What Will We Do About Global Climate Changing Emergency?

... or whatever the hell we are calling this scam these days.




Before one begins, one should point these things out:

- carbon dioxide is not a pollutant

- in many parts of the world, air pollution is so bad that millions of people die from it each year

- the mayor of Montreal agreed to sump sewage into the Saint Lawrence River


Were it not for the tax revenue and the incalculable public favour virtue-signalling provides, a competent government with a teaspoon of scruples might disregard the burdensome carbon tax and plastic straws ban to deal with more urgent issues like making sure that people don't decrease their life spans simply by breathing.


But I'm getting ahead of myself ...


Consider the recent ban on plastic straws. What does it achieve when such a ban has no effect on more pressing pollution problems like dumping sewage into a major waterway or that outsourcing the disposal of all kinds of garbage to countries that have non-existent to poor garbage disposal and recycling plans only result in more pollution and public embarrassment?:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the Canadian government’s recent announcement that it is going to ban certain single-use plastic items. This is feeble virtue signalling of the type now exhibited by politicians around the world. But it will do almost nothing to deal with the problem of plastic in the oceans.

The tsunami of waste that is sinking countries in southeast Asia is now a comparatively well-known problem. For a while, Asian countries seemed powerless to end the trade, but a few days ago, the Philippines and Malaysia made a stand, and sent a few small shipments of this problematic material back to Canada, its country of origin.

Mixed dirty plastic waste is almost impossible to recycle, which is why rich countries, with their tight environmental regulations, send it off to poorer places. But recycling is no easier in southeast Asia, and only a small portion of the 106 million tons of waste shipped over the past 20 years or so was ever converted to new plastic granules. Most was burned in the open air, or dumped in rivers, from where it found its way to the oceans.

This is the ugly consequence of the green economy and the urge to recycle. The damage that is being done has become increasingly clear as Asian countries have moved to put an end to the trade in waste. A bans on plastic straws in Canada is a gesture to make it look as if politicians are doing something, while avoiding the difficult decisions. But those difficult decisions are not going to go away, and they may soon become unavoidable.

Appearance coupled with poor planning and dubious (at best) science is a recipe for politicians and their tiresome platitudes about saving the environment when, in truth, they want to appear to be tackling the problem while getting rich on the side:

Scheer’s 60-page plan released Wednesday, which does not include a carbon tax, says the greenhouse gas reduction targets agreed to by Trudeau under the Paris climate accord in 2015, “are Conservative targets and our plan will give Canada the best chance at reaching them.”

Scheer has to say that because Trudeau’s targets used to be Stephen Harper’s targets and Scheer previously said he supports the Paris accord.

But in the real world Scheer’s plan, containing 50 initiatives, has as much chance of hitting the Paris targets as Trudeau’s, meaning somewhere between slim and none and slim just left town.

This as evidenced by the fact Scheer’s plan contains no timeline or deadlines for actually achieving the Paris target of reducing our emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.

That means Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna will spend the election denouncing Scheer for not having a plan to meet the Paris targets.

Of course, they will ignore the fact the federal environment commissioner, nine of 10 provincial auditors general, the United Nations, the federal government’s own studies and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, say the same thing about Trudeau’s plan.

**

A new report by the Fraser Institute debunks the most common defence of carbon taxes by the Trudeau government, the Green party and other supporters — that the cost of doing nothing exceeds the cost of taking action.

The report by Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick for the fiscally-conservative think tank — Apples to Apples: Making Valid Cost-Benefit Comparisons in Climate Policies — says the problem is that politicians don’t understand basic economics.

This leads to inaccurate claims, as made recently by the Green Party of Ontario, McKitrick says, that the cost of climate change to the Canadian economy will be over $91 billion annually by 2050 without a federal carbon tax — currently $20 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, rising to $50 per tonne in 2022. ...

The second common mistake political supporters of carbon taxes make, added McKitrick, is known as “the-social-versus private error” which considers carbon taxes in isolation from other taxation policies and ignores the ways in which these policies interact.

Both of these errors, he said, exaggerate the benefits of Canadian carbon taxation policies and make a false economic case for ever-increasing carbon taxes.

How would banning plastic straws stem the tide of a global catastrophe that seems to be happening in a country that already has a carbon tax?