Why Trudeau’s scheme for climate is a scam

Why do the media persist in prolonging the myth that Justin Trudeau — or for that matter any prime minister going back to Brian Mulroney — has a workable, coherent plan to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change?

Or that the United Nations does under its Paris climate treaty?

Now that Trudeau is bringing in a national carbon price, how many billions of dollars more annually are going to be extracted from beleaguered taxpayers for no discernible good, before we acknowledge the obvious?

That is, that our emperor, or emperors if you throw in most of Canada’s premiers like Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne and Alberta’s Rachel Notley, have no clothes.

That as the Trudeau government’s rhetoric about fighting climate change becomes more and more hyperbolic and nonsensical (see federal Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna and, especially, Ontario’s Glen Murray) the facts on the ground become more and more irrefutable.

In 1990, about the time global governments first started talking about man-made climate change, Canada’s annual industrial greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) totalled 611 megatonnes. (A megatonne, or Mt, is one million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions.)

As of 2015, a quarter of a century of political hot air later and the latest year for which statistics are available, Canada’s annual emissions were 722 Mt, an increase of 111 Mt or 18 per cent.

And yet Trudeau’s plan, which used to be Stephen Harper’s plan, calls for Canada to reduce its annual emissions to 613 Mt by 2020, a decrease of 109 Mt or 15 per cent, less than four years from today.

That would mean the equivalent of shutting down Canada’s entire electricity sector (79 Mt of annual emissions) and 41 per cent of the agriculture sector (73 Mt of annual emissions), in less than four years.

To meet the commitment Trudeau made under the UN’s Paris climate treaty would require Canada to reduce its annual emissions to 517 Mt by 2030 — a decrease of 205 Mt or 28 per cent, less than 14 years from today. That would mean the equivalent of shutting down Canada’s entire transportation sector (173 Mt of annual emissions) and 66 per cent of the waste disposal sector (48 Mt of annual emissions) in less than 14 years.

The only way to achieve this in these time frames would be through a national effort equivalent to the economic sacrifices Canadians made in the Second-World War.

It would mean imposing a carbon price of hundreds of dollars per tonne of emissions on Canadians, sending prices and taxes on virtually all goods and services skyrocketing, causing a massive, prolonged recession.

The only way to avoid this would be through a revenue-neutral carbon pricing system known as carbon fee and dividend, in which every dollar our governments raised from Canadians through carbon pricing, would be returned to them in the form of direct grants.

By contrast, Trudeau’s national carbon pricing scheme — starting next year at $10 a tonne of emissions and rising to $50 a tonne in 2022 — isn’t high enough to significantly slow emissions — and not revenue neutral.

All it is, is yet another government cash grab that will increase the cost of living for Canadians, with no benefit to the environment.

Trudeau’s climate plan is doomed to fail. It will lower our standard of living. It will not reduce emissions significantly, or anything close to what Trudeau is promising, according to his own government’s figures.

Simply put, it’s a scam.