Jan 26, 20206 min read

How DARE You... Lie To Me About Climate Change (Part IV)

The remedies are extreme, intrusive, and evidently socialist.

Chris

Jan 26, 2020

Here we are at the fourth, and final part (for now) that I have planned on the topic of climate change. To echo what we’ve discussed thus far, the message from climate alarmists is that the earth is warming at a disturbing rate, that man is responsible by way of carbon emissions, and that the consequences are imminent and dangerous to our survival.

The reason the skeptics are so hostile in their rebuttals is that the data supporting the alarmists’ claims is faulty and manipulated. And the remedies being mandated by political leaders, environmental activists, and the media in response to that disinformation, threaten our industrial existence. The following paragraphs outline the measures are being forced on us, and the damaging risks involved in fulfilling these policies.

The most well-known policy around climate change is the carbon tax. The simple definition for a carbon tax (as per Carbon Tax Center) is, “a fee imposed on the burning of carbon-based fuels (coal, oil, gas).” Additionally, we are led to believe that, “a carbon tax is a way – the only way, really – to have users of carbon fuels pay for the climate damage caused by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere” (Carbon Tax Center, carbontax.org).

We’ve already learned that carbon is essential to animal life, and it is suggested that diminishing too much carbon from the atmosphere would negatively impact green life on earth. Plantlife will begin to die at 150ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Further, it is corporations responsible for a large part of the carbon emissions and those taxes will be redirected to the consumer. Without affordable alternatives, Canadians will be forced to go broke just to heat their homes, get to work, and feed their families.

Punitive measures actioned against companies and entire industries are also being discussed which would lead to business leaving Canada resulting in a hit to our economy. Rather than implement taxes and restrictions on industry, we should allow for the natural research and development to take place. Consumers tend to make purchasing decisions based on emotional reasoning, as well as economic or logical ones. Consumers are forced to buy cheap products when they can’t afford much else. Without government pilfering Canadians’ money through unnecessary taxes and given the option, one can make an environmentally conscious choice about which products they buy.

There are environmental factors to consider with the use of “green solution” components like EV car batteries or wind turbines when they need to be decommissioned at the end of life. Recycling companies exist but prove to be costly, and there are significant environmental concerns with putting these items in a landfill including an effect on water systems. As of 2017, The Guardian reported a “recycling gap” of as few as five percent of lithium-ion batteries being recycled.

Wind turbines have a “useful life” of approximately twenty years. In the United States, there are nearly 50,000 wind turbines, twenty-seven hundred of which being decommissioned since the energy boom in the 1970s. According to an October 2019 article by Center of the American Experiment, the cost to decommission a wind turbine in 2019 dollars is $532,000 USD, and some of the concrete in the ground is never removed.

Some 1,000 decommissioned wind turbine blades wait for disposal at Casper Regional Landfill. Photo courtesy of the Casper Regional Landfill staff and retrieved from Cowboy State Daily.

“Wind turbines and solar panels are often given a free pass when it comes to their impact on the environment even though they can cause substantial environmental degradation” (Center of the American Experiment, 2019). Each blade of a wind turbine requires 30 to 44.8 cubic yards of landfill space.

There are other life cycle assessments required with green products that should be considered. Life cycle assessments take interest in raw materials, manufacturing, transport, and eventual disposal. I personally prefer cloth bags to plastic, but did you know that a cloth bag should be used at least 131 times according to a UK study (a 2018 Danish study recommended 7,100 times). It isn’t just about buying the reusable bags; you have to actually re-use them to make them green.

Politicians like Elizabeth May and her circle of friends from Part III, tell us we need a complete reduction or elimination of carbon emissions. This means:

- No more pipelines

- No cars, boats, planes, farm equipment

- To stop building any, and all new buildings

- To turn off all electricity production (this on its own is extreme and still only gets us half-way to the goals set by the IPCC

What does this mean for life in Canada? We’re sitting on oil we can’t use ourselves and our only customer is the United States who need not pay the full market price. No Canadian will be able to travel anywhere a bicycle cannot take them. We cannot produce farm foods. No heat in our homes, no emergency life-saving equipment in our hospitals, no quality of life. The vast geography of our country and three- to ten-month winters means most Canadians will literally not survive. Even if we could get to a market to buy our food, they want to control that as well.

Recall that the Club of Rome was considered a “crisis think tank” and came up with the idea that as a common enemy, “Global Warming / Climate Change” fit the bill as a global crisis, meant to establish fear, and provide a solution which presented various intrusive policies including wealth redistribution. Also recall that the present “War” being propagated is Carbon. These two notions lay the groundwork for the next remedy we’ll examine, rationing.

An opinion article published by The Globe and Mail in December 2019 presented the idea that “the climate crisis is like a world war. So let’s talk about rationing.” You have heard some of the activists we talked about in Part III lecture the idea of consuming less but rationing takes it one step further. It controls how much people can consume therefore ensuring we all follow their rules. The idea that we will run out of food is ludicrous. It is suggested that humans produce enough food for 10 billion people, with scientific evidence predicting that will increase. However, the United Nations doesn’t want us to produce more food, they want us to waste less.

Waste less, I can agree with. But to force anyone to consume less by way of rationing is an authoritarian exercise. Furthermore, it would be more productive to encourage homestead sustainable food production, even if only part of the population followed that lifestyle.

When rationing took place during and after WWII, it was due to the kind of shortages caused by an enemy at war taking out shipping vessels in order to “starve the nation into submission.” But even with due cause for the rationing, eventually, the public became dissatisfied leading to a change in political leadership and an end to the practice. In the 1970s, there was also rationing of oil following the 1973 Oil Crisis which took place due to embargos targeted at Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States.

There is no reason why anyone should entertain the notion of rationing, and certainly, it is an over-exaggeration to compare this made-up climate crisis to that of a World War. Places like Cuba still have rationing today (additional rationing took place as recently as May 2019). In the footnotes, I have included a Quora link which includes first-party anecdotes of what it is like to live in a country with rationing.

Canada contributes 1.6% of global man-made carbon emissions, and all man-made emissions account for 3-5% of all carbon emissions. The rest occur through natural processes like decaying plant life. That means that Canada is on the hook for 0.048%-0.08% of all global emissions while China, the largest emitter at ten-to-fifteen times what we produce adds “an amount equivalent to our entire production every three to four years.” (Toronto Sun, GUNTER: The uselessness of Canada’s climate extremism, Oct 2019)

India is the other major perpetrator of carbon emissions, the impoverished population being the brunt of the offense. Poverty and green solutions are unable to coexist at this juncture. The risk of implementing forced reductions in carbon usage threatens developed countries to turn back to a ‘stone age’ era and inhibits developing countries from making industrial progress.

This is not an issue that anyone should stay silent on. You can believe in climate change without the alarmism that leads to poor political policy decisions that have significant quality of life impacts on humanity. If the goal was truly about a greener planet, then we wouldn’t be bombarded with regulations around private property usage for smaller living spaces, sustainable food production, and connectivity to a national energy grid.

It should be apparent by way of their extreme solutions that policymaking is the primary driver for this movement. You are not a “denier” if you ask the critical questions. Now you know the tricks of the binary question, “do you believe in climate change?”, you understand the background strategy of this global movement, and why skeptics are being silenced. If the experts and facts I have presented to you are too technical, goes over your head, or hard for you to absorb, then I am afraid you have no business mirroring the climate alarmists or retweeting anything Elizabeth May, AOC, Greta Thunberg, or any of the other alarmists have to say.

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