GOOD OLD CARBON
Similarly,
in Heaven and Earth, geologist and University
of Melbourne Earth Sciences professor Ian Plimer points
out that CO2 is a vital chemical compound that every plant
requires to live and grow and to synthesize into life-giving
oxygen. The vendetta against carbon can lead to no good.
Robert Zubrin’s
Merchants of Despair and Michael Shellenberger’s
authoritative Apocalypse Never effectively lay
out the case for environmental CO2 as a crop multiplier
and a benefactor of life and prosperity—a counterintuitive
fact not understood by the myopic catastrophism of the
global warming crowd. “Carbon dioxide from burning
fossil fuels,” writes astrophysicist S. Fred Singer
in his blockbuster Hot Talk, Cold Science, “becomes
a natural resource for humanity rather than an imagined
menace to global climate.” Singer’s examination
of the relevant facts is convincing.
Carbon capture,
carbon offsets and renewable energy subsidies amount to
a fool’s errand. An environmentally-unfriendly,
landscape-defiling, uglifying architecture of wind turbines
and solar panels is not only largely unworkable and egregiously
costly but actually futile. Neither the economy nor the
backup electrical grid can sustain them for any length
of time. The uncomfortable truth is that wind is capricious
and sun prefers the tropics; air and light are non-dispatchable
energy sources. The power-intermittency problem is crucial
and baseload battery storage to solve the deficits is
inordinately complicated, obscenely expensive and far
from currently feasible. The aeolian fantasy persists.
These are
facts that cannot be “fact-checked” or IPCC’d
out of the physical record. Moreover, as Lomborg shows
in The Skeptical Environmentalist, there is no
dependable method of modeling an open system such as the
earth, and there is no climate modeling system that can
yield accurate predictions. The data insistently driving
industrial keto are highly questionable. The advantages
of carbs to the environment are not.
For another
thing, the reduction in the percentage of atmospheric
carbs owing to “Green technology,” carbon
capture and punitive carbon taxes is infinitesimal. One
of the few Canadian dailies that appears to have retained
a measure of editorial independence, the Regina Leader-Post,
reports that Canada’s new climate plan banking on
carbon capture is a pipe dream. The newspaper quotes Julia
Levin, senior program manager at Environmental Defence
and author of the Buyer Beware: Fossil Fuels Subsidies
and Carbon Capture Fairy Tales in Canada Report,
who dismisses Canada’s climate strategy as “not
at all realistic.”
The Leader-Post
continues: “Carbon capture utilization and storage
(CCUS) projects only capture 0.05 per cent of Canada’s
greenhouse gas emissions, according to the new report,
published March 31 by Environmental Defence.” Given
exorbitant technology costs and the meagre emissions reductions
they yield, the scheme is an administrative delusion.
The global record is even worse, amounting to only 0.001
per cent of total emissions. To add injury to injury,
in some cases carbon capture systems emit more carbon
than they capture.
LOTS OF CO2
IN THIS ATMOSPHERE
As for carbon
taxes, they do far more harm than good, being essentially
a form of virtue signaling lavishly emitted by the Canadian
prime minister. Their effect is to diminish productivity,
raise prices, reduce disposable revenue and elevate the
poverty index, all in order to materially change consumption
behavior to medieval levels of scarcity. Carbon taxes
have increased every year since 2019, when the tax was
introduced at $20 per tonne of emissions, and will continue
to rise annually up to $170 per tonne in 2030. Added to
the rising cost of transportation, housing and food due
to inflation, they represent a net loss for most households.
Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is very clear
about the harmful effects of the tax: “When including
the economic impacts as well, most are worse off.”
Carbon pricing especially hurts farmers deep in the pocketbook
owing to the mounting expense of propane, fertilizer and
transport. The fact is that Canada cannot feed itself
without sufficient and high-capacity agriculture and a
solvent farming community to harvest its product and move
it to market, any more than it can heat its homes and
keep a G20 nation running without fossil fuels.
It has been
sensibly argued that a northern country like Canada subject
to long and harsh winters is uninhabitable without ample
and secure supplies of coal, oil and natural gas. As Energy
Policy Analyst David Yager states in From Miracle
to Menace, to believe otherwise “is against
the reality of what is required to live in this large,
cold and dark country for much of the year.” The
trouble is, Yager says, that we Canadians are living in
“a parallel universe where the basic laws of physics,
common sense, reality and even basic honesty no longer
apply... Canada’s self-appointed climate leadership
role,” he concludes, “is a failure.”
There can be no doubt that a viable economy is reliant
on plentiful and readily exploitable energy and agricultural
resources, development and experiment, for both domestic
and export purposes, which we are now sacrificing to climate
folly.
Indeed, the
controversy around fossil fuels is merely academic. Belatedly
realistic countries, despite their infatuation with renewables,
will tap out of this particular bout against carbon. They
may begin to look unfavorably on ESG investment of private
pension funds in underperforming alternative fuels concerns.
Conventional forms of energy, abetted by nuclear power
plants, must necessarily be with us for the foreseeable
future. There is no way around this reality unless we
are willing to crash our economies and opt for endemic
shortages of everyday essentials and a dramatically diminished
lifestyle with little prospect of recovery. Interestingly,
the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicted
in its 2022 Annual Energy Outlook that hydrocarbons “will
increase through 2050 as a result of population and economic
growth.”
A VIRTUE-SIGNALING
LUXURY CANADA CAN NO LONGER AFFORD
Canada, however,
remains oblivious to such findings as it continues to
believe in and advocate for renewables, which is merely
whistling past the oilpatch. Should we improbably win
the war against carbon, we will then have lost everything.
Canada sees itself as the bellwether in an ostensibly
noble fight that, in reality, garners nothing but parliamentary
plaudits and massive corporate profit. As Rupert Darwall
reveals in his must-read Green Tyranny, it is not Big
Oil that is the villain of the piece; it is Big Green.
Everyone else will suffer. The writing is on the factory
gate. Energy costs, stemming from both foreign sanctions
and a modicum of domestic production, are sending retail
prices through the roof.
Any way one
looks at it, the climatological keto diet is a prohibitive
farce. Taking carbon out of the planetary ecology is a
very bad idea to begin with. If the project is ever carried
out to putative net-zero, the dieter will sicken and find
himself on intimate terms with sparsity. As Ian Plimer
argues with abundant evidence in his recent Green
Murder, “It has never been shown that human
emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming”—which,
as noted, is by no means a catastrophe but a benefit.
We should take heed. Carbon deficiency means less fecundity,
less productivity and less prosperity. It will likely
mean famine in many parts of the world.
Canada had
better wake up asap. As a country facing critical reductions
all across the board—energy extraction, investment,
jobs, household income, farming, manufacturing, GDP to
debt ratio—we don’t need our clamorous Green
saviors, Woke investors, faux-ethical functionaries, and
ideological champions. They are completely dispensable.
But we do need our carbs, which are not.
