The federal government needs to start taking stock of whether its climate-change regulations are actually cutting greenhouse-gas emissions or not, Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco said Thursday
DeMarco published the results of a new audit looking at the impact of five specific climate change policies, which found that Canada doesn’t know how much those regulations are contributing to any reduction in emissions.
Canadians who took part in a federal focus-group research study were skeptical about the government’s climate change policies, saying they would add financial burdens to households but do little to reduce emissions.
“It was felt that many federal actions such as the introduction of a federal price on carbon had placed too much of a financial burden on the individual and that not enough focus was being devoted to reducing the emissions of large businesses and corporations,” said the resulting report, titled “Continuous Qualitative Data Collection Of Canadians’ Views.”
“All food is not created equal,” New York City mayor Eric Adams inscrutably intoned this week. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crisis lies in meat and dairy products.” This indictment accompanied the mayor’s efforts to extirpate animal proteins from city-run facilities, where “meat is increasingly missing from the menu,” according to the New York Times.
Adams’s boosterism for a “plant-powered diet” supplements his efforts to expand a program he inherited from former mayor Bill de Blasio, which is now designed to reduce the city’s carbon footprint by 33 percent in 2030 by cutting back on protein purchases. Adams scolded his fellow environmentalists for devoting most of their carbon-cutting efforts to curbing the combustion of fossil fuels. “But we now have to talk about beef,” he insisted. “And I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.”
A line must be drawn between obtuse environmental orthodoxy and the rational need for responsible energy development
Led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recently announced a million-barrel-per-day reduction in oil production, action only cartels can take to limit supply in order to raise prices — the cost to the global economy be damned. It will inevitably lead to higher North American gasoline prices as refineries gear up for peak-driving summer months. Even more damning is that it exposes the inherent fallacy of the anti-energy policies of Canada and the United States, which have two of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. Their determination to squelch oil and gas development in the name of climate change gives Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC members the whip hand on prices for key energy supplies and stimulates already high inflation rates. Canada and the U.S. together unwittingly surrender leverage about the price of a resource vital to our economy. Does this make any sense?
Bavarian Premier Markus Söder on Sunday proposed that his southern German state could assume control of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant, which was permanently taken off the grid, along with two other remaining power stations shortly before midnight.
Söder, who has been a staunch critic of Germany’s decision to transition away from nuclear energy, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the move would require an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act to hand control of nuclear power from the federal to the state level.
It was a monumentally stupid decision to shut down the reactors.
One city-owned charging station was used just 65 times in 2022
A full year after they were installed, Ottawans appear slow to embrace the city’s new fleet of public electric vehicle (EV) charging stations — but usage is trending upward.
The City of Ottawa installed a total of 24 EV charging stations across 16 sites spread throughout the city (some sites have two chargers). It currently bills $2 an hour for the service, a price point it says is in line with other cities.
As of last Friday, each of the city-owned charging stations had been in place for at least one year. In that time, a clearer picture of how Ottawans are using the technology has emerged.
China’s overseas infrastructure projects present high-impact risks to the environment, a new study has found.
The report — conducted by researchers from the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, the University of Queensland, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Colorado State University — focused on the risks to coastal and marine ecological systems posed by 114 of China’s overseas development projects between the years 2008-2019. According to the document, those 114 projects represent only 20% of all Chinese development finance projects in that time period, meaning that the results of the study are probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Despite their advocates’ urgent claims, renewable energy sources are still intermittent, unreliable, and far more expensive than advertised.
California’s headlong rush to replace its electricity grid with renewable energy has given the rest of the country a preview of the decarbonized future that Joe Biden and his revived Clean Power Plan envision for America. It isn’t pretty.
Before supply-chain woes and federal stimulus goosed inflation, California’s cost of living already ranked second highest in the nation. Enthusiastic efforts to rely more heavily on wind and solar power—touted as “cheap” sources of clean energy—have only made the state more expensive.
Assurances by the Trudeau government that Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions would decrease annually every year after 2019 lasted for exactly one year — 2020 — before they began increasing again, according to new federal data released Friday.
It reported Canada’s emissions rose to 670 million tonnes in 2021 — an increase of 12 million tonnes or 1.8% — compared to Canada’s emissions in 2020.
NBC News recently touted a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that says, “The chance to secure a livable future for everyone on Earth is slipping away.” It further reported, “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” This was echoed by Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council: “This is the stone cold truth laid out in unassailable science by the world’s top climate experts. We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.”
President Joe Biden is set to “transform” and “remake” the entire auto industry — “first with carrots, now with sticks” — notes the Washington Post, as if dictating the output of a major industry is within the governing purview of the executive branch. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing draconian emissions limits for vehicles, ensuring that 67% of all new passenger cars and trucks produced within nine years will be electric. This is state coercion. It is undemocratic. We are not governed; we are managed.
Since 1992 and the Earth Summit in Rio, the West has been living under the spell of a “climate emergency” that is repeatedly renewed but never happened. Since then, the West – and only the West — has set itself the main goal of reducing CO2 emissions (and other greenhouse gases, implied in the rest of this article).
It is now 2023, time for a review …
Canadian polls show young adults are drifting away from the federal Liberal party. It seems they’re slowly figuring out that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, despite his sympathetic rhetoric, is working against their dream of buying a first home.
While it’s taken a while for young and old to realize it, top bankers, retired civil servants, housing analysts, former property developers and housing activists are now declaring the Liberals are directly causing house-price inflation.
The retired head of B.C.’s civil service, Don Wright, recently wrote a piece titled, “Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?”
It explained how B.C.’s effort to reduce housing prices and build affordable dwellings “will be largely hostage to the federal government’s immigration policy.”
Wright, an economist, said Trudeau’s government routinely raises the “almost entirely fallacious” argument that Canada has a labour shortage to justify welcoming a record 438,000 new permanent residents in 2022, while adding another 680,000 non-permanent residents, including foreign students and other guest workers.
An important new study on climate change came out recently. I’m not talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report with its nonsensical headline “Urgent climate action can secure a liveable future for all.” No, that’s just meaningless sloganeering proving yet again how far the IPCC has departed from its original mission of providing objective scientific assessments.
I’m referring instead to a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres by a group of scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headed by Cheng-Zhi Zou, which presents a new satellite-derived temperature record for the global troposphere (the atmospheric layer from one kilometre up to about 10 km altitude).
It’s tax season. Well, for the environment now, it’s always tax season.
The carbon tax — which was raised to $65 as metric ton on April 1 — is impacting the economy in many ways. As the implementation of a higher carbon tax moves forward, a new baseline for costing is set for all sectors of our economy. By 2023, our carbon tax will be at $170 a metric ton, subsequently we need to be ready.
