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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

On climate change, Trump won’t kill the planet – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – January 30, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

“The best hope for the planet lies not in massive investments in wind
and solar power, which can never reliably supply more than a fraction
of the energy a power-hungry planet needs. … What’s needed is an embrace
of cleaner-than-coal natural gas as a transition fuel, an acceptance
that the benefits of nuclear energy outweigh its risks, and a moonshot
focus on technologies that can truly end our dependence on fossil
fuels or capture the carbon their combustion emits.”

Of all the protesters, free traders and peace-lovers depressed at the prospect of four years of tendentious tweets, protectionism and a faster-advancing Doomsday Clock, perhaps no Trump-phobics are as inconsolable as the global climate activists who thought they’d killed the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all.

Keystone’s back. And it’s not the only zombie fossil-fuel development upping the anxiety of climate catastrophists. Donald Trump vows to keep an “open mind” about the existence of man-made global warming. But as White House chief of staff Reince Priebus has explained, the new U.S. President’s “default position” is that the current climate-science consensus is “a bunch of bunk.”

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The cult of the anti-scientific climate model – by John Robson (National Post – January 20, 2017)

http://news.nationalpost.com/

To say it’s unpleasantly cold might be dismissed as banal small talk. Of course it’s cold. It’s a Canadian winter. And we all saw it coming. Except we didn’t.

For decades alarmists have said man-made global warming is about to end winter as we know it. They claimed to know all about climatic patterns and be able to predict with mathematical precision what 2050 will be like if we do, or don’t do, certain things. And after anything happened they said their theory had predicted it whether it had or not.

They even switched, after long insisting that man-made warming was incontrovertible and only boobs and hacks denied it, to touting nebulous “anthropogenic climate change” that calls all weather proof of a coming apocalypse. But a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing because no outcome can constitute evidence for or against it. Which is not how science works.

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On oil sands, ignore Jane Fonda’s foolery, listen to Trudeau’s truth – by Gary Mason (Globe and Mail – January 19, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

If you ever want an Albertan mad at you, mention something about the oil sands they don’t like. Last week, many in the province were setting their hair on fire over a visit by movie-star activist Jane Fonda and later comments by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about Alberta’s energy future.

I get the animus Ms. Fonda’s visit incited. Albertans are tired of jet-setting do-gooders flying in from their L.A. manses, or whichever homes in whichever countries they might be coming from, to do passovers of the oil sands and proclaim how awful it all is.

Before Ms. Fonda, it was the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Before Mr. DiCaprio, it was the singer Neil Young. Before Mr. Young, it was the director James Cameron. The script is always the same: Meet with environmental activists and First Nations leaders and decry the violation of the Earth they have witnessed.

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Indigenous reconciliation will never flow from a pipeline – by Jane Fonda (Globe and Mail – January 18, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

I’ve been accused of parroting half-truths and misinformation: well, here are the hard truths that brought me to Alberta in the first place.

For centuries, first nations peoples have been telling non-indigenous people how to live in relationship to the land rather than to see the land and its natural resources as commodities to be exploited. We did not listen and now, here we are, on the edge of a climate cliff.

Like millions of people, I believe we are living an existential crisis, one that humankind has never faced before: If we continue down the current road of fossil fuel dependency, if we expand the problem, climate science is telling us we will soon reach a point of no return.

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Trudeau’s Liberals just got struck by the first shot in Canada’s carbon-tax rebellion – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – January 17, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

During a now-notorious town hall in Peterborough, Ont., Prime Minister Trudeau last week came face to face with an issue that could become his electoral undoing — not just in Ontario, but across all of Canada.

The moment came when the Peterborough audience erupted in cheers and applause for a 54-year-old woman, Kathy Katula, who pleaded for the prime minister’s support in her battle against soaring Ontario electricity bills and the burden of living in what she described as energy poverty.

“I’m asking you, Mr. Trudeau, how do you justify to a mother of four children, three grandchildren, with physical disabilities, and working up to 15 hours a day, how is it justified for you to ask me to pay a carbon tax when I only have $65 left in my paycheque every two weeks to feed my family.”

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Ontario’s plan: destroy jobs, save the planet – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – January 4, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Here in clean, green Ontario, where the ambitions of our government know no bounds, a bright new year has dawned. Gasoline is likely to rise by 4.3 cents a litre. Your hydro bill is going up. You’ll pay more for natural gas, too.

But don’t feel blue. You are helping save the planet. All of these higher costs are part of the government’s new cap-and-trade scheme, a vast multibillion-dollar enterprise that is designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by redistributing tons of money to big emitters in California and subsidy-seekers here at home.

Unfortunately, the timing is terrible – especially for an increasing number of small- and medium-sized business owners, who can’t figure out how to make a living here any more.

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Beware of desperate politicians seeking ‘environmental legacies’ – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – December 22, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Here’s to wishing all Canada’s provincial and federal leaders much success, prosperity and terrific polling numbers for 2017. Let us hope they all sail comfortably through the new year on high approval numbers from their voters. Because as Canadians — and now Americans — are learning, there is little more dangerous than a political leader with nothing to lose.

On Tuesday, after eight years of stifling U.S. economic growth, Barack Obama announced yet another round of rules to restrict oil and gas, this time ordering vast expanses of the Arctic and Atlantic seaboard “indefinitely off limits” to new offshore oil and gas exploration.

The reasoning was supposedly “the important, irreplaceable values of … Arctic waters for Indigenous, Alaska Native and local communities’ subsistence and cultures, wildlife and wildlife habitat, and scientific research (and) the vulnerability of these ecosystems to an oil spill,” according to a White House statement.

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It’s time to expose the lie that expensive green energy won’t hurt Canada’s prosperity – by Philip Cross (Financial Post – December 20, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

It is naïve or wilfully misleading to pretend there is an overall
economic benefit from higher energy costs. There is no possible
way of putting a positive economic spin on the doubling of electricity
prices in Ontario since 2002. It is a drain on household budgets and
a burden to the competitiveness of businesses.

We heard it repeated ad nauseum in the ongoing debates over Canada’s climate-change policy, this hackneyed catchphrase that our society does not have to choose between clean energy and economic growth. This makes it sound as if there are no economic risks in our choice of energy sources. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The exploitation of energy is fundamental to economic growth. Ruth Sandwell, in her recent book Powering Up Canada, divides human economic development into two eras according to their principal sources of energy. The first was based on inefficient organic sources of energy, mostly plants and animals as well as wood, that produced a low standard of living for most of human history.

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Ontario’s energy fiasco needs a fix, and a new report from the Chamber of Commerce is a good start – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – December 14, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Ontario’s electricity disaster is now so well known that everybody takes the grim facts for granted: Absurdly high prices, a billion-dollar smart grid boondoggle, huge overcapacity problems, energy poverty among consumers, hundreds of millions paid annually to companies not to produce electricity. Less well known is what some of the solutions might be.

A new report released Wednesday by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce outlines some ideas on how to fix the fiasco, including the welcome idea of getting the politicians out of the business of making decisions on energy supply. But that and other ideas from the chamber are unlikely to be enough for a system that needs radical reform.

The chamber’s report is aimed at influencing the province’s 2017 Long-Term Energy Plan (LTEP), which in practice is a quasi-Stalinist attempt to come up with regular 20-year revisable Gosplans for the province’s electricity system.

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Trudeau’s climate ‘deal’: all pain, no gain – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – December 13, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

How much is moral leadership worth? We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that the price tag will be steep. Justin Trudeau’s new climate deal with the provinces will cost Canadians many, many billions, maybe more. Some will come directly from our pockets in the form of carbon taxes.

Some of it will disappear by stealth, swallowed up in complicated cap-and-trade schemes, infrastructure investments, clean-tech subsidies and a whole thicket of new building codes and regulations. No cost-benefit analysis has been provided, or ever will be, because too much is subject to negotiation, and too much is impossible to measure even if you tried.

Mr. Trudeau is not a man to set his sights too low. His goal is to fundamentally change the way Canada produces and consumes energy. But his climate deal is not so much a master plan as a dog’s breakfast. The only thing we know for sure is that even if Canada were to miraculously achieve its 2030 target for reductions in carbon emissions, the net impact on global warming would be zero.

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Editorial: Canadian government moves to quash thermal coal miners – by John Cumming (Northern Miner – December 13, 2016)

http://www.northernminer.com/

In November the Canadian government announced sweeping plans to phase out coal-fired power generation across Canada by 2030. Coal miners and electricity consumers across Canada can only be left wondering whether the same Liberal party deep-thinkers that brought economic havoc and skyrocketing electricity rates to Ontario will do the same thing to the rest of Canada, and particularly to the coal-reliant Western provinces.

The federal government’s coal-power phase-out announcement comes on the heels of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s separate proposed carbon tax that would cost $10 per tonne in 2018 and rise $10 per tonne each year to $50 per tonne by 2022 — a plan that has been bitterly opposed by Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall.

(According to pollster Angus Reid, energy realist Wall has by far the highest approval rating among Canada’s premiers at 58%, while Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has presided over the implementation of the province’s disastrous Green Energy Act, has an approval rating of only 16% — or 8 points lower than George W. Bush at his nadir.)

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Bill Gates and investors worth $170 billion are launching a fund to fight climate change through energy innovation – by Kevin J. Delaney (Quartz.com – December 11, 2016)

http://qz.com/

Bill Gates is leading a more than $1 billion fund focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation. The Microsoft co-founder and his all-star line-up of fellow investors plan to announce tomorrow the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, which will begin making investments next year.

The BEV fund, which has a 20-year duration, aims to invest in the commercialization of new technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in areas including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial processes, agriculture, and energy-system efficiency.

“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” says Gates, who is serving as chairman of BEV and anticipates being actively involved.

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Trudeau’s climate non-deal just kicked off a whole new era of carbon quarreling – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – December 13, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

You might have never before heard a national leader declare a trade deal done, or a peace pact achieved while the signatories are still squabbling over the terms but, as usual, when it comes to climate policy the normal realities don’t apply. There was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau late Friday, flanked by the premiers, announcing that they had “developed a framework” of a climate plan.

This, while Saskatchewan’s premier stated he was adamantly opposed to its most fundamental terms, Manitoba’s premier said he wouldn’t accept the conditions, and B.C.’s premier, Christy Clark, after first saying she wouldn’t sign, agreeing only with the proviso that the federal model for annual national carbon-tax hikes, which underpins the entire framework, might never unfold as planned.

The prime minister resorted to a mushy porridge of twee to describe the framework to cover for its severe defectiveness, pronouncing that he and the premiers had done “what Canadians expected of us, and of themselves, to do all we can to make our world better for our children and grandchildren.”

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IF NOT NOW, WHEN?: The failed battle to stop Australia’s vast new mine shows why the world isn’t ready to move on from coal – by Cassie Werber (Quartz.com – December 8, 2016)

http://qz.com/

Following years of protest, Australia this week granted approval for a vast new coal mine to be built in Queensland. The decision to allow Indian company Adani to go ahead with its $16 billion mine—despite the environmental impacts and the protests of indigenous peoples—shows that coal, a waning industry that many consider unsalvageable, is still a powerful force.

When built, the Carmichael mine will become the biggest thermal coal project in Australia. The battle to get here was fraught, and three dynamics at the heart of it mirror energy conflicts worldwide—from the US coal country Donald Trump has promised to resurrect, to the millions of Indian households still living without power, to those people dedicated to making leaders take seriously the long-term impacts of our short-term decisions.

First, there’s the local perspective. Queensland’s mining sector has been hit so hard by falling commodity prices worldwide that its precipitous drop is known as the “mining cliff.” At least 22,000 mining jobs were lost in two years starting in November 2013; that number is projected to hit 50,000 in the next two years.

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Canada’s elite ‘useful idiots’ endorse the Liberal plan to eat them last – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – December 6, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

The other day, a motley group of 60 business and “civil society” leaders signed an open letter calling on the prime minister and the premiers to impose “smart” climate policies on the way to that allegedly inevitable “low-carbon world.” The letter read like a Liberal policy document because, essentially, it was. Bizarrely, it made no reference to the election of Donald Trump.

The letter received little coverage in the media, but on Thursday Friends of Science, the small but feisty Calgary-based group of climate skeptics, challenged its claims, noting — with substantial background documentation — that it flew in the face of reality, even without taking into account that Trump’s likely rejection of carbon pricing would make the recommended “smart” Canadian moves look distinctly dumb.

The more glaring issue, however, is why a group of senior executives, many from the oil industry, plus other business representative bigwigs, such as John Manley, head of the Business Council of Canada, would be joining some of industry’s most rabid environmental NGO opponents in effectively begging the government to hobble the economy?

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