Climate train went off track months ago

While U.S. President Donald Trump has effectively gutted the Paris climate treaty, Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is correct to say “no one person can stop a train.”

Except the train isn’t designed to lower industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change.

That train crashed 15 months ago in Paris, when Canada and other nations signed the United Nations climate treaty.

It contains no binding emission reduction targets and in fact locks in emission increases that climate scientists say will result in catastrophic global warming.

So, if you believe the world faces an imminent, existential threat from manmade global warming, the Paris climate treaty has basically sealed your doom.

However, if, as the federal and most provincial governments in Canada believe, global warming scare-mongering is a great way to extract billions of dollars from the public for use as governments see fit, then the climate train McKenna referred to is roaring ahead.

She told CTV’s Power Play last week that what Trump can’t stop is the march of businesses towards renewable energy.

“Businesses have moved,” McKenna said. “Businesses are looking at what are the new opportunities ... they see the real business opportunity.”

McKenna is correct in the sense that huge government (taxpayer) subsidies to business to produce inefficient, unreliable, expensive and unnecessary wind and solar power have done the job they were designed to do.

They have created an industry in so-called green energy that extracts billions of dollars from the public annually to be divided up by big business and governments.

Similar fiascoes are going on all over the world as cash-strapped governments use global warming as a new way to grab money from their citizens.

The proof is that the one form of carbon pricing that everyone from moderate Republicans in the U.S. to the Green party agrees is the most effective and fair method of pricing carbon — carbon fee and dividend — is the one governments consistently ignore.

That’s because the purpose of carbon fee and dividend — in which 100 per cent of the monies raised by carbon pricing are returned to the public in dividend cheques — is to lower emissions, not extract more cash from taxpayers and grow the size of government.

So, of course governments aren’t interested in it.