Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The future is going to be a lot of fun in Ontario. Just a few years from now, millions of us will be liberated from our evil fossil-fuelled transportation network. Millions of government-subsidized electric cars will whisk us silently to work. Our buses will run on biofuels.

Our retrofitted geothermal-powered homes will keep us warm at prices much higher than today’s natural gas (which would be banned). Vast tracts of land will be diverted to solar panels, which will transform the sun’s rays into clean, green, righteous energy – as soon as we can figure out how to store it and attach it to the grid. Unicorns will frolic in our gardens, and pigs will fly.

Ontario’s new draft Climate Change Action Plan is a breathtaking work of fantasy, wrought by folks who evidently never met an engineer, an economist, or anybody else who knows how the real world works. Glen Murray, the Environment Minister, is a notoriously Big Thinker.

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http://news.nationalpost.com/

Remember the Leap Manifesto? That was the wild-eyed ultra-greenist, anti-capitalist dogma-sheet that Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein dragged out to the New Democratic Party convention recently. It received a blistering reception from the only NDP premier in Canada, Rachel Notley, and was excoriated by labour leaders in Alberta – where its fanatic zealousness threatened the peace and point of the convention itself.

It is the finest specimen of the Greenist philosophy yet put to hard drive or paper. Kill oil. Kill all fossil fuels. No pipelines. No refineries. Cripple the economy. Deny the poorer nations. If not in your backyard, it should go in no backyard.

No doubt it was meant to be radical. But only if radical now means a cascade of unexamined and baseless assertions, a manifest distaste for reality, a raw pulse of dogmatic certitude, and a set of prescriptions that would obliterate a modern economy, push hundreds of thousands out of work, and bring the industrial age back to the days of horse cart and covered wagons for transportation.

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

Insight – Ontario is hitting the gas pedal on adoption of the electric car, but in order to meet the government’s aggressive goals, consumers and industry will have to accept some big changes, according to experts.

The provincial government’s $7 billion climate-change strategy, leaked this week in The Globe and Mail, lays out $285 million in electric vehicle (EV) incentives, including up to $14,000 on each car purchased, as well as cheap power and a pledge to build charging stations. The goal is to have 12 per cent of all vehicle sales to be electric by 2025, compared to the current levels of a fraction of one per cent.

But don’t expect to be fighting lineups down at the Tesla dealership just yet, say analysts. “Believe me, I would love to see more electric cars as much as everyone else, but 5 per cent by 2020 and 12 per cent by 2025… I think it’s a tad unrealistic,” says Kumar Saha, aftermarket research manager at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

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http://business.financialpost.com/

“Ontario is responsible for such a tiny fraction of global
emissions.[About 0.5%] The Wynne government repeatedly defends
its bungling of the electricity sector on the grounds that at
least it closed two coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, in
2015 alone, China approved construction of 155 new coal-fired
power plants. … The climate file has pushed deranged
extremism into mainstream policy planning.”

The latest news out of Queen’s Park is that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals plan to deindustrialize Ontario. Of course they don’t call it that; they prefer the term “decarbonize.” But for an industrial economy, the government’s new climate action plan, leaked to reporters this week, amounts to the same thing.

The proposed scheme beggars belief. Having phased out coal-fired power, the province now plans to phase out natural gas, the only reliable alternative for non-baseload generation. Despite electric cars being extremely costly and unpopular, more than one in 10 new car sales will need to be electric, and every two-car household will have to own at least one electric car.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

TORONTO – Ontario’s energy and auto industries say they were surprised by the province’s ambitious plan to slash greenhouse gases, warning that it will drive up home heating costs by as much as $3,000 for homeowners, and that auto makers will not produce enough electric cars to meet its targets.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say the blueprint puts the province in the vanguard of the battle against climate change, outpacing every other province but Quebec.

The Liberal government’s $7-billion Climate Change Action Plan, scheduled for release in June but obtained this week by The Globe and Mail, promises to start phasing out natural gas for home heating. This will be done partly through incentives for owners of homes and buildings to install geothermal and solar heating, and partly by changes to the building code mandating that, by 2030, all new houses and small buildings be heated by something other than fossil fuels. Natural gas currently provides 76 per cent of the province’s heat.

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http://business.financialpost.com/

“In assessing “investment changes in key economic sectors” resulting
from carbon pricing, the roundtable bluntly projected that spending
in the mineral and freight transport sector would virtually dry up due
to “reduced output” (refining, too, although that’s meant as a feature,
not a bug). Investment would also shrink in those “value-added”
industries that provincial governments love — from cars and paper
mills, to chemicals, metals, and building construction.”

To get an idea of what Ontario could look like a couple of decades out under Liberal energy minister Glen Murray’s “climate action plan” — which was revealed in detail in Monday’s Globe and Mail — who better to rely on than the man himself, Glen Murray?

Back in 2008, when he chaired the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, Murray — along with his acting CEO, Alex Wood, now executive director of the Ontario Climate Change Directorate — offered up a plan that looked remarkably similar to the new Liberal cabinet document. In fairness, the NRTEE document hardly offered the perniciously micro-managed prescriptions for people and businesses that Murray has graduated to now.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

TORONTO — The Ontario government will spend more than $7-billion over four years on a sweeping climate change plan that will affect every aspect of life – from what people drive to how they heat their homes and workplaces – in a bid to slash the province’s carbon footprint.

Ontario will begin phasing out natural gas for heating, provide incentives to retrofit buildings and give rebates to drivers who buy electric vehicles. It will also require that gasoline sold in the province contain less carbon, bring in building code rules requiring all new homes by 2030 to be heated with electricity or geothermal systems, and set a target for 12 per cent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2025.

While such policies are likely to be popular with ecoconscious voters, who will now receive government help to green their lives, they are certain to cause mass disruption for the province’s automotive and energy sectors, which will have to make significant changes to the way they do business. And they have already created tension within the government between Environment Minister Glen Murray and some of his fellow ministers who worry he is going too far.

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http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/

Premier Kathleen Wynne is preparing to impose another suite of climate-related energy policies on the province. The Climate Change Action Plan promises to be even more expensive and more economically intrusive than the Green Energy Act. Which should give voters cause for alarm.

The public details of the plan that have emerged so far outline a policy thrust that sounds more like a war on personal mobility and the automotive industry than an environmental blueprint. It has already proved so concerning to the auto industry that the government has been forced to reassure the sector it means it no harm.

For instance, draft plans of the policy say Ontario intends to require that 80% of the province either walk, take transit or bike to work by 2050. How are they going to do that without imposing draconian new rules on where companies choose to invest and where people live? It’s hard to imagine that rule applying in Ontario counties where bus service is limited.

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