This is how to really fight climate change in Canada

No kids, no cars, no meat, no flying! And even that won’t save you from man-made climate change.

If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau really wants to save the planet from man-made global warming, he should tell Canadians to stop having kids, not drive, not fly and not eat meat.

Those are the four most efficient ways of reducing industrial greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change in the developed world.

By contrast, the “solutions” pushed by Canadian governments and educators, such as recycling and switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs, while they may be feelgood exercises, are insignificant.

This, as reported by University of British Columbia PhD student Seth Wynes and Prof. Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University, in their paper, The Climate Mitigation Gap, published last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The biggest saving by far comes from having no children, or fewer of them. Every unborn child would save the average Canadian family 58.6 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions annually, compared to 0.213 tonnes by recycling.

Going carless saves 2.4 tonnes, compared to 0.1 tonnes by replacing incandescent lightbulbs with energy efficient ones.

Avoiding one transatlantic flight per year saves 1.6 tonnes of emissions, compared to 0.247 tonnes by washing clothes in cold water.

And switching to a plant-based diet saves 0.8 tonnes of emissions, compared to 0.21 tonnes by hanging your clothes out to dry instead of using a dryer. Despite this, Wynes and Nicholas report, “we find that 10 high school science textbooks from Canada (covering seven provinces, with 80 per cent of the population) largely fail to mention these actions — they account for four per cent of their recommended actions — instead focusing on incremental changes with much smaller potential emissions reductions.”

Further, “government resources on climate change from the EU, U.S., Canada, and Australia also focus recommendations on lower-impact actions.”

Thankfully, the researchers don’t recommend our governments force Canadians to have smaller families, although this is a common refrain among radical environmentalists, whose love for humanity is surpassed only by their hatred of people, save for themselves, of course.

In that context, consider China’s “basic dictatorship” (which Trudeau says he admires), which only abandoned in 2015 the infamous onechild policy it imposed in 1979.

But that didn’t stop China from taking credit at international meetings on climate change for decades, arguing that policy had prevented 300 million births, the equivalent of the U.S. population, and saved 1.3 billion tonnes of industrial carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions annually, based on global average percapita emissions of 4.2 tonnes.

The Wynes-Nicholas study is useful because it spells out the fundamental lifestyle and societal changes we would have to make just to achieve the greenhouse-gas reduction targets Trudeau has committed us to under the Paris climate agreement.

Even if we achieved our targets, and every other nation on Earth did the same, all it would do is doom the world to catastrophic global warming by the end of this century, according to the climate science.

But this is the fantasy world we live in when it comes to “fighting” climate change. Anyone who can add knows the carbon-pricing schemes being imposed on us by Trudeau and premiers like Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne and Alberta’s Rachel Notley, won’t lower our emissions anywhere near the levels our governments are claiming. Their carbon pricing schemes are cash grabs disguised as environmental programs.

There are practical steps we could take to reduce our emissions, such as 100 per cent revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend carbon pricing, whose sole purpose is to cut emissions, not increase government revenues, so of course our politicians aren’t interested. We could concentrate on expanding the practical clean and green energy sources we have now, in addition to hydro power, which are nuclear energy and natural gas, the lowest emitting fossil fuel, instead of wasting our money on wind turbines and solar power, which are decades away from being able to efficiently power modern, industrialized economies like ours on demand.

Or we can pretend to tackle the problem by electing politicians who are pretending to solve it.