Countdown to Copenhagen

The UN will send billions to the Third World in carbon credits. Remember Oil for Food?
By Peter Foster

When the TD Bank’s Don Drummond agreed to spend $110,000 on a study of the impact of climate change policy on Canada, what he had in mind was to elucidate the regional impacts of such policies. This was a worthy objective, although everybody knows that it’s Alberta that stands to get hammered. But Mr. Drummond chose to channel the study, which was carried out by climate policy wonk Mark Jaccard, through the Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, organizations hardly known for their objectivity on the issue. Why do this? Mr. Drummond told me yesterday that these activist organizations have “technical expertise,” while Mr. Jaccard apparently has “the models.”

TD certainly got media bang for the buck. His report was leaked to The Globe and Mail, and yesterday’s Globe featured a front-page story, two columns and an editorial. However, the thrust of coverage appeared to contradict the smiley-faced conclusions of the report, which was titled “Climate leadership, economic prosperity.” Or, please hobble us so that we can run faster!

Under reasons for draconian action, the report quotes the widely discredited report from British economist and climate extremist Nicholas Stern. Meanwhile, the Jaccard study claims that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the fount of science, but then maintains that the situation is much worse than that presented by the IPCC.

The Stern report’s central flaw is a ridiculously low discount rate. If that sounds technical, what it means is that man-made climate change is claimed to be already costing us 5-20% of global GDP annually. It’s just that we can’t see where.

Lord Stern is increasingly becoming a figure of ridicule. This week, he suggested that vegetarianism might save the world, and projected that attitudes towards meat eating might become like those towards drunk driving. He has also predicted climate change would turn Europe into a desert and turn the world back in time by 30-million years. (See Simpson and the Shillers, below).

Naturally, there is no mention in the Jaccard/Suzuki/Pembina report that there has been no warming for the past eleven years, contrary to all UN models, or that leading IPCC scientists have admitted that we may be in for an extended period of cooling. Instead, apocalyptic warnings from the likes of Al Gore’s pet scientist James Hansen are included: that the world hasn’t been here for 3 million years, when sea levels were 15 meters higher. Lord Stern recently said we haven’t seen conditions like this for millions of years. Pick a number. Meanwhile the report’s authors take IPCC figures for projected sea level rise this century and treble them. Which still only adds up to a meter. Or more.

The Harper government has announced a necessarily vague plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. Their main priority is not to do anything that’s going to lumber us with U.S. sanctions. The Jaccard report, by contrast, declares that “fairness” (plus the UN) requires a slashing of Canadian emissions of 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. And it will hardly hurt at all.

The report claims that “with strong federal and provincial government policies,” Canada can meet the UN targets “and still have a strong growing economy, a quality of life higher than Canadians enjoy today, and continued steady job creation across the country.” All we need is to penalize industrial activity by pricing carbon at up to $200 a tonne by 2020 (multiples of anything suggested in proposed U.S. legislation) and adopt a vast range of meddlesome policies. The economy will carry on, cranking out 2.1% annual growth. We can slash carbon emissions by 72% in 2020 vs. “business as usual” and the economy will be only 3.2% smaller. It’s a miracle! Or yet another example of large-scale and long-time-frame modelling. Whether it’s the climate or the economy, the outcomes are unlikely to be any more than best guesses as to where we will be in 20 years, let alone 50 years.

Similarly improbable is the claim that more jobs will be created under heavy government intrusion than under freer markets. How? By giving half the $70 billion-plus business tax burden by 2020 back in lower income taxes! And you thought Stephane Dion’s Green Shift was dead!

Government will promote carbon capture and storage, reduce “fugitive” emissions, regulate vehicle and building efficiency, and fund renewable investments and public transportation. Plus it will ship billions annually to developing countries to pay for carbon “credits” (via the UN. Remember oil-for-food? No problem. Canada will only engage in “carefully chosen investments.”) Still, by 2020, this thinly disguised foreign aid will amount to $6 billion annually. It will be like funding a GM and Chrysler bailout every year (only with little or no local benefit except for some pie-in-the-sky “cleantech” industries). There will also be massive elaborations of the tax code to take care of the poor, regional variations in energy costs, and protection of “the most vulnerable manufacturing sectors.”

The report confirms that the main burden of new legislation will fall on Alberta and Saskatchewan. However, Alberta is still projected to grow faster than any other province.

Another miracle!

So what conclusions did the Globe draw from this pile of policy?

John Ibbotson declared the report was a “rigorous and unbiased assessment” and that now “no one can now hide behind bafflegab and rhetoric.” Jeffrey Simpson claimed that “Scaremongers would have to eat their words if they gave this study a fair-minded report, but so, too, would those who paint cost-free scenarios of reducing emissions.”

But both these assessments seemed a bit at odds with the Globe’s main editorial, which declared — accurately — that the report’s analysis was “unsaleable and dangerous.”

The TD’s Mr. Drummond apparently doesn’t “endorse” the report. He told me he just wanted people to have “something to shoot at.”

But such a study, while an inviting target, should hardly be the starting point for rational analysis of the greatest policy threat to freedom and prosperity in living memory.

What it does confirm is how far the policy “debate” has been taken over by activists, supported by Big Corporate money.
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Simpson and the Shrillers
Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail’s official climate panjandrum, recently referred dismissively to what he called the “shrill chorus of climate-change deniers.” We know a few deniers, and all seem remarkably calm and cool and not usually given to extremes, hype or exaggeration. When it comes to shrill, in fact, nobody beats the proponents of global warming theory and official climate policy. Some examples, in no particular order:
•UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the official climate change science reports are “are as frightening as a science-fiction movie. But they are even more terrifying, because they are real.”
•Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, “should be in jail… for all of eternity.” He said coal companies Massey Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal are “criminal enterprises.”
•James Hansen, NASA climate scientist, said of coal that, “If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” Hansen estimated that one coal-fired power plant “would be responsible for the extermination of about 400 species.”
•If world temperatures rise above 2 degrees Centigrade, it would be “exceedingly dangerous” because the world has not seen such temperatures in more than 3-million years, according to James Hansen.
•Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern report on climate economics and New Labour climate change guru: “We have not seen those sort of conditions for 30 million years. These kind of changes will have huge consequences — southern Europe is likely to be a desert; hundreds of millions of people will have to move. There will be severe global conflict.”
•Former UN secretary general Koffi Annan claims that 300,000 people a year are being killed by climate change.
•Current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says, “Many scientists are saying that worst-case projections are already being realized — indeed surpassed...Some estimates say that rising greenhouse gas emissions could cause a decline of 5 per cent or more in global GDP.”
•David Suzuki, head of the David Suzuki Foundation and former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says, “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing [on climate policy] is a criminal act.”

DeSmogBlog, Jim Hoggan’s shrillerama blog site, recently carried a headline: “What if we handled Hitler like we’re dealing with climate change?” It links to a cartoon video, with a news-reel voice that says, “Global warming continues on a path of global domination. What if the world dealt with the Nazis of yesterday the same way were are dealing with the scourge of global warming today?”

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Those 200 protesters who disrupted Question Period this week demanding the government pass Bill C-311 -- setting strict targets for reducing carbon emissions -- showed how dearly some people will pay to slash Canada’s carbon footprint. Six protesters were arrested; one later showed up on television with blood around his nose claiming he’d been brutalized by Parliamentary guards. “My face was smashed on the floor,” Jeh Custer told a CBC audience, insisting he would not give up pressuring the government to commit to aggressive emission-reduction goals.

With the arrival yesterday of a report funded by TD Bank, prepared by the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, and based on economic models by M.K. Jaccard and Associates, calculating for the first time the economic impact of government climate-change policies, the rest of us are left to decide how willing we are to have our own noses bloodied in the name of atmospheric justice.

For it leaves no doubt: in meeting the government’s plan to cut greenhouse gases by 20% from 2006 levels in the next decade, there will be blood.

It portends, TD’s chief economist told reporters, “the biggest fiscal shock in Canadian history.” The study shows “it can be done,” as long as we’re prepared for hard-line restrictions, including steep carbon taxes and the banning of any new buildings, homes, appliances and vehicles not meeting strict environmental standards.

And since that won’t quite get us to either Ottawa’s goal, or the taller ambition of environmental groups that we cut emissions about 40% from today by 2020, Canada must also purchase loads of carbon permits from developing countries to make up our shortfall.

The bulk of the brutality will be felt, unsurprisingly, in one part of the country — that which had, in pre-recessionary days, proved the powerful piston in Canada’s engine: the West.

It’s a “massive fiscal transfer that leads to a major industrial realignment,” Mr. Drummond wrote. To please Mr. Custer and his fellow travellers at Pembina and the Suzuki foundation, the entire country must sacrifice 3.2% of GDP, almost all at the expense of Alberta, which loses 8.5% of its economy, and B.C. and Saskatchewan, which would both kiss goodbye just under 3% of theirs. Only Ontario and Manitoba come out slightly ahead.

The report crashed onto Parliament Hill yesterday like a collapsing ice shelf. If the Liberals hoped it would show an easy transition to a new, greenified economy, permitting much mockery of Conservative inaction in making it so, they were stunned. In a committee hearing on C-311, one MP asked the Pembina Institute’s representative which countries, anywhere on Earth, faced as steep a cost for climate compliance as Canada.

The answer, we learned, was none and so, any opposition party backing C-311 now winds up endorsing the economic equivalent of a whack to the face. Conservatives, having had their own climate plan shown to be no painless affair were in just as precarious a spot, only with the bonus of stoking inter-regional tensions, as the West is left to wonder if their man, Stephen Harper, is out to shaft them for Ontario votes, just like other parties they stopped trusting years ago.

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said the report made it seem like the spirit of climate change was “all about sending [our] money someplace else” and vowing “there won’t be another wealth transfer to Ottawa under my watch.”

A policy that punishes the west disproportionately will “make a lot of stuff more difficult” on the political scene, says Roger Gibbins, president of the Canada West Foundation. The report’s scenario represents a “dangerous proposition”; likely not one this government would readily grasp.

And so the pro-Kyoto groups behind the study may not have done themselves any favours here. Their continued insistence that what Mr. Drummond described as “a considerable disruption to labour markets” in some of Canada’s largest sectors — in exchange for more money, from carbon taxes, for public transit, wind turbines and other green subsidies — is a tolerable price to pay for environmental absolution risks revealing a stark disconnection between environmentalist NGOs and the reality of the condition of the average family.

The economy, after all, would survive, the Pembina Institute’s Matthew Bramley assured Canadians yesterday, just in a different, and smaller form.

“This is scary. And when you get scared you don’t go to the meetings [between government and industry] and get the work done that’s actually fruitful … everything freezes,” says Aldyen Donnelly, president of the Vancouver-based Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium, an industry association dedicated to reducing CO2 emissions, who testified yesterday before the committee considering C-311. A report as bracing as this one, she worries, will only turn Canadians off making climate-change progress.

That is a shame, she says, since the report presumes only one route to reducing Canada’s CO2 emissions — the way of decommissioning coal plants and oilsands operations while buying invented permits from countries less clean than our own — failing to consider any number of cheaper, less disruptive approaches. Those are too numerous to list here but range from shifting vehicles, and energy production, to a high-efficiency diesel economy to getting coal plants to produce hot water to heat homes, rather than electricity.

After yesterday, however, getting Canadians to believe addressing climate change won’t feel something like being dragged against their will, face first and bloody, to some dark place they don’t want to go, will be an awful lot harder.
National Post
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That is a shame, she says, since the report presumes only one route to reducing Canada’s CO2 emissions

Prime Minister Harper:

The climate treaty under discussion is nothing more than a blatant transfer of wealth.
It appears that there is no stopping the President of the US from signing a document that will incarcerate the American people. The European union appears unwilling to acknowledge the massive burden they will recklessly saddle their citizens with. It will be up to you to see that Canadians are not represented by such irresponsible leadership.

I am certain you are wise enough to know the man made global warming claim is truly the most discredited bit of junk science the human race has ever seen. I urge to unleash the science and force the charlatans to admit that their only goal is the incarnation of the human race and for what? So that they can live in luxury, jetting around the world burning up the very fuel they want to deny us, the energy we need to support our lives.

The travesty must stop. If not for the sake of the citizens who are alive today and are being called upon to pay for a farce, consider the crushing burden that will be placed on the shoulder of those too young to speak and those not yet born. Your legacy should not read, ‘I sold out to fraudsters and Charlatans”

Mr harper, regardless of the pressure you will be under, I urge you to do the right thing. Please do not add Canada’s name to the Treaty under discussion in Copenhagen. It will be immoral to hang this yoke of slavery on the Canadian people.

And if you value your place in history, I urge you to consider being held responsible for draping these chains of energy servitude on the Canadian people. Instead, call for those who ask that you be their tool of force in this insanity, to end their hypocrisy. Ask them to first drape those chains on their own shoulders, to stop seeking special privilege. Ask them to lead by example, to show us all, those they will enslave, their personal willingness to also live within the draconian limits they are prepared to levy us with.

Mr Harper I urge you to tell the world that the ‘emperor is naked’ - that man made CO2 global warming is a monumental hoax. Ask those who are there, to stop embarrassing themselves because we are no longer fooled. It is over.