Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

https://business.financialpost.com/

To produce the power needed to offset fossil fuels, Canada would have to build two and a half $13-billion hydro dams every year

Judging from the headlines, Canada and the world are on track to ratchet up renewable energy and begin the rapid scale-down and ultimate phase-out of fossil fuels. Most energy analysts consider the fossil-fuel phase-out to be a scientific, economic and political fantasy, akin to levitation and time travel, but the movement keeps making news.

Governments everywhere — from Canada to the United Kingdom to states in Australia — are declaring climate emergencies and committing to variations on zero emissions. The international organization promoting emergency declarations claims “a fast transition to zero emissions is possible.”

Canada’s Green Party, said to be gaining ground, has a new platform plan, headlined “Mission: Possible,” to eliminate fossil fuels by 2050. A proposed Green New Deal in America aims to eliminate fossil fuels from the U.S. power grid by 2030 and phase gasoline out of the transportation sector.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

How’s this for incoherence? Last week the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax – his signature initiative on global warming – won’t be nearly high enough to make a difference.

To get people to change their carbon-hungry habits, the tax would eventually have to double from the $50 level it is scheduled to reach by 2022 (if the Liberals are still in power, that is).

The government immediately denied that it plans to do any such thing. “The price will not go up,” vowed Catherine McKenna, Mr. Trudeau’s earnest but preachy environment minister.

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https://nationalpost.com/

“Daddy, what did you do in the Climate War?” “Son, I carpooled twice a week, and (his voice breaks, a tear bleeds down his cheek) gave up stir sticks and plastic coffee lids.” Quoted from It was Hard: Tales from the Climate War (Patmos Publications, 2077).

It is a fiction and a delusion that Canada is in any way now or ever will be a significant influence, for good or ill, in the dreary, endless, pup-chasing-its-own-tail “fight against climate change.”

Canada’s leverage over the future climate of the entire planet is incidental and trivial. We are as a toothpick among redwoods. This is acknowledged. Were we to halt this country’s entire energy output, the race to eco-apocalypse that the doom-mongers say we’re on would not be slowed by a week. The coal mines of India and China would see to that.

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https://business.financialpost.com/

“Last year, global greenhouse gas emissions grew by an estimated
2.7 per cent. So if Canada’s economy had simply ceased to exist,
our 1.6 per cent of global emissions would have been replaced in
just seven months. These are irrefutable facts.”

In choosing to mislead Canadians on climate change, the Liberals are basing their election campaign on a known lie

As the federal election approaches, the Trudeau Liberal government’s record has become increasingly more difficult to defend. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise in the last election that he would run only “modest” deficits has burgeoned into a national debt increase that is bigger per person than that racked up by any government in Canadian history, outside of a major war or a recession.

Trudeau promised to reduce taxes for “middle-class” families, but a Fraser Institute analysis calculated that 80 per cent of middle-class families are paying taxes at least $840 higher per year.

Then there’s Indigenous reconciliation. After a bungled inquiry into missing and murdered women left Aboriginal families angry and disappointed, what was left of the Trudeau government’s reconciliation agenda was then demolished by their sanctimonious attacks on and the firing of Jody Wilson-Raybould, a widely respected and Indigenous former attorney general.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Watch out. There’s another apocalypse looming. This time it’s the plants and animals. Our destructive habits, along with global warming, are laying waste to the Earth. According to the experts, we are on the brink of a mass extinction – one that could wipe out a million species.

Is there any silver lining to this story? Maybe. Human beings might be wiped out‚ too, and that, in many people’s view, would be a good thing. One of the top-rated comments for The New York Times’ mass-extinction story was: “… [T]he earth is shaking off the parasite that is man.”

The extinction story was one of the top news stories of the week. That’s because predictions about species in decline and the fragility of nature are extremely popular these days. In fact, a lot of people think we are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. Only this one won’t be caused by an asteroid, but by man.

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https://business.financialpost.com/

It’s Big Oil and the miracle of hydrocarbons versus Big Finance and the great carbon scare

Two Solitudes: That’s how Hugh McLennan’s 1945 novel portrayed Canada — a nation of clashing English and French Canadians living in the same country under different languages, worldviews, experiences. In other words, a nation divided.

Welcome to the new Canadian solitudes, a nation divided over carbon and climate. Two recent events highlight the great carbon divide, one held in Alberta in early April, another in Montreal last week. The gap is wide and multifaceted, but in this case it’s Big Oil versus Big Insurance.

We begin in Alberta, where Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was reported by The Globe and Mail last week to have attended a “secret” and “private” meeting on April 11th with oil executives “to map out a strategy to oust the federal Liberals.”

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