The Canadian federal government offered an open consultation on Net Zero policies. Friends of Science Society encouraged the public to participate. Following the closing of the consultation, a citizen who is a Professional Engineer with decades of experience in the power generation (electricity) sector offered us a slightly edited version of his submission for publication. He hoped to enlighten the general public about the extreme risks to the health and safety, economy and the lifestyle of Canadians, related to present and proposed Net Zero policies and plans.
PDF is here:
This is an edited version of the submission I made to the Government of Canada’s public engagement on net zero, which closed on January 21, 2022. I first provide my comments on the errors and biases in the survey’s background material, and then I respond to the government’s questions for Canadians. I have elaborated on a few points on which I ran up against word limits in the on-line survey, and I have added a few references to support some of my submissions. My overall message echoes Greenpeace founder and environmentalist Patrick Moore, who said [1]:
During the past 50 years we have adopted a lot of environmental policies that have changed the social and economic landscape considerably. But today there are demands being made that would actually cripple society and the global economy permanently. The push to “phase out all fossil fuel consumption in 30 years” is certainly the biggest threat to civilization in the world today.
Comments on the Survey’s Introductory Material
The italic text at the beginning of each bullet comes from the government’s online survey. My responses are in normal text.
• During… COP26, the world came together to commit to doing more on a faster timeline to limit global warming to 1.5 °C.
I disagree. The world’s largest emitters either did not show up at all or they reiterated their intentions to advance their economies, even when doing so requires fossil fuels. India, for example, has committed to net zero, but not till 2070 [2]. Moreover, the global average temperature in 2016 was already 1.3 ℃ above the 1850-1899 mean [3], so those who believe human-produced CO₂ controls the climate should accept the impossibility of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 ℃ (which is an arbitrary target anyway). The sky was not filled with fire and brimstone at 1.3 ℃ above the pre-industrial level, so I don’t expect to see fire and brimstone at 1.5 ℃ or even 2 ℃. Indeed, throughout much of its history, Earth was much warmer than it is now [4].
• Canada is listening to the best available science and economic analysis, which tell us that getting to net-zero emissions in less than 30 years is essential to keeping the world safe and livable for future generations.
I and thousands of reputable scientists disagree. Nowhere in the scientific sections of the UN IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is it claimed that there is a “climate emergency,” and even the report’s Summary for Policymakers—which is a political document that often misrepresents the science—does not claim an emergency [5]. On the other hand, Christiana Figueres, then the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated in 2015 that [6]:
This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years.
And German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer said [7]:
Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.
Countering ideologically and politically motivated climate alarmism, Bjorn Lomborg—president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, former director of Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Centre, one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004, and “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” according to The Guardian in 2008—says [8]:
The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change.
The singular obsession with climate change means that we are now going from wasting billions of dollars on ineffective policies to wasting trillions. At the same time, we’re ignoring ever more of the world’s more urgent and much more tractable challenges. And we’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible.
• If we make the right decisions today, we can reach our climate targets in a way that supports workers, communities, and the competitiveness of our economy now and in the years ahead.
What platitudes! Workers in the oil and gas (O&G) industry have not been supported by the federal government, they’ve been demonized and attacked by bill after bill in Parliament that killed off pipelines, west coast oil shipments, oil sands mines, and other major energy projects. Some deplorable people (no politicians that I am aware of) went so far as to opine on social media that the people of Fort McMurray got what they deserved in the devastating fire of 2016 simply because of the community’s connection to fossil fuels. Regarding economic competitiveness, high energy prices and stifling energy policies will drive jobs and CO₂ emissions to more business-friendly countries with lower environmental and human-rights standards. And if it kills off the O&G industry, the federal government will have eliminated Canada’s largest export sector and its largest source of government revenue [9].
The statement that “we can reach our climate targets” is absurd. Climate targets (not to be confused with CO₂ reduction targets) are meaningless because there’s no science behind them and because no one can produce an accurate estimate of the effect of CO₂ emission reductions on Earth’s climate fifty or a hundred years from now [10]. Based on observational studies, we know that almost all of the world’s ~100 climate models are far more sensitive to CO₂ than the real climate is—that is, the models run hot. In addition, model projections of the global average temperature differ wildly amongst themselves [11], and at the regional level it is not uncommon for one model to project a large increase in some weather variable (e.g., annual precipitation) while another model projects a large decrease.
The most likely outcome from trillions of dollars in world CO₂ reduction expenditures will be that sea levels, glaciers, extreme weather, etc., will do pretty much what they would have done anyway, and we will have to spend even more trillions on the infrastructure improvements we should have made in the first place.
• A total of 1,134 respondents participated in the engagement.
That’s 0.003% of Canada’s population, and the sample is almost surely skewed toward environmental activists and away from Canadians who are too busy putting food on the table and getting their kids to school to fill out climate-related surveys. Moreover, opinions among the general public are informed largely by ENGOs, abetted by the mainstream media, who promote the false notion that renewable energy is 100% good and CO₂ is 100% bad. Rarely a day goes by without a headline story that fossil fuels are to blame for the latest horrible event, yet it seldom takes me more than a few minutes to find real-world data that refutes the blame claim. In a similar vein, I have reviewed several documents prepared by the Pembina Institute, which describes itself as a “clean energy think tank,” on the subject of renewable energy in electric power systems, and they all contain a significant number of serious errors. To make matters worse, “cancel culture” is now endemic, and anyone who dares question the climate narrative may be censored or even fired.
• In April 2021, Canada announced an enhanced nationally determined contribution (NDC) to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030. This new target was formally submitted to the United Nations in July 2021.
I am not aware of any comprehensive consultation with Canadians that would justify the “nationally determined” claim, so I suspect that the NDC was determined by a small group of environmental activists within the Liberal Party of Canada. Regarding the UN, it is a political body that Canadians did not elect and that has no particular interest in preserving the socioeconomic well being of this country. In any case, the NDCs are not binding.
• In December 2016, Canada released its first ever national climate plan … to reduce carbon pollution.
“Carbon pollution” as a term for CO₂ emissions was coined by environmental extremists, apparently for the reprehensible purpose of scaring people. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is not carbon (C), just as water (H2O) is not hydrogen gas (H2). CO₂ is one of the two molecules, the other being water, that is most essential for life on this planet [12]. The level of CO₂ in the atmosphere rose from ~280 parts per million (ppm) in the late 1800s to ~415 ppm today, and largely due to that increase, Earth’s vegetated lands have shown significant greening [13] and crop yields have been rising across the world [14]. We pump CO₂ into greenhouses because plants grow better at 1200 ppm than they do at 415 ppm [15], which in turn is because plants evolved at much higher CO₂ concentrations than exist today. Since plants die of CO₂ starvation at ~150 ppm, life on Earth is much closer to having too little CO₂ than to having too much [16].
Even though CO₂ is the antithesis of pollution, in 2020 I heard radio ads (which I believe were sponsored by the federal government) claiming that “carbon pollution” is making our kids sick. The claim is categorically false. As already noted, the atmosphere contains ~415 ppm of CO₂, a value far below the more than 1000 ppm that can regularly be found in meeting rooms and classrooms, even farther below the NIOSH-recommended exposure limit of 5000 ppm for ten hours, farther still below the 10 000 ppm that most people can tolerate with no ill effects, and only one percent of the immediately-dangerous-to-life level of 40 000 ppm [17]. In other words, a national plan to reduce “carbon pollution” makes no sense.
• At COP26, Canada made significant announcements, including committing to: cap Canada’s oil and gas emissions at the pace and scale needed to get to net zero by 2050; accelerate its clean energy transformation by working … to ensure that the electricity grid achieves net-zero emissions by 2035.
Apparently the Government of Canada is unaware of the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg. Eliminating the O&G industry would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in annual royalties, tax revenues, and export revenues that currently fund jobs and government programs, and it would strand trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel assets in the ground. Meanwhile, fossil fuels will continue to power the rest of the world for many decades into the future even under the most optimistic “green” scenarios. Regarding net zero emissions from the electricity sector, it is unachievable in the non-hydro-rich parts of the country without imposing extreme financial and socioeconomic hardship.
Response to Question 1
What opportunities do you think the Government of Canada should pursue to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030 and position Canada to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, including in any or all of the following economic sectors?
The government should not be pursuing any specific opportunities to reduce emissions by 40-45% by 2030. Not only is the target arbitrary, it is futile: no reduction in Canada’s 1.6% share of world CO₂ emissions is going to make a difference to the climate, and any reduction will quickly be swamped by emissions growth in much of the rest of the world. Canada is a large, cold country in which citizens’ access to affordable, reliable energy is a matter of survival, so it should not be on the bleeding edge of CO₂ emissions policies of highly speculative benefit. That said, objectives that are worthwhile on their own, such as improving energy efficiency, still make sense.
Buildings
Forcing building energy systems to use electricity instead of oil or natural gas will lead to increases in building operating costs. Oil-to-electric or gas-to-electric conversions will require large expenditures for home furnaces and water heaters, large investments in electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, large tax increases to pay for the higher cost of running public buildings, and large increases in the cost of goods and services as businesses pass their costs on to end consumers.
Electricity
As a professional engineer with 40+ years in the electricity industry, I can say with some confidence that, barring a technological miracle, forcing Canada’s power grids to be net zero by 2035 will lead to serious financial and social harm in provinces that rely heavily on fossil fueled generation today. Contrary to oft-heard claims, renewable generation is not cheaper than conventional generation when we include the costs of turning intermittent, unpredictable electricity sources into reliable ones [18]. Renewable generation requires more transmission and distribution wires for the same amount of energy delivered, more real-time supply/demand balancing resources, and alternate energy sources for when the wind is not blowing and/or the sun is not shining. In addition, renewables impose costs on other generators for, among other things, sub-optimal output levels and the extra maintenance necessitated by more frequent thermal cycling.
Heavy Industry, including Oil and Gas
The International Energy Agency recently recognized Canada’s O&G industry as a preferred supplier and as the world leader on the environmental front [19]. Despite that fact and IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol’s acknowledgement that the world will need oil and gas for years to come, the industry—especially in Alberta—regularly gets vilified by Canadian politicians and foreign-influenced not-so-charitable organizations. The fact that Alberta contributed a net $600 billion to the rest of the country over the last six decades seems to have been lost on our leaders. Journalist Rex Murphy hit the mark in his piece in the Jan. 20 National Post, where he wrote, “And, once again I caution, we will drive a wedge in Confederation if a policy that treats Alberta as a scapegoat and forces it to carry the burden of an Ottawa obsession [over climate] is not abandoned.” Canada’s O&G industry must be allowed to thrive and innovate, not be strangled by draconian federal policies.
Transportation
In some circumstances, electric vehicles (EVs) make sense. But forcing Canadians to drive EVs—which perform poorly in harsh winter conditions, have significant range limitations, and have long “refueling” times—could have serious consequences for those whose vehicles allow them to earn a living, visit distant friends and family, seek medical and dental care, or enjoy sports and leisure activities. This will be especially true for rural Canadians. As for police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, taxpayers will have to fund two or three times as many EVs as fossil-fueled vehicles because EV turnaround times between shifts will be hours, not minutes. Electric utilities, too, are likely to need more EVs than gasoline or diesel vehicles because there is a good chance that storms will occasionally knock out power when EV batteries are almost fully discharged at the end of a shift. In addition, Canada’s large distances require long-distance air travel, and electric airplanes (other than in niche applications) are infeasible with today’s technology.
Agriculture and waste
As climate policies drive energy costs up, food will become more expensive to plant, grow, harvest, transport, process, package, and deliver. This will add to the vast array of other increased costs that Canadians will have to face under a net zero scenario—again for no detectable benefit.
Nature-based climate solutions
Climate change is an inescapable consequence of having a climate, and there is nothing humans can do to stop it from happening. But since extreme weather will always exist, it makes sense to become more resilient to it. We can, for example, move homes out of flood plains, use readily available hail-resistant building materials, and do a better job of maintaining dikes, dams, bridges, and other infrastructure. We can also avoid using forest management practices, born of human hubris, that replaced more-frequent but smaller and more manageable fires with less frequent but far larger and more destructive ones [20].
Through the lenses of engineering and economics, weather adaptation makes vastly more sense than CO₂ mitigation, especially since adaptation works regardless of how much or how little climate change is actually caused by humans.
As one specific example, if we move a house out of a flood plain or use readily available existing technology to make it flood-proof, we can be confident that it won’t get flooded. On the other hand, after we spend trillions of dollars on CO₂ mitigation we will still have no reason to believe that the house is safe. And for those who believe humans control the climate, what happens if our trillion-dollar expenditures actually make the house more susceptible to flooding?
Economy-wide (e.g., carbon pricing, climate-risk disclosure, sustainable finance, etc.)
Until the world’s largest CO₂ emitters share the Government of Canada’s views and policies, anything this country does to reduce its meagre 1.6% share of world CO₂ emissions will amount to a socioeconomically disastrous exercise in futility. If Canada were to cut its emissions to zero tomorrow, they would be replaced in a year or at most two by just the growth in emissions from China, India, and most of the countries of the world that are not “woke” western democracies. Given our current state of climate knowledge and the chaotic (in a mathematical sense) nature of the real climate, there is no hope of producing a credible estimate of what effect carbon pricing or the other proposed measures would have on the global average temperature, let alone on the number of heavy thunderstorms in Toronto or the number of forest fires in British Columbia. In other words, Canada’s policies will have real costs but will not produce any detectible climate benefits (unless one considers virtue-signalling a climate benefit) in the foreseeable future.
Since climate is just long-term-average weather, there are no “climate” risks, only extreme-weather risks. Such risks have always existed and they always will. Climate risk disclosure, other that in the sense of weather risk disclosure, is of little relevance given that there is no credible evidence that extreme weather is getting worse [10,21,22] and there is no ability to produce meaningful regional “climate” forecasts. Regarding “sustainable finance,” the term is actually a euphemism for the concept of choking off funding for the O&G industry, leading to serious economic harm and perhaps even death for millions of people because modern society cannot survive a too-rapid elimination of fossil fuels.
Other, please specify
As noted above, I am a professional engineer with more than 40 years’ experience in the electric utility industry. I have spent tens of thousands of hours studying weather & climate statistics and both conventional and renewable energy systems. As should be obvious from my preceding remarks, I believe the federal government’s net-zero policies will lead to energy poverty for millions of Canadians, cause drastic and irreparable harm to our economy, degrade our quality of life, and do far more harm than good for the environment. No country on Earth is likely to suffer more or benefit less from the mad rush to net zero. From an engineering perspective, the attempt to address weather-related disasters through CO₂ reductions rather than infrastructure hardening or asset relocation is irresponsible and doomed to failure. Given today’s still-emerging no-CO₂ technologies, which we will be forced to use prematurely by arbitrary, self-inflicted emissions reduction deadlines, Canadians are likely to see energy become unaffordable, unreliable, or both.
Response to Question 2
What do you see as the barriers or challenges to reducing emissions in these sectors? Do you have suggestions on how to overcome these barriers?
At the most basic level the main barrier is simple: reducing emissions will cost a lot of money, could have a devastating effect on Canadians’ standard of living, and will produce no detectible benefit in the foreseeable future.
When the price of energy inevitably starts to rise beyond affordable levels, as has already happened in jurisdictions that are farther down the green-energy road, Canadians will start to hurt financially and their lifestyles will begin to suffer. The pain will only accelerate. Taxes will rise to cover the increasing cost of energy for hospitals, schools, city halls, and other public-sector buildings. The cost of food will rise as described above. And attempts to electrify the economy will lead to huge increases in the need for and cost of electricity infrastructure (in some parts of the country more than others).
Many of the leisure activities that Canadians enjoy today could come to an end, since the energy needed will become more expensive and, on top of that, families will have to devote ever-increasing shares of their budgets to the rising cost of almost everything. Camping, for example, is at risk because EVs with sufficient range and trailer-towing capacity will be very expensive, propane for heating and cooking will be expensive and perhaps even illegal, and the cost of building electric charging stations in private, provincial, and national campgrounds will be well beyond our financial reach. (The necessary infrastructure additions would likely be opposed by many environmentalists anyway.) Kids’ sports could also fall victim to eco-zealotry, and it may be only a matter of time before eco-activists turn their sights on the air travel associated with professional sports. Some of the more radical environmentalists have even expressed support for “climate lockdowns” that would make the COVID lockdowns seem like a Sunday picnic, and for the elimination of democracy on the grounds that totalitarian control is necessary to save the world [23].
Response to Question 3
What broader economic, technological, or social challenges and opportunities do you foresee resulting from efforts to reduce emissions in these sectors? For example, opportunities associated with economic diversification across sectors. Do you have suggestions on how to address these challenges and opportunities?
As outlined above, the economic challenges are staggering. Canadians will be forced to write off many billions of dollars’ worth of perfectly functional assets and spend many more billions of dollars to replace them with assets that are often far less fit for purpose. As part of doing so, we will unleash an assault on our environment. Per unit of energy produced, wind generators take some ten times as much raw material as fossil fuel generators. That means, among other things, that we will need a massive worldwide expansion in mining operations. Solar panels contain toxic materials that today are uneconomic to recycle, so we will either let end-of-life panels pollute our world or we will cover the cost of recycling through some type of tax, driving Canadians’ energy bills higher still. (As I noted above, the claims by proponents that wind and solar generation are cheaper than fossil-fueled generation is easily shown to be false when we include the cost of turning them into reliable sources of electricity.)
Huge tracts of land will be gobbled up by wind generators and solar panels. To give an idea of the scale, the Blackspring Ridge wind farm in southern Alberta uses 4200 times as much land per megawatt-hour of electricity produced than a combined-cycle natural gas plant. By simple extension, we find that meeting the energy needs of North America with wind generation alone would mean covering every city block, every lake, every stream, every mountain-top, and ever forest over three quarters of the contiguous United States with wind turbines [24]. Solar generation is also a land hog. And since the best wind and solar resources are often located far from major load centres, massive investments in transmission wires will be needed. Since wind generators produce only ~40% of their maximum outputs on average, while solar generators produce only ~20%, those transmission facilities will be especially expensive on a dollars-per-megawatt-hour basis.
The probability that millions of Canadians will be pushed into energy poverty and that businesses that are able to do so will relocate to countries that do not implement Canada’s bleeding-edge energy policies is high. There is still some hope for Canada, but only if the leaders of the western democracies (including Canada’s Prime Minister) stop trying to one-up each others’ climate pledges, eco-zealots stop their scare tactics, sanctimonious lectures, and calls to blow up pipelines, and engineers and economists are allowed to help devise rational, achievable plans for emissions reduction that don’t force us to destroy much of what makes Canada among the very best countries in the world in which to live. In particular, unless the federal government allows the O&G industry to thrive and innovate, we are doomed to fail. And if its bashing of Alberta continues, Canada could cease to exist as a nation.
Another societal challenge is that the federal government’s fixation on eliminating fossil fuels will hurt far more than just our energy systems. Walk through a hospital, a dentist’s office, a grocery store, or even your own home, and try to imagine them with no plastics. Many EV components, including tires, interior parts, and insulation for electrical wiring, are derived from fossil fuels. Among tens of thousands of other products, warm synthetic-fiber clothes, medicines, tooth brushes, sterile food packages, cooking utensils, building materials, appliance components, dog toys, and cell-phone cases are also petroleum-based. The modern references to plastics as “toxic,” sometimes accompanied by staged videos of plastic debris and dead animals, are yet more elements of the attack on the O&G industry and other examples of reprehensible scare-mongering. As Patrick Moore explains, marine plastics actually provide benefits and are no more toxic than driftwood, which is not toxic at all [25].
The idea of eliminating fossil fuels is also dangerous from a strategic and geopolitical perspective. Russia has eyes on Ukraine and perhaps Canada’s Arctic islands, and China wants Taiwan. A fossil-fueled military will obliterate an “electric” army in short order. In addition, China and other not-necessarily-friendly countries now control a large share of many of the raw materials that are critical to wind generators and solar panels. I am vehemently opposed to handing the keys to my children’s future to foreign entities.
Regarding economic diversification through renewable energy, the experiences in many jurisdictions (including Ontario and Spain) have shown that idea to be a pipe dream. Canada has no particular competitive advantage over other countries in renewable energy systems and it does not control many of the necessary raw materials. Today, the main beneficiary from Canada’s push for renewable energy would likely be China.
Response to Question 4
Looking beyond 2030, what enabling measures, strategies or technological pathways do you think the Government of Canada should put in place now to ensure that Canada is on track to net-zero emissions by 2050?
In my view, the cost of net zero in Canada will outweigh the benefits by several orders of magnitude. That said, if the Government of Canada is going to damn the torpedoes and head full steam down this path, then the first thing it should do is abandon the irrelevant, draconian, and futile CO₂ reduction targets for any year prior to 2050 (or even better, 2070). There are at least three reasons for this. First, as already noted, the interim targets are futile because Canada’s percentage contribution to CO₂ emission is small and getting smaller. Second, 30 years from now we should have a better understanding of CO₂’s role in the climate, and we might decide that there are far more beneficial ways to spend money than on CO₂ reduction. (I and Bjorn Lomborg believe we already know that CO₂ reduction is the wrong approach [26].) Third, it would be better for the government to fund a few new-technology demonstration projects to ensure their technical and commercial viability than to force their premature adoption on an economy-wide basis.
Another thing the government should do is end all subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles. If they are truly more economic than their fossil-fueled counterparts, as proponents claim, market forces and consumer choice will lead to their adoption. Finally, the government should make an unequivocal commitment to never take away our rights and freedoms in the name of “preventing” climate change. Climate change is neither an immediate threat nor an existential one.
Response to Question 5
What broader economic, technological, or social issues to you foresee as a result of the transition to a net-zero economy in Canada? Do you have suggestions on how to address these issues?
There is nothing wrong with wanting cleaner and more sustainable energy systems. However, no country on Earth can less afford to gamble with its energy future than Canada. Forcing Canadians to write off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of today’s affordable, reliable energy systems and to use new systems that are more expensive and less reliable, that are likely to kill Canadian jobs, that are not better for the environment overall, and that will produce no discernible climate benefits anyway is nothing short of insane. Reiterating Patrick Moore’s words, “The push to ‘phase out all fossil fuel consumption in 30 years’ is certainly the biggest threat to civilization in the world today.”
End Notes
All hyperlinks were valid as of January 26, 2022.
1 Patrick Moore (2021): Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. Comox, BC: Ecosense Environmental, page 9.
2 Climate change: India pledges net-zero by 2070 but remains mum on coal (msn.com), November 1, 2020.
3 See the HADCRUT5 Global (NH+SH)/2 Monthly temperature data set at Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets. The mean global temperature anomaly and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals, all in ℃, were: −0.42 (−0.59,−0.25) in 1850; −0.23 (−0.37,−0.10) in 1900; 0.93 (0.90,0.96) in 2016; and 0.76 (0.73,0.80) in 2021.
4 See, for example, Figures 14, 25, 30, and 41 if Moore’s Fake Invisible Catastrophes.
5 The word “emergency” appears four times in the 3949-page AR6 Working Group I Full Report (IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf), three times in the list of references and once in the report’s discussion of the media’s role in public perceptions of climate issues. On page 1-35 it states:
Also, some media outlets have recently adopted and promoted terms and phrases stronger than the more neutral ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, including ‘climate crisis’, ‘global heating’, and ‘climate emergency’. Google searches on those terms, and on ‘climate action,’ increased 20-fold in 2019, when large social movements such as the School Strikes for Climate gained worldwide attention. We thus assess that specific characteristics of media coverage play a major role in climate understanding and perception (high confidence), including how IPCC assessments are received by the general public.
6 U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare | Investor’s Business Daily (investors.com), February 10, 2015.
7 IPCC: ‘Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth’ | National Review, November 18, 2010, quoting from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 14, 2010.
8 Lomborg, B. (2020): False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition.
9 Between 2000 and 2018, Canada’s energy industry paid over $672 billion in fees, royalties, and federal, provincial, and local taxes. The O&G sector alone paid $493 billion, more than the next two top industries—real estate and construction—combined. During the 2016 downturn, the O&G industry’s share of Canada’s GDP was twice that of the automotive industry and four times that of the aerospace industry (75 facts about Canadian oil and gas: A reference guide – Canadian Energy Centre). In 2018, there were 202 000 direct O&G jobs and 338 000 indirect jobs (Fueling Canada’s economy: How Canada’s oil and gas industry compares to other major sectors – Canadian Energy Centre). The values of Canada’s top six exports in 2020, in billions of US dollars, were: oil and gas (69.1); vehicles (46.5); machinery and computers (28.9); gems and precious metals (23.0); wood (13.5); and plastics (12.4) (Canada’s Top 10 Exports 2020 (worldstopexports.com)).
10 Steven Koonin, the former undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, states that “there’s a lot to fret about” regarding climate models, and he points out that “It’s uncommon for the popular media to discuss how problematic our climate models are.” He also suggests that a statement like this should, but likely never will, appear in a UN assessment report:
The uncertainties in modeling of both climate change and the consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions make it impossible today to provide reliable, quantitative statements about relative risks and consequences and benefits of rising greenhouse gases to the Earth system as a whole, let alone to specific regions of the planet.
Koonin, Steven (2021). Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Kindle Edition, pp. 95-96. See also the next endnote.
11 One metric used to compare computer models of the climate is the equilibrium climate sensitivity. ECS is a measure of how much global temperatures will rise in response to increasing levels of CO₂. Astonishingly, the latest generation of models, called CMIP6, differ by a whopping 300% in their ECS estimates, from a low of 1.8 ℃ for each doubling of CO₂ in the Russian INM-CM4-8 model to a high of 5.6 ℃ in the Canadian CanESM5 model. (See the chart titled Climate sensitivity in CMIP6 models in CMIP6: the next generation of climate models explained – Carbon Brief.) The Russian model’s results are the closest to the best observational estimates of ECS. Imagine the Canada Revenue Agency having a choice of computer models to calculate your income tax, with the best (for you) deducting 30% and the worst deducting three times that.
12 Moore (Endnote 1), p. 36.
13 Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, April 26, 2016.
14 Crop Yields – Our World in Data
15 Greenhouse Carbon Dioxide Supplementation | Oklahoma State University (okstate.edu), March 2017.
16 Moore (Endnote 1) writes, at p. 39:
To conclude this section on the history of carbon dioxide, there is one question I have never heard an answer for. If CO₂ was at 4,000 ppm at one time and 2,000 ppm at another time and still 1,000 ppm at another time and then during the Pleistocene rose and fell from about 190 ppm to 280 ppm numerous times, why is 280 ppm, the “pre-industrial” level, considered some kind of benchmark level carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?” Life on Earth worked just fine at all those other levels, which are clearly much higher.
17 Carbon Dioxide (usda.gov) and CARBON DIOXIDE | Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha.gov)
18 The-True-Cost-of-Wind-and-Solar-in-Alberta-FINAL-Ap-25-2021.pdf (friendsofscience.org)
20 In A Disrupted Historical Fire Regime in Central British Columbia, Brookes et al. from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry studied historical fire frequency, severity, and spatial patterns in a dry Douglas-fir forest and found that fires burned at a range of frequencies and severities. They write:
The 23 fires between 1619 and 1943 burned at intervals of 10–30 years, primarily at low- to moderate-severity that scarred trees but generated few cohorts. In contrast, current fire-free intervals of 70–180 years exceed historical maximum intervals. Of the six widespread fires from 1790 to 1905, the 1863 fire affected 86% of plots and was moderate in severity with patches of higher severity that generated cohorts at fine scales only. … The post-1863 cohorts persisted due to disruption of the fire regime in the twentieth century when land-use shifted from Indigenous fire stewardship and early European settler fires to fire exclusion and suppression. In the absence of low- to moderate-severity fires, contemporary forests are dense with closed canopies that are vulnerable to high-severity fire.
(A cohort is a group of trees starting as a result of the same disturbance.) A virtually identical assessment for the United States can be found in Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests of the United States (fs.fed.us). Stated succinctly, the main cause of large fires is human suppression of smaller ones.
21 Pielke, Jr., R. (2014): The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.
22 Morano, M. (2018). The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing.
23 Cambridge University is Pushing for Tyranny in the Name of Climate Change – Watts Up With That?, January 6, 2022.
24 In-the-Dark-on-Renewables-FINAL-Nov-18-2018.pdf (friendsofscience.org)
25 Moore (Endnote 1, supra), Chapter Six.
26 Lomborg, B. (2010): Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf. (Kindle Edition) In the Introduction he states:
The argument in this book is simple. (1) Global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century. (2) Statements about the strong, ominous, and immediate consequences of global warming are often wildly exaggerated, and this is unlikely to result in good policy. (3) we need simpler, smarter, and more efficient solutions for global warming rather than excessive if well intentioned efforts. Large and very expensive CO₂ cuts made now will have only a rather small and insignificant impact far into the future. (4) Many other issues are much more important than global warming. We need to get our perspective back. There are many more pressing problems in the world, such as hunger, poverty, and disease. By addressing them, we can help more people, at lower cost, with a much higher chance of success than by pursuing drastic climate policies at a cost of trillions of dollars.While I disagree with Lomborg on the magnitude of human influence on the climate, I wholeheartedly support his approach—because it works regardless of the proportion of climate change that is caused by humans. (Humans influence climate, but hundreds of millions of years of natural climate change did not come to a screeching halt when we started burning fossil fuels.)
Response to Government of Canada Survey on Net Zero (Updated): January 2022 0Page 1
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