Don’t treat ads for home heating like advertisements for tobacco

Earlier this month, Ottawa city council considered a proposal to change the city’s policy governing advertising and sponsorships in municipal buildings. Ads could be banned after consideration of whether they might lower greenhouse gas emissions.

There were more than a dozen presentations, including one by me. All but mine were by representatives of environmentalist organizations. These organizations supported the policy change on the grounds that any oil and gas industry advertising that placed fossil fuel production or consumption in a positive light would have grave adverse effects on both human health and the Canadian economy. With one voice, they compared advertising that favoured hydrocarbons to cigarette advertising and recommended a similar ban. Other city governments will probably face similar lobbying campaigns.

I had only five minutes to speak. I used that brief time to question the premises behind the proposed change. I pointed out that climate change is a global, not local, phenomenon; that Ottawa annually produces only 0.015 per cent of global GHG emissions; that global emissions are mainly driven by economic and population trends in the developing countries, which Canada has no influence on; and that blocking ads would in no way affect the climate, temperatures, the weather or their health effects.

I also observed that questioning the ethics of oil and gas producers implicitly impugned the actions of consumers who used the industry’s products to heat their homes, move people and goods and use the more than 6,000 products that would not exist without hydrocarbon energy and feedstocks — including pharmaceuticals, diagnostic equipment, antiseptics and others important to health.

Time did not allow me to comment properly on the comparison of publication bans concerning cigarette smoking and oil and gas consumption. I might have noted that, among other things, smoking is a voluntary activity, whereas heating one’s home in Canada’s climate is not.

The NGO reps spoke with absolute conviction in the ethical and ideological correctness of their position. They paid no attention to the logical gaps in their arguments that I mentioned.

One gap concerns the claim that human-induced climate change is already causing increases in extreme weather events. It has been made so often that by now the general public probably believes it. But it is vastly oversimplified and exaggerated. The main sources of climate variability in the past, present and (probably) future, in all places and with regard to virtually all climatic phenomena, are still overwhelmingly natural.

How do we know? Climate activists generally regard the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the leading scientific authority on the causes and effects of climate change. It published its Working Group 1 Sixth Assessment Report in 2021. That report examined thousands of issues, including the frequency of disasters and “extreme weather events” potentially related to climate change, as well as their attribution to natural or human causes. The potential effects examined included precipitation levels, floods, droughts, erosion of coastlines, frost, heat waves, ocean alkalinity, sea levels, cyclones and hurricanes, to name the most important. The report assessed whether, based on present evidence, the effects are already occurring and whether, based on their models of the future, the effects seem likely to occur sometime after 2050.

The report concluded that in the historical period (that is, up to now) the IPCC has “high confidence” that increases are occurring in mean air temperatures, extreme heat periods and ocean temperatures, and that decreases are occurring in dissolved oxygen in the oceans and in ice levels in lakes, rivers and seas. But it had “low confidence in the direction of change” of most of the climate effects that receive most current media attention, including precipitation, drought, fire weather, cyclones and hurricanes, snow and ice, sea levels, coastal erosion and ocean acidity. For the most part, it also has “low confidence” that a wider range of adverse climate effects will occur beyond 2050, except under “worst case” scenarios.

So, the IPCC itself contradicts the claims that are predicting climate and weather catastrophes. That pretty much kicks out the legs from under health scares related to climate change.

Ottawa council sent the proposed policy change back for further study of the potential legal issues, with instructions that staff report back within six months. At that time, one might hope, more energy consumers will join the discussion.

BLOCKING ADS WOULD IN NO WAY AFFECT THE CLIMATE.