GOLDSTEIN: Liberal climate crusaders exposed
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The Trudeau government’s approach to addressing climate change — a combination of arrogance, ignorance and wishful thinking — has been on full display in Ottawa in recent days.
On Sunday, on CTV’s Question Period, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna repeatedly dodged basic questions from host Evan Solomon on how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will reach his absurdly unrealistic 2030 greenhouse gas emission reduction target.
Instead, she veered off into a partisan rant about, how, because she has “three kids” and we need to “save the planet,” she has “no time” for Canadians, including federal and provincial politicians, who oppose Trudeau’s carbon pricing scheme.
McKenna equated that with climate denial, with those who, she said, “pretend that climate change isn’t real.”
So if you’re not on board with Trudeau’s carbon pricing scheme, according to McKenna, you’re against children and the planet.
Last week, Trudeau in the House of Commons and McKenna in environment committee hearings, failed to answer another basic question posed by Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and Tory MP Robert Sopuck, respectively.
That was: How much will Trudeau’s $50 per tonne national carbon price (in 2022) reduce Canada’s emissions?
(Thanks to my former Sun News colleague Brian Lilley for pointing this out on Twitter.)
The Trudeau-McKenna response was to attack the Conservatives under Stephen Harper for doing nothing about climate change during their 10 years in office, failing to mention that the prior Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin did nothing for 13 years before that.
The reason Trudeau and McKenna didn’t say how many megatonnes of emissions the PM’s $50 per tonne national carbon price will reduce Canada’s emissions by — a megatonne or Mt represents a million tonnes of emissions — is that they don’t know.
That’s because imposing a national carbon price in the way Trudeau has done it will only tell the federal and compliant provincial governments how much money it will take from Canadians due to these emissions, not how much emissions will be reduced.
That can only be determined after the fact by trial and error, using the guideline that the higher the carbon price, the more emissions fall.
But even that isn’t reliable if the goods and services to which the carbon price is applied are necessities, such as electricity or home heating fuel, which consumers must buy no matter the cost.
The government’s own experts have advised McKenna that to reach Trudeau’s emission target would, in their estimate, require a $100 per tonne carbon price by 2020 (not $50 by 2022) and up to $300 per tonne by 2050.
At one point in Solomon’s questioning of McKenna, citing a recent report by the federal environment commissioner and nine provincial auditors general that Canada isn’t on track to meet its 2020 or 2030 targets, McKenna descended into fantasy.
“Our emissions were going up when we came into government,” McKenna responded, “and actually the UN report, it showed, 200 megatonnes — that probably doesn’t mean much to people — that’s a significant drop in our emissions.”
But the UN report doesn’t say Canada reduced its emissions by 200 Mt under the Liberals, which is what McKenna implied.
It says Canada must cut its emissions by 219 Mt by 2030 to meet Trudeau’s target (which used to be Harper’s target) of 30% below 2005 levels by then.
To do that, Trudeau would have to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s transportation sector (173 Mt annually) and waste disposal sector (48 Mt annually) in less than 13 years.
Since Canada’s emissions dropped by a mere 5 Mt between 2014 and 2015 to 722 Mt, the last year for which statistics are available, this seems highly unlikely.
The truth is Liberal and Conservative governments have failed to meet their emission reduction targets for a quarter century.
The only difference now is that the Trudeau Liberals want to charge us for their failures.
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