GOLDSTEIN: We're paying money for nothing to 'fight' climate change - Toronto Sun

GOLDSTEIN: We're paying money for nothing to 'fight' climate change | Toronto Sun

The Trudeau government's carbon pricing regime and climate change policies are adding to the financial hardships faced by Canadians

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Here’s the thing.

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GOLDSTEIN: We're paying money for nothing to 'fight' climate change Back to video

Making people pay more to heat their homes in Atlantic Canada isn’t going to stop wildfires in Alberta, or for that matter in Atlantic Canada.

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Subsidizing electric vehicle battery plants in Ontario isn’t going to stop flooding in British Columbia.

This is the logical fallacy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government engage in when they link their carbon pricing regime and massive subsidies for so-called clean technology to addressing climate change.

There’s no link. The emperor has no clothes.

Canada could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero tomorrow and it would have no effect on the weather in Canada.

Rarely is this mentioned.

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When it is, the Liberals go berserk, as they did, when Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux noted in his recent report on the costs to Canadians of the federal government’s clean fuel regulations, “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change.”

According to the federal government’s own data, Canada’s emissions in 2019 were 724 million tonnes — 1.5% of global emissions, down from 1.8% in 2005 — while global emissions during the same period increased 23.6%, from 38,669 million tonnes to 48,117 million tonnes.

The highest-emitting country in 2019, according to the same data, was China with 12,705 million tonnes, or 26.4% of global emissions, up 74.8% from 2005.

As Kenneth Green noted in a recent Fraser Institute report, which estimated the federal emissions cap will cost the Canadian economy more than $44 billion in 2030, even if Canada eliminated all emissions expected from the oil and gas sector in 2030, “the reduction would equal four-tenths of 1% of global emissions.”

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Environment Canada, always ready to guilt-trip Canadians on climate change, reported that “in 2019, Canada was the highest GHG-emitting country per capita among the top 10 emitting countries with 19.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.”

That put Canada ahead of, in descending order, the U.S., Russia, Iran, Japan, China, European Union (27 countries), Brazil, Indonesia and India.

Except comparing Canada to other nations by selectively using emissions per capita is highly misleading, because Canada is the second-largest and second-coldest country on earth with a relatively small population.

By contrast, when emissions are measured per square kilometres, Canada drops to 140th place among the world’s 215 countries and regions identified by the United Nations when it reported on the global data in 2007.

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When environmental consultants Sustainable Business Consulting looked at the same metric in 2019 using 2017 data, Canada was the 129th largest emitter out of 184 countries, with lower emissions per square kilometre than any of the world’s top 10 emitters, save for Brazil.

What you get depends on what you measure.

The single largest contributor to global emissions is using coal to generate electricity.

Our federal government says Canada gets 6% of its electricity from coal, a 55% decrease since 2011.

By contrast, China gets almost 60% of its electricity from coal. India gets 70% of its electricity from coal.

The Trudeau government’s carbon pricing regime and climate change policies, which are adding to the financial hardships faced by Canadians in tough economic times, are based on the logic that we have to do something, so this is something.

What it ignores is that the solution to lowering emissions, to be effective, has to be a global one.

Without that, Canadians are and will be paying money for nothing to ‘fight’ climate change for years to come.

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