Conservatives must present a real alternative to Trudeau’s ‘carbon’ tax

By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

OTTAWA – OPINION – We are approaching the first anniversary of one of the most irresponsible actions of a Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader in recent memory. As one of his first acts as new CPC leader, Andrew Scheer led Conservative Members of Parliament to vote in support of the June 6, 2017, Liberal government’s motion boosting the Paris Agreement on climate change. Only Ontario MP Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke) had the courage to vote against the motion.

But the Conservatives know that the science behind the climate scare is wrong because various scientists, including myself (Dr. Ball), told them. So, although the government’s ‘carbon’ tax is a huge mistake, and Scheer and the CPC are right to point that out, the Conservatives’ plan to meet the Paris Agreement using instruments other than a ‘carbon’ tax is also misguided.

The farce begins with the fact it is not a ‘carbon’ tax, ‘carbon’ emissions, or ‘carbon’ regulations. What they intend to limit is the carbon dioxide (CO₂) that Canadians produce, believing that this will stop global warming. It will not. There are three issues that must be addressed:

1. Science: CO₂ makes up only 4% of greenhouse gases, and the human portion is 3.4% of that, making it, on average, 0.032% of all atmospheric gases. These numbers are so imprecise that even if the complete Paris treaty was applied, the atmospheric difference would be undetectable. Estimates say that it would reduce the global temperature by 0.048°C by 2100. This assumes that a CO₂ increase in the atmosphere causes a temperature increase. But every record shows the opposite: temperature increases first. The only place where a CO₂ increase causes atmospheric temperatures to rise is in the computer models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is partly why the model predictions (called ‘projections’) are consistently wrong, yet these models are the basis of the Paris Agreement and the Canadian ‘carbon’ tax plan.

2. Economics: President Donald Trump announced that America will withdraw from the Paris Agreement because it is a bad deal for his country. But it is a bad deal for all developed nations, including Canada. While we are supposed to immediately start to decrease production so as to decrease emissions, the developing nations have an opt out clause in the 1992 UN climate treaty that sets the ground rules for Paris. It states “Economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties.” So, they clearly will not restrict development for climate protection purposes. And, under the Paris Agreement, China, still considered a developing nation by the UN even though it is the world’s largest emitter, is allowed to increase its emissions until 2030. Worse, the developed nations are supposed to donate $100 billion a year into the Green Climate Fund, from which developed nations, even China, are entitled to draw.

2. Politics: The entire global warming deception was never about climate. Climate was a convenient global threat that allowed UN planners, particularly Canadian businessman and former UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong, to overcome nation-states by claiming that only a world government could handle the problem. Elaine Dewar, an investigative journalist for the Hamilton Spectator and author of the groundbreaking book, Cloak of Green, spent five days with Strong at the UN and concluded, “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.”

Another of the real objectives of the UN’s climate plans were confirmed in 2015 when Christiana Figueres, then Executive Secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind 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, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Former Canadian Liberal Minister of the Environment, Christine Stewart summed up the situation well, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

We should not let Trudeau, Scheer or any other politicians off the hook, even though they are unintentional victims of the bureaucrats in the deep state, in this case, Environment Canada (EC). After all, with a bit of investigation, anyone can realize the origins of the climate scare: Strong set up the IPCC through the bureaucrats at the World Meteorological Organization, an organization made up of bureaucrats from every UN member nation. He knew that if he controlled the bureaucrats, he controlled the politicians. And a bureaucratic scientist is never going to tell the politician that what they based their careers on is wrong.

Scheer has the opportunity to develop a climate change strategy that gives Canadians a real alternative to the Liberals’ hugely expensive, but useless plans. The CPC plan should be one that focusses on hardening our infrastructure to natural climate variability, particularly cooling which is more likely than warming and is also a much greater threat to Canada. We stand ready to help him in this endeavour.

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Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition.

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