A LUMP OF COAL FOR McKENNA.

PETER FOSTER

There used to be a tradition that Santa gave naughty children a lump of coal. If the jolly fat man also frowns on bad, pointless or hypocritical policies, he’ll want to save a lump this Christmas for Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

The Powering Past Coal Alliance, led by Great Britain and Canada, and in particular trumpeted by McKenna, is as vacuous a piece of environmental virtue signalling as can be imagined. Announced earlier this month, it supports a phase out of coal in developed countries by 2030 and developing countries by 2050, but its members account for a tiny proportion of global production. Its irrelevance is suggested by the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) medium-term coal report, which was released on Monday. The report also further undermined numerous dodgy claims made by McKenna in an anti-coal article she authored last week in The Globe and Mail.

The IEA, as a creature of its member governments, is inevitably a shill for radical and expensive climate policies. Its problem is that it keeps producing reports that reveal that the great transition to the wind- and solar-powered low-carbon future — allegedly required to save the world from climate catastrophe — is simply not happening. Still, the IEA always tries to put a positive face on inconvenient facts. Its report predicted that global coal demand would remain “stagnant” until 2022. Put another way, coal is refusing to die.

Since coal is the mother of all fuels for carbon-dioxide emissions, its reluctance to go away presents more than a marginal problem for “official” climate science, which likely exaggerates the problem a great deal, anyway. The IEA has a simple solution: it says that carbon capture, utilization and storage — that is, taking CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants and injecting them deep underground, or using them for some industrial purpose — must be made more economic, or at least be more heavily subsidized. We can because we must.

Coal demand may be down 4.2 per cent over the past two years but that has a great deal more to do with the flood of cheap natural gas than the alleged “surge” in renewables. Germany’s renewables surge has actually led it to use more coal, for back up. Moreover, coal will still account for 36 per cent of the global “power mix” by 2022, and its declining use in developed countries will be matched by its increased use in developing countries, where the IEA admits that coal offers cheap and reliable electricity to people who need it most. Indian coal-fired power generation is expected to grow almost four per cent a year through 2022.

McKenna appears to believe that poor people should not be permitted such development, but claims it is for their own good. She asserts that coal pollution leads to 800,000 premature deaths annually. Such precision invites skepticism, especially since the statistic comes from an organization called “Endcoal.” Nevertheless, 670,000 of those claimed deaths would occur in China, which is very conspicuously not a member of Ms. McKenna’s alliance. (It also doesn’t seem to want any economic, environmental or gender-sensitivity lectures from Canadian Liberals, as Justin Trudeau’s recent trip embarrassingly demonstrated.)

Meanwhile how many lives have been lengthened or saved because of coal- driven development? Seeing coal only as a killer is all-too-typical of the kind of single-entry bookkeeping that marks climate radicalism.

According to the World Health Organization, vastly more than 800,000 people a year die from cooking over open indoor fires. Coal-fired electricity — or efficient coke stoves — could certainly save many lives.

Minister McKenna peddles the tedious claim that corporations see killing fossil fuels as an investment opportunity in “clean growth.” She cites the California-based tech firm Salesforce, claiming that it had plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but “through rigorous innovation has already reached its goal.” In fact, the company reached its goal simply by purchasing carbon credits, which hardly amounts to “rigorous innovation.”

Salesforce describes itself as a “customer relationship management company.” It doesn’t manufacture anything tangible, but it does use a lot of energy to provide computing power. Although it boasts of facilities decked with virtuous LED lighting and low-flow water fixtures, its data centres have trebled their energy use, and emissions, in the past two years. Their single largest power source is… coal.

Then there are Salesforce’s customers. They include giants of the internal- combustion engine: Toyota, snowmobilemaker Bombardier Recreational Products, aircraft maker Embraer, and motorcycle manufacturer Ducati. Even more intriguing, one of the Canadian companies that Salesforce trumpets as a client is Sun Life Financial. In her Globe article, McKenna cites a recent Friends of the Earth Canada report that seeks to name and shame Canadian companies investing in coal facilities overseas. One of the companies is Sun Life.

McKenna’s biggest fake statistic was that shutting down coal plants in Ontario had been responsible for the elimination of smog days in Toronto. In fact, the province itself cited the closures as only one factor, and a study for the Fraser Institute by Professor Ross McKitrick and Elmira Aliakbari found that they were a very minor one.

There has been controversy lately over “name calling” against McKenna. Why sink to that when a far more powerful weapon is fact checking? On that basis alone she richly deserves that lump of coal.

APPARENTLY POOR PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED DEVELOPMENT — FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.