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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

Column: Rio Tinto warning may rupture mining industry into green and dirty – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.K. – April 16, 2019)

https://uk.reuters.com/

The mining industry is starting to come under more intense pressure
from investors who are demanding sustainable and ethical mining.

LAUNCESTON, Australia (Reuters) – It’s not quite yet pistols at dawn but Rio Tinto’s polite warning to mining lobby groups that they have to acknowledge the threat of climate change is likely a sign that the industry will inevitably fracture into two camps.

These factions could be described as the “green” miners, who produce the minerals essential for the transition from the age of oil to the age of electricity, and the “dirty” miners who remain trapped in coal and other minerals deemed unnecessary for a carbon constrained future.

Rio Tinto’s carefully worded statement on industry associations, released last week, said that it would only work with groups aligned with its own climate principles.

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The Liberals manipulate a climate report to justify handouts to Loblaws – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – April 10, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Bring on what promises to be a steady blizzard of climate announcements

In a huge coincidence last week, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna leaked — to the CBC — her department’s latest official climate change report on the very same day her government’s new carbon-tax regime came into effect in four provinces.

The government-owned flagship news program, The National, sprang to attention. Host Rosemary Barton kicked off the Monday night show by cranking up the volume on “Canada’s Changing Climate Report” from Environment Canada scientists:

“Tonight a dire warning for Canada’s climate. The country is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. According to virtually every climate scientist, climate change is already here. Temperatures have risen and are expected to keep rising with dramatic and increasingly disastrous impacts. And today we are learning that in Canada, that goes double.

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Why will the carbon taxers stop now? – by Kelly McParland (National Post – April 10, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

We have a carbon tax — now what? That’s what worries a lot of people who wonder how high a price should be paid for a point of principle

The carbon tax that took effect in four provinces a week ago is a much-needed achievement for the federal Liberals. Whether it proves anything more than ephemeral remains to be seen.

All 10 provinces now have a price on carbon in one form or another. The addition of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Manitoba to the list — in each case over provincial objections — fulfills a pledge by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and marks the culmination of aspirations that began more than 25 years ago under a previous Liberal regime.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna welcomed the event with the declaration that “it’s a fact that pricing pollution is the most cost-effective way to cut pollution. Our plan will also leave eight out of 10 families better off, with an Ontario family of four receiving a … rebate of $307.”

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Ontario, Manitoba, N.B. and Saskatchewan may see spike in pump prices Monday as climate-change levy takes effect – by Shawn McCarthy (Globe and Mail – April 1, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Canadians in four provinces should expect to see a spike in pump prices Monday – the most visible sign of the federal government’s carbon tax that is meant to spur reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but at the same time has sparked a political storm.

As of April 1, the Liberal government’s climate-change levy takes effect in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick, four jurisdictions that do not have provincial carbon pricing plans.

The tax kicks in at $20 for each tonne of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with the fuel, rising to $50 a tonne by 2022. That’s expected to immediately add 4.5 cents on a litre of gasoline and 5.5 cents on diesel, rising by 2022 to 11.6 cents and 13.7 cents, respectively.

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The climate alarmists are keeping poor people in the dark — literally – by Joe Oliver (Financial Post – March 27, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

It is impossible to elevate people in dire need to a decent standard of living without inexpensive electricity

I recently returned from a Petroleum and Energy Summit in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG), which put into stark relief the moral imperative of developing fossil fuels, especially for the poorest people in developing countries.

By implication, it reinforced the profoundly unethical stand of climate-change alarmists who are working to rid the world of hydrocarbons, irrespective of the harm to economic growth, employment and a decent standard of living for billions of people.

A mere 13 per cent of Papua New Guineans have access to electricity. The government’s goal is to extend electrification to 70 per cent by 2030, an ambitious precondition to substantially raising GDP per capita above its current $2,400.

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Support for climate change action could wane if no help for coal workers: report (CTV News – March 11, 2019)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/

CANADIAN PRESS: OTTAWA – Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is hinting the upcoming federal budget might have room for additional aids to help coal industry workers transition to new jobs.

The 2018 federal budget included a $35 million, five-year fund to help retrain coal workers to work in new jobs, but that was before Ottawa assigned a task force to consult affected provinces and communities on what was specifically needed. That task force reported Monday, laying out 10 broad recommendations to help workers prepare for a future without coal.

McKenna told The Canadian Press Monday she was intrigued by most of what was in the report. “There are some really good suggestions here,” she said. “We kind of have to look at it as a package. Most of the things we’re looking at in terms of the budget.”

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Don’t blame melting ice for polar bear attacks. Blame a bear baby boom – by Susan J. Crockford (Financial Post – February 27, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Opinion: Some scientists still think it’s OK to mislead the public to promote climate change alarm

February 27th is International Polar Bear Day, and what interesting timing it happens to be this year. In recent weeks the media have been all over the news that the Russian village of Belushaya Guba, on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the southern Barents Sea had declared a state of emergency because more than 50 aggressive and fearless polar bears had invaded the community.

Protected status for the bears meant deadly force was not an option for terrified residents, yet non-lethal efforts to get the bears to leave had been futile.

Predictably, the blame was immediately put on sea-ice loss due to climate change — not by a scientist but by a Norwegian journalist who initially reported the story, adding in his own homemade, unscientific analysis.

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Bill Gates, defying the Climate Barons, tells the ugly truth about renewables – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – February 22, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Forcing the adoption of expensive and unreliable energy destroys jobs (see Alberta) and exacerbates poverty in poor countries

Market advocates have always claimed that policy advice from business should be treated with suspicion. The road to economic and political hell is paved with corporate welfare and national champions (SNC-Lavalin anyone?).

Communists and the “progressive” left were much more harsh, claiming that since big business sought only monopoly and plutocracy, the state at least required “countervailing” power, if not absolute power.

Since command of economic resources was deemed synonymous with political power, some of the greatest businessmen and philanthropists all time — such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt — were reflexively dubbed “Robber Barons.”

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Whether Earth’s population booms or busts, the future still looks promising – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – February 13, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Two vital new books from Canadian writers on the alleged population crisis suggest we can all relax

For centuries, assorted obsessive doomsters — from Thomas Malthus to Al Gore to the Club of Rome — have issued dire warnings that the world is careening into an overpopulated nightmare. U.S. biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth publication warned in 1972 of a population crisis within a century, and Al Gore in 2014 called for “voluntary measures to lower birth rates around the globe.”

Two vital new books from Canadian writers on the alleged population crisis suggest we can all relax.

The latest, released this month, is Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, by pollster Darrell Bricker and newspaper columnist John Ibbitson. They argue that global fertility rates are declining in all regions and that the world’s population could peak around nine billion in 2040.

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Social-justice Democrats’ ‘Green New Deal’ will turn America into Venezuela – by Rex Murphy (National Post – February 12, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

The Green New Deal uses environmentalism as a lever to pursue a far-larger, more sinister, agenda, a mad leap to a socialist nightworld

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is out to prove she is the Thomas Jefferson of the infantile social-justice progressive Left. And she is doing one (non-carbon emitting) hell of a job. She is a marvel. In her mere 35 days as a freshperson in Congress she’s made her mark.

She’s the Cardi B (I like to fake hipitude) of the Democratic party (the very seal of death to the Hillary era – it’s done); she takes to Twitter like a (Donald) duck to water, provokes whole rivers of drool over at CNN and MSNBC, and is the very embodiment and avatar of every social-justice warrior and barista malcontent’s idea of the perfect politician.

Ocasio-Cortez, like the Bishop of Ussher before her, knows when the world will end: 2030. She has said so — “We only have 12 years left.” And on that rock she has built her church. Her policies are determined from her predetermined date of apocalypse in 2030, unless … unless we heed her urgent call.

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Opinion: Miners must appeal anti-coal landmark court decision – by Matthew Stevens (Australian Financial Review – February 10, 2019)

https://www.afr.com/

You have to admire the collective against coal mining. It sure does know when and how to pick its fights. On Friday, the NSW Land and Environment Court rejected an application by Gloucester Resources to build a three-pit coking coal mine near the central NSW town that named the company.

Left to stand, the decision by Judge Brian Preston would seem to establish precedent because it moves all three categories of carbon emissions to the front and centre of the state’s planning approval process.

This has not so far been the case in NSW or anywhere else in Australia, for that matter, a fact made plain by the victory celebrations that Judge Preston’s odd decision triggered among his fans, old and new, in the climate change lobby.

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The unspoken danger of CO2: It makes people go absolutely nutty – by Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post – February 8, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

When the inmates run the asylum, whispers of ‘climate’ explain everything

Carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas, represents the most serious threat today to the citizenry of the developed world. No other substance known to man more often makes us go crazy.

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” and combat CO2, Democrat firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated two weeks ago, explaining her views and those of “millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us.”

A few days later the Doomsday Clock — the countdown to total nuclear annihilation established by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists during the Cold War — got wound up tighter than ever by adding CO2 to nuclear weaponry as an existential threat. “Today sets the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight — the closest it has ever been to apocalypse,” the organization announced in a press release.

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At Davos, the world is aflame. Everywhere else, things are awesome – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – January 25, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Nothing is off the list of threats that are circling the planet. But what about all our progress?

Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, interviewed broadcaster Sir David Attenborough at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week.

Reaching deep for the hard question, Prince William asked: “David, recently you were in Poland and you spoke out very powerfully at the UN climate change conference there. How urgent is that crisis now?” Sir David did not fail to take up challenge: “It’s difficult to overstate it.”

But let me try, he might have added. “We are now so numerous, so powerful, so all pervasive, the mechanisms that we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it.”

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Canada could impact emissions were Ottawa not so obsessed with carbon taxes – by Brad Wall (Financial Post – January 18, 2019)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Brad Wall is the former premier of Saskatchewan. He is currently an adviser for Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt in Calgary.

Canadian technology could clean up hundreds of coal plants around the world

Three years ago, there we were at the COP21 Paris Climate Conference: 383 Canadians strong. Our delegation was larger than almost any other country’s, rivalling even the host country’s delegation. Canada was back.

Saskatchewan was there, too, with our three-person contribution to the overall Canadian throng, though we may have been a little out of step.

Just two weeks before Paris, the Alberta government had announced its own carbon tax. The explicit and implied promise was that this indulgence paid by Albertans would purchase the absolution required to secure pipeline approvals. Saskatchewan then was alone in its opposition to a nationally imposed carbon tax. So, in Paris we were — without intention — a few prairie skunks at this low-carbon garden party.

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Is Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene proof of ecological disaster — or power politics? – by Terence Corcoran (National Post – January 5, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

With the arrival of Burtynsky as a high-profile advocate, the science campaign to define and identify the Anthropocene gets a fresh publicity boost

To sell Canadians on the merits of his carbon tax plan, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau staged a media event in late October before a group of high school students at the National Gallery in Ottawa. His backdrop was a wall-size image of Cathedral Grove #1, a beautiful but dark-hued interior view of a boreal forest on Vancouver Island taken in 2017 by famed Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky.

The link between the peaceful majesty of Cathedral Grove #1 and the crass politics of a $20 carbon tax might not be obvious. But the high school students were at the National Gallery to take in Anthropocene, a major multimedia exhibit based on new Burtynsky photographs that depicts assorted human incursions on the geography of the planet — coal mining, garbage production, logging, oil refining, expressways, marble quarries, underground tunnels.

Trudeau’s simplistic message to the students — and all Canadians — was that a carbon tax will help curtail this ongoing ruination of the Earth. Behind the simple message, however, is a complex tangle of motives, objectives and political wrangling that animate the key players behind the exhibit.

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