GOLDSTEIN: Climate hysteria wasted our money, failed to reduce need for fossil fuels
· Toronto Sun
After almost four decades of climate alarmism the so-called “fight” against climate change has failed.
In 1990, the base year for the now long-forgotten Kyoto climate accord that was supposed to be the first step in saving the planet from catastrophic global warming, fossil fuels – oil, coal, natural gas – provided 87.38% of the world’s energy.
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As of 2024, it had barely budged at 81.26% and because the world today uses far more fossil fuel energy than it did in 1990, global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions are at their highest level ever – projected at 38.1 billion tonnes last year.
So what went wrong?
As it turns out, Canada is a case study in the failed and ruinously expensive strategy to avoid what we’re told is the “existential” threat of climate change.
That’s the first problem – false advertising.
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Climate change not an ‘existential’ threat
Climate change is not an “existential” threat. It will not wipe out humanity.
Severe weather is one of a number of environmental and geo-political challenges the world has faced, now faces and will face forever.
Second, “fighting climate change” is a misnomer.
What efforts to lower industrial emissions have actually been aimed at is reducing anthropogenic or “human-induced” climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels and some land use practices, as opposed to natural climate change, which has been going on forever.
Describing every single severe weather event as “climate change” as governments and media do, is absurd, because all severe weather events are the result of climate change, whether they are caused by natural or human factors.
Third, is the lack of government credibility on the issue.
Just as global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have consistently failed to meet unrealistic United Nations targets, so have Canadian federal governments failed to come anywhere close to meeting a single target of more than a dozen they have set since 1988.
(Shockingly, the annual global gabfests sponsored by the United Nations, ostensibly aimed at reducing emissions and held in the world’s vacation hotspots since 1995 – last year’s was in Brazil – attended by jet-setting politicians, celebrities, bureaucrats and hundreds of thousands of protesters, have been ineffective at actually lowering emissions.)
Carney acknowledged Canada was always going to fall short
Mark Carney – the world’s leading corporate promoter of carbon taxes before becoming prime minister who scrapped Justin Trudeau’s unpopular consumer carbon tax on his first day as PM – acknowledged last year that Canada was always going to fall far short of Trudeau’s 2030, 2035 (and thus, logically, 2050) emission reduction targets, despite committing more than $200-billion of federal taxpayers’ money to the effort in 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments.
Which ones worked and which ones failed? Which were duplicates of other programs resulting in the double counting of claimed emission cuts?
Who knows? There’s never been a comprehensive audit of the feds’ climate strategy .
What we know is that whenever the auditor general, parliamentary budget officer and federal environment commissioner examine a sampling of these programs, they find widespread examples of incompetence, mismanagement and conflicts of interest.
Add in 364 provincial programs – which still excludes municipal ones – and a rough estimate of the total projected cost to taxpayers is more than $500 billion, or $12,000-plus per Canadian.
Today, governments constantly cite “climate change” as the source of the damage caused by every conceivable natural disaster.
In reality – since there has always been severe weather – the culprit in many cases is government negligence over decades to properly maintain public infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, sewers and dikes, as well as to update fire suppression strategies and building codes, while allowing massive developments on floodplains, in coastal areas and in forests prone to wildfires.
Public bombarded with doomsday predictions
In the midst of all this, the public has been bombarded with decades of doomsday predictions of catastrophe known as “climate porn.”
This phrase was coined in 2006 by the United Kingdom’s Institute for Public Policy and Research, a progressive think tank, to describe the alarmist rhetoric that has permeated public debate about climate change for decades, following an extensive review of government and environmental websites and media coverage of the issue.
In their paper, “Warm Words: How are we telling the climate change story and can we tell it better?” authors Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit noted:
“Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire – as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control … It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, incorporating an urgent tone and cinematic codes.
“It employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, and it uses language of acceleration and irreversibility.
“The difficulty with it is that the scale of the problem as it is shown excludes the possibility of real action … by the reader or viewer. It contains an implicit counsel of despair – ‘the problem is just too big for us to take on’ …”
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No one trusts a liar
“Climate porn” has proven ineffective for the same reason the villagers in Aesop’s 2,500-year-old fable, the “boy who cried wolf,” eventually stopped listening to his warnings. No one trusts a liar, even if he occasionally tells the truth.
The public has been lied to so many times, that many today dismiss “climate change” as a hoax and are then labelled “climate deniers’ by alarmists, who themselves behave like members of a cult.
There are sensible ways to reduce global emissions – the most effective being replacing coal-fired electricity with non-emitting nuclear power and natural gas, which burns at half the carbon dioxide-intensity of coal.
But environmental fanatics oppose even that, putting their faith in wind turbines and solar panels, which cannot provide base load power to the electricity grid on demand and electric vehicles designed to save the auto sector , not the planet.
People are not monsters. Provide them with goods and services that lower their emissions while not bankrupting them or bribing them with their own money through massive government subsidies and consumers will follow.
The alternative, decades of climate hysteria, hasn’t worked.