada, the Chinese and Indians will simply burn more dirty coal

The inconvenient truth about the Kyoto-Paris Agreement on climate change is that the 1997 deal has been a major flop because it was flawed from the beginning. It should be scrapped and completely overhauled and Canada’s Liberals should have realized this before they embarked on their ruinous attack against the country’s resource base.

The failure of the agreement, evidenced by emissions that are climbing alarmingly fast, reveal how the Trudeau government’s holier-than-thou approach on climate change is naive and completely misguided.

The facts are that Ottawa should have been building lots of pipelines, approving many LNG export projects, and leading an international movement to scrap and try to redo the Paris agreement.

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In China, coal creeps back in as slowing economy overshadows climate change ambitions – by David Stanway (Reuters U.S. – December 2, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China is building more coal-fired power plants and approving dozens of new mines, despite assurances from the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter that it was serious about fighting climate change.

China’s 2021-2030 policy plans are under close scrutiny as the United Nations climate change conference gets under way in Madrid, especially after a new UN report said the world needs to cut carbon dioxide by 7.6% a year over the decade in order to limit temperature rises.

But with the country’s economic growth at its slowest in nearly 30 years, industry data as well as speeches from leaders and industry officials suggest a willingness to lean on coal for power, especially in old mining regions.

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