Mike Diamond. The Canadian reaction to climate change and what we must do about it varies from year to year, and from government to government. On one hand, it seems evident that if you increase the price of carbon, less will be purchased and it will be more likely that more environmentally friendly technologies will be able to compete. It is also evident that if your cost of carbon is higher than that of your competing neighbour(s), that your economy will suffer. And even if Canada stopped all use of carbon tomorrow, the impact on the climate even if the theory of man made climate change was entirely accurate, would be negligible.
Simply stated, the idea that Canada needs to lead the world in reducing carbon output is counter-productive for Canada’s already beleaguered economy. To protect ourselves, we need to move along with or just behind major polluters and do what they do- and here I am thinking about India, China and the US which are by far the greatest polluters on the planet. The US under Trump has stopped focusing on carbon reduction, and India and China never started. The number of coal fired plants in Asia continues to grow, not be reduced….
Against this backdrop, the idea of a carbon tax is not strategically wise for Canada, even if the entirety of the tax was returned to the populace. That itself is unlikely as cash starved governments will inevitably find a way to divert the cash from our pockets into their pet programs. Moreover, industry and competitiveness will suffer badly in the process. Neither should a replacement program be put into place, as the Conservatives suggest. The only thing that is going to work is investing in alternative technologies such that they, on their own without subsidies, can be as cost effective as carbon. Personally, I know it will not be long before I get an electric car. And many more such cars are going to be released in the next couple of years, and they will be bought even though there are no more subsidies because they are fun to drive and save the cost of gasoline. Stay out of the market, and focus on R and D to get us to cost effectiveness may be the best route, as one of the articles below suggests.
In addition to the above, there are further concerns- and that is whether there is in fact any major degree of climate change which is being generated by mankind. (people kind
). The evidence on that is still not without controversy. Two articles below are worthy of note in that regard…. the first article points to the political nature of the UN agency which is pushing climate change the hardest, and points to another scientific group which does not agree, and which is apolitical. Why does a group which is more political, and less scientific push for climate change strategies? One possible answer is found in the last article which I can not substantiate, but suggests that there are more macro political forces at bay here, more focused on an attempt to move wealth around using climate change as a driver…. I put that out there not as a credible theory, but as a possibility only as the argument put forth in the article is intensely political
The second and third articles are equally interesting. What they posit is that the cost of eliminating man made climate change, if it indeed is the primary cause, is much greater than the impact of not dealing with it, and higher than the cost of a number of alternatives to dealing with it. Given the hysterics over rising seas, the elimination of many low lying cities and lands, I do not quite get their conclusions… but given that the source of the date used in their arguments are credible scientists.
My conclusion relative to the world problem is that we need more analysis and strategy around determining the cause, and properly responding to it in ways which cost the least and provide the greatest return. I don’t think that a simple strategy of eliminating all carbon use at any cost is the right answer, especially as the effects are catastrophic economically for most countries and therefore its not going to happen anyway. My conclusion for Canada is that since there is little we can do to solve the problem, and since our economy is running on fumes with all kinds of negative constraints on our being competitive, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves such that become impossibly non-competitive in the process. Also see this article by the always brilliant Rex Murphy who makes a similar point. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-the-un-climate-change-panel-that-cried-wolf-too-often
The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it.
By John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast, AMERICAN THINKER
Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a special report on the alleged impacts of “global warming of 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.”
To coincide with that publication’s release, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released on October 5 a draft Summary for Policymakers of the fifth volume in its “Climate Change Reconsidered” series. That report is available online here.
The two reports tell dramatically different stories about the causes and consequences of climate change. The IPCC report, referred to as SP15, is expected to claim that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing an unprecedented warming of the planet’s atmosphere, that it is too late to prevent a warming of 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, and that nothing less than a dramatic reduction of the use of fossil fuels, possibly even an outright ban enforced by the United Nations, is needed to prevent a global catastrophe.
The NIPCC report finds that while climate change is occurring and a human impact on climate is likely, there is no consensus on the size of that impact relative to natural variability, the net benefits or costs of the impacts of climate change, or whether future climate trends can be predicted with sufficient confidence to guide public policies today. Consequently, there is no scientific basis for the recommendation that the use of fossil fuels should be restricted.
According to its Summary for Policymakers, the new NIPCC publication shows:
- Fossil fuels deliver affordable, plentiful, and reliable energy critical to human welfare. Wind and solar are not practical and reliable substitutes.
- Fossil fuels create a better environment for the ecosystem because they require less surface area than renewable energy sources.
- Sixteen of 25 identified impacts of fossil fuels are net positive, eight uncertain. Only one is net negative. Areas of impact measured include agriculture, air quality, extreme weather events, and human health.
- Forcing a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar power would inflict tremendous economic hardship, reducing world GDP by some 96 percent and plunging the world back to economic conditions last seen in the 1820s and 1830s.
How could two international teams of scientists, economists, and other experts arrive at opposite conclusions? Therein lies a story.
The IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific body. It was formed by the United Nations in 1988 for the purpose of establishing the need for a global solution to the alleged problem of anthropogenic climate change. Note that the mission of the IPCC was never to study the causes of climate change; were that the case, it might have devoted some of its billions of dollars in revenues over the years to examining solar cycles, changes in ocean currents, the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, or the planet’s carbon cycle. The IPCC has spent trivial sums on these issues, and the authors of and contributors to its voluminous reports have few or no credentials in these fields.
Now consider the NIPCC. It is a scientific body composed of scholars from more than two dozen countries, first convened in 2003 by the great physicist S. Fred Singer and later chaired by another great physicist, Frederick Seitz. The NIPCC’s only purpose is to fact-check the work of the IPCC. It receives no corporate or government funding and so has no hidden agenda or axes to grind. Most of its participants volunteer their time; a few receive token compensation for many hours of effort.
The NIPCC views the claim that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change to be a hypothesis to be tested, not a preordained conclusion. It asks whether the null hypothesis – that changes in climate are natural variability caused by a multitude of forcings and feedbacks – has been disproven. Its research reveals thousands of studies published in peer-reviewed science journals supporting the null hypothesis, meaning that the IPCC’s mountains of data and expressions of “confidence” are irrelevant, meaningless, and ultimately wrong.
Given their provenances, which report do you think is more likely to be truthful?
NIPCC scientists and experts will be in Katowice, Poland the week of December 4 to release the full volume of “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels” at a counter-conference coinciding with the United Nations’ 24th Conference of the Parties (COP 24).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an emergency physician and inactive attorney and a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. Joseph Bast is a director and senior fellow of The Heartland Institute. Both are contributors to “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels.”
U.N. Ignores Economics Of Climate
New Nobel laureate William Nordhaus says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts aren’t worth it.
By Bjorn Lomborg
The global economy must be transformed immediately to avoid catastrophic climate damage, a new United Nations report declares. Climate economist William Nordhaus has been made a Nobel laureate. The events are being reported as two parts of the same story, but they reveal the contradictions inherent in climate policy—and why economics matters more than ever.
Limiting temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges, is economically and practically impossible—as Mr. Nordhaus’s work shows. The IPCC report significantly underestimates the costs of getting to zero emissions. Fossil fuels provide cheap, efficient power, whereas green energy remains mostly uncompetitive. Switching to more expensive, less efficient technology slows development. In poor nations that means fewer people lifted out of poverty. In rich ones it means the most vulnerable are hit by higher energy bills.
The IPCC says carbon emissions need to peak right now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models actually reveal that to achieve the 2.7-degree goal the world must stop all fossil fuel use in less than four years. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 fossil fuels will still meet three-quarters of world energy needs, even if the Paris agreement is fully implemented. The U.N. body responsible for the accord estimates that if every country fulfills every pledge by 2030, CO2 emissions will be cut by 60 billion tons by 2030. That’s less than 1% of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2.7 degrees. And achieving even that fraction would be vastly expensive—reducing world-wide growth $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year by 2030.
The European Union promises to cut emissions 80% by 2050. With realistic assumptions about technology, and the optimistic assumption that the EU’s climate policy is very well designed and coordinated, the average of seven leading peer-reviewed models finds EU annual costs will reach €2.9 trillion ($3.3 trillion), more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined. In reality, it is likely to cost much more because EU climate legislation has been an inefficient patchwork. If that continues, the policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.
Trying to do more, as the IPCC urges, would be phenomenally expensive. It is important to keep things in perspective, challenging as that is given the hysterical tone of the reaction to the panel’s latest offering. In its latest full report, the IPCC estimated that in 60 years unmitigated global warming would cost the planet between 0.2% and 2% of gross domestic product. That’s simply not the end of the world.
The new report has no comparison of the costs and benefits of climate targets. Mr. Nordhaus’s most recent estimate, published in August, is that the “optimal” outcome with a moderate carbon tax is a rise of about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.Reducing temperature rises by more would result in higher costs than benefits, potentially causing the world a $50 trillion loss.
It’s past time to stop pushing so hard for carbon cuts before alternative energy sources are ready to take over. Instead the world must focus on resolving the technology deficit that makes switching away from fossil fuels so expensive. Genuine breakthroughs are required to drive down the future price of green energy.
Copenhagen Consensus analysis shows a ramped-up green-energy research-and-development budget of around $100 billion a year would be the most effective global-warming policy. It would be much cheaper than the approach pushed by the IPCC, and would not require global consensus. Most important, it would have a much better chance of ameliorating temperature rises. Under the IPPC’s approach, by contrast, the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits. Instead, the over-the-top reception to the latest IPCC report means that we are more likely to continue down a pathway where the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits.
Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It.”
On Climate, Listen to the Nobel
And not the media’s hysterical and confused response to the latest IPCC report.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Journalists have been herniating themselves unnecessarily in covering a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finding that global temperature might increase by another 0.9 degree Fahrenheit sometime between 2030 and 2052.
The truth is, any reporter with a fifth-grade education could have made the same calculation last week, last year or 10 years ago by applying the standard climate-sensitivity estimate (in use since 1979) to the standard emissions forecasts.
The IPCC foresees heat waves, rainstorms and floods, but heat waves, rainstorms and floods have always happened, and it isn’t clear what the report is really saying. The New York Times notes an estimate that an additional 0.9 degree will cost the global economy $54 trillion but that fails to say over what period. For the record, global gross domestic product is expected to hit $100 trillion in 2020, and virtually all experts see global GDP continuing to grow faster than global climate costs mount up.
The climate cognoscenti, meanwhile, are understandably more focused on what an important report, due in 2022, will say about the 40-year-old, unsatisfying climate-sensitivity model that underlies so many fuzzy forecasts reported in the media as fact. Today’s IPCC is mum but does specifically acknowledge two studies this year that greatly play down the likelihood of catastrophic climate outcomes, including one described in this column in February.
Bottom line: The U.S. media once again proves itself largely useless to anyone interested in the climate conundrum. “Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn,” went a CNN headline, announcing yet another deadline that is sure to be missed.
Unmentioned is the “or else”: We’ll have to adapt to some measure of climate change in a climate that is always changing even as the economy evolves toward greener technologies.
Or take a recent Washington Post piece that hyped a Trump administration estimate that the earth might warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, which was found buried in an environmental statement related to fuel-economy mandates.
Again, this merely applies the standard climate-sensitivity envelope to previously forecast future emissions, as any reporter could have done. The Trump document, in fact, is no different from Obama documents showing that the pending Obama fuel-mileage rules produce virtually no climate benefit—less than 0.0072 degree Fahrenheit by 2100.
The Trump analysis also states plainly what the IPCC only muffles: “Drastic reductions” in greenhouse gases are not “currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.”
Who among U.S. politicians might be considered the anti-Trump? Here is California Gov. Jerry Brown making exactly the same point, more colorfully, to the Nation magazine’s Mark Hertsgaard:
“Brown lurched forward, nearly leaping from his couch to denounce what he clearly viewed as the activists’ naive demagoguery. ‘What if I could snap my fingers and eliminate all gasoline in all California gasoline stations?’ he demanded. ‘What would happen? Revolution? Killings? Shootings? . . . There would be mass chaos. You’d never get close to [leaving oil in the ground] before the public reaction stopped it.’ ”
The virtue of democracy is that it turns away from folly eventually, and policies that are costly and produce no benefit would seem the definition of folly.
Turning away from Obama policy is at least something, even if it leaves open whether there is a non-foolish alternative we should pursue. On this point, we won’t belabor how the press and the greens, with their hysterical exaggerations and vilification of opponents, talked themselves out of the U.S. tax-reform debate. Notice, however, that the newly minted Nobel economist Paul Romer was anointed for showing that technological innovations don’t drop from the sky; they respond to demand. A carbon tax, he predicted on Monday, would bring forth lower-carbon ways of doing things more quickly and cheaply than most people imagine.
In the meantime, one thing is sure: There is no way to parse these matters to mean we should engage in costly policies of no benefit, which has been the approach so far. With that in mind, let’s turn to Chapter 4 of the IPCC report, which will be of interest to one and all regardless of their feelings about climate change.
At a cost of between $1 billion and $10 billion annually the forecast warming could be stopped by injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere. Via magical thinking, the IPCC presumes this technology would be employed only in conjunction with a forced march toward green energy. Right. Here’s something you can take to the bank: A future struggle among nations will concern how this cheap instrument of climate modification is to be used and for whose benefit quite regardless of any debate over climate change and fossil fuels.
Appeared in the October 10, 2018, print edition.
October 2, 2018
The hidden agenda behind ‘climate change’
In
comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.’s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:
This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she
complained that America’s two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.’s climate objectives. She went on to
cite China’s communist system as the kind of government America must have if the U.N. is to impose its environmental will on the world’s most free and prosperous capitalist nation. In other words, for the U.N. to have its way, America must somehow be transformed into a communist nation.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Figueres is not alone. Another senior U.N. official had comments of his own about the true agenda behind “climate change.” If you’re among those who still believe climate alarmists when they say all they’re trying to do is save the planet, what Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer had to say will leave your jaw on the floor.
In a Nov. 14, 2010
interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC’s Working Group III, made this shocking admission:
One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we’re doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.
In the same interview, Edenhofer added this:
Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with protecting the environment. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.
Edenhofer, one of the U.N.’s top climate officials, effectively admitted that the organization’s public position on global warming is a ruse, and another senior U.N. official, Figueres, said in an official capacity that the United States must be converted to communism for the world to be saved from global warming.
Let all of that sink in for a moment.
Powerful progressives in this country believe it’s not right that billions of people in the world sleep on the ground in mud huts while Americans sleep on soft mattresses in air-conditioned comfort. The progressive elites who feel that way – nearly all of whom are found in the Democratic Party, and 100% of whom live opulent, carbon-based lifestyles – also believe that far more of America’s wealth must therefore be forcibly “shared” (read: redistributed) with poor nations. Global wealth redistribution is the foremost tenet of communism, and those who advocate it are, by definition,communists, whether they openly admit it or not.
The stunning pronouncements by Figueres and Edenhofer are all the evidence a rational mind needs to conclude that climate alarmism is being used as a Trojan horse to justify the massive new carbon taxes clamored for by powerful progressives like Barack Obama, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, none of whom has ever denounced the anti-American, pro-communist sentiments of two of the U.N.’s most senior climate officials.
The words of one of those officials reveal that such taxes would be used not to save the planet, but to fund the most massive redistribution of wealth in human history, literally trillions of dollars extracted under false pretenses from hardworking U.S. taxpayers and given to the corrupt governments of every undeveloped nation on Earth, all in the guise of “climate aid.”
Democrats in high places are attempting the largest heist in human history, an international collusion to exfiltrate unprecedented sums of money from the world’s largest capitalist nation. Why? To implement, on a global scale, the mandate set forth in The Communist Manifesto: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Outraged that President Trump dealt their plan to redistribute America’s wealth a major setback when he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, Democratic Party luminaries would have you believe they’re nothing more than environmentally concerned citizens who would never even dream of supporting an effort to upend their country’s capitalist system. Trump knows that’s a big lie. And now, so do you.
No intelligent person can fail to recognize that the modern Democratic Party is using “climate change” as a ruse to
fundamentally transform the United States of America into a socialist-cum-communist nation. But because the human ego is loath to admit when it’s been duped, many patriotic liberals will continue allowing themselves to be led like sheep into the closing noose of the hammer and sickle. By the time they realize what happened, it will be too late.
John Eidson is a 1968 electrical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech; a lifelong conservative; and the father of two law-abiding, self-reliant sons.
Not to forget the little side issue of maximum 500 million people remaining on the earth according to the same sources, and guess who they are supposed to be.