TRUMP’S NEW CLIMATE MEASURES POSE MORE NEW PROBLEMS FOR CANADA.

“alt-science” into the climate debate. What is needed, apparently, is a new papal decree that there can be no debate.

On the Galileo side, scientist John Christy said Washington should appoint a second science body — a so-called red team — to take up all sides of the climate issue and offset the IPCC. He told the Washington Post that the official science comes from the IPCC where “they’ve just stopped selecting people who disagree with the consensus. So you have a consensus of those who agree with the consensus.”

It’s a global civil war over science and policy, and no country will feel the impact more than Canada.

When President Trump issued his executive order this week to rescind parts of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and revamp the Environmental Protection Agency, the reaction among the climate clergy was immediate. Democratic Senator Ed Markey said Trump had issued a “declaration of war” on climate action and Al Gore, the secular pope of climate panic, called it a “misguided step away from a sustainable, carbon-free future.”

Nobody said much in Ottawa, even though Trump’s executive order laid down another challenge to Canada’s environmental bureaucracy, the Trudeau government’s carbon price plan and the legion of nuncios from the profitseeking corporate division of the climate-industrial complex.

Trump’s executive order on Tuesday was aimed primarily at removing Obama-created restrictions on U.S. coal. But it also nicked away at Canadian policy. U.S. methane control regulations will weaken — just as Canada is set to introduce its own set of regulations that could add the equivalent of up to $5 per tonne of carbon to industry costs.

Another big little item stands out for Canada. The order says it “disbands the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gasses.” Seems like a small thing, but for Canadian bureaucrats and carbon pricing enthusiasts the U.S. working group is the sole supplier of official economic analysis for determining the appropriate price of carbon.

If the IWG disappears, how will Canada establish its social cost of capital, which at last report was allegedly somewhere between $40 and $125 a tonne today and climbing to between $75 and $228 by 2050? That’s the official “monetary measure” of the damage expected from climate change as determined by the U.S. model.

Without the U.S. model to work from, Canada will be lost for fake data. The solution, of course, would be to follow the U.S. and start all over again. That was the recommendation last year from Guelph University economics professor Ross McKitrick. The IWG social cost of carbon models, he said, “ended up peddling guesstimates based on inconsistent models.”

Even Environment Canada, in its report last March, cited the “inherent uncertainty” and “limitations” in the IWG method given the “current state of scientific knowledge, model capabilities and ongoing debates regarding appropriate discount rates.” As Canadian government officials like to say, Canada’s carbon price models appear to be unsustainable.

Overall, while the U.S. is moving in one direction, Canada is heading in the opposite. Canada will impose a carbon price, introduce methane regulation, eliminate cheap coal power, continue to mandate auto emissions standards, and support the Paris accord. If the U.S. does none of the above, it will be impossible for Canada to stick with its program.