Trudeau insists on a carbon tax
Dear Editor: A year ago Canada’s 385 delegates and Christy Clark’s photographer jetted home from Paris with the aim of dialing down global temperatures by two degrees in relation to pre-industrial levels. How did they arrive at that figure? Environment Minister McKenna has since announced that the agreement to eliminate hydroflurocarbons from air conditioners will lower the world temperature another half degree. Just how did they calculate that?
The International Panel on Climate Change says that the earth’s temperature has risen .74 degree over the past 100 years, which has apparently brought us to the verge of catastrophe. But the UN agreements on climate change and hydrofluorocarbons aim to reduce the temperature by 2.5 degrees, a net cooling of 1.76 degrees. If a rise of .74 degrees is dangerous, then what’s the effect of a reduction of 1.76 degrees; perhaps a postnuclear winter scenario?
The Liberals are hell bent to pay the costs of curing our presumed 1.95 per cent contribution to global warming, but maybe they should slow down and verify what the big offenders, especially China and the U.S., will do. The U.S. may back out of the UN climate deal which will destroy our already feeble competitive position. But Justin Trudeau still insists on a carbon tax for us.
The Chinese sign every climate deal that comes along, but what are they doing to change things? They’ll experience air quality emergencies in their major cities again this winter, yet they’re pressing ahead with construction of new coal fired power plants and burn some 4 billion tonnes of coal annually. We should avoid trade deals with them until things improve.
Mr Trudeau says he admires Communist China’s “basic dictatorship” which allows them to turn their economy around on a dime. Unfortunately he’s done it too, but it’s going in the wrong direction. It’s a game of chess, not Chinese checkers.
No one denies that the climate is changing; it has been since the dawn of time. We see abundant evidence for this in the sciences of geology, paleontology and archaeology. The ideologically driven Trudeau government hasn’t engaged us in much dialogue about global warming. Their mantra is: “the science is done, climate change is real and it’s man-made, and we’re going with whatever the UN wants”.
Maybe Mr. Trudeau could at least tell us what the optimum temperature for the world is and then explain how the global thermostat works. John Thompson Kaleden