SHEILA GUNN REID ｜ Ottawa's ‘climate emergency’ is a cautionary tale
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Summary
Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada joins me to talk about a new report from the City of Ottawa regarding the extreme cost of a climate emergency declared by the city council. We also talk about the impact of the blizzard that hit the Canadian capital this week.
Transcript
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Oh hey Rebels, I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my
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weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show. However, and I say this every week, this is the internet so
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you can listen or watch whenever is convenient for you. That's the beauty of not being tied to
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terrestrial TV and or radio. Now tonight my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate
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Science Coalition Canada and he's talking about the new report that he just authored
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regarding the extreme cost of the climate emergency according to the city council
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in Ottawa. It will cost Ottawa taxpayers close to 60 billion with a B dollars to pursue these goals.
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Are climate emergency declarations really non-binding? What do you think? I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed
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and you're watching The Gunn Show. The city of Calgary just declared a climate emergency
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and I don't think it's going to amount to just pointless virtue signaling because it never does.
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The city of Ottawa is looking to spend nearly 60 billion dollars over the next 30 years to take
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action on their climate emergency declaration. In the city of roughly 1 million not only will the
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financial burden be enormous for every man woman and child but so will the practical burden. Solar
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panels everywhere you look, electric buses that don't work in snowstorms and towering wind turbines
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everywhere producing infrasound to drive you insane. My friend Tom Harris from the International
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Climate Science Coalition has run the numbers in his new report about what the city of Ottawa's
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climate plan really means for the long-suffering residents of that city. And he joins me tonight
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to share his findings but also to warn us because this climate plan followed directly from a climate
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emergency declaration and those things are happening in otherwise sensible cities all across the country.
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So joining me now from his home in Ottawa, I think snowy Ottawa by the way,
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is my friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada. Tom, first of all,
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I heard that climate change has struck Ottawa much the same as it has struck northern Alberta this
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week. Are you snowed in? Oh, we just finally took at least 24 hours to clear our road and we are not
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a minor road. I mean, we're kind of an intermediate road and yet it took them over 24 hours. I think
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that might be a better use for Ottawa's money than their $60 billion climate plan. But you know,
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Sheila, you'd laugh because a few years ago there were a few environmental groups and they brought in,
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world-class skiers to the Museum of Aviation and Space here in Ottawa and they were moaning about
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the lack of snow and they were saying how we're going to see a snow-free winter in Ottawa pretty
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soon and you know, this was just a disaster. So I went to the microphone and I said, well, you know,
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the snow cover in Ottawa has actually been, actually North America as a whole, has been increasing
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gradually for decades and they were furious with me. One woman in the audience, she stood up and she
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shook her fist and she said, go home. I said, well, check the data yourself. I mean, the likelihood that
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we're not going to have snow is just about zero. And I understand it would be a horrible thing for
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skiers to lose all their snow, but it's not happening. Oh man, they, they were just furious.
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Yeah. Don't threaten me with a good time. Less snow. Give me a break. Or real data. Yeah. Climate
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change has kept my children home from school two days this week because the school buses aren't
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running because we've had freezing rain and then the temperature plummeted 35 degrees and then a
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blizzard with zero visibility blew in. So, you know, they keep promising me climate change, but maybe
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the carbon tax is working. It's just working a lot faster. That's right. Well, you know, Ottawa is
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the seventh coldest capital city in the world. And so I had in my original article that was just
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published, you know, it'll be published Wednesday morning at World Commerce Review. I had that it
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didn't seem to cross the city councilor's eyes that a little bit of warming might not be too
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disappointing for most Ottawa's. Well, my advisory team said, oh no, you're being too sarcastic.
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But I mean, it's true. A little warming isn't going to hurt Ottawa. And you know, the funny thing is
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they show in their master plan, their climate change master plan, they show that the average
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temperature in the summer is rising. But what they don't tell you is that the maximum temperature is
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not rising. It's just that the temperature at night is not quite so cool. So you end up with a
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higher average. So I say, well, so what? And you know, Sheila, that's, that's the thing that we're
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just about to do is we're releasing a report on the city of Ottawa's climate change plans. They call it
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their climate change master plan, you know, which is funny, because they actually released in 2019,
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a declaration of climate emergency. Oh, Calgary just did one. Yeah, I heard that. It's insane.
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I mean, you know, we're talking about global temperatures going up 1.2 degrees in since 1880.
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I mean, it's almost nothing. And it's a good thing, because we were in the middle of the Little Ice
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Age, or at least ending the Little Ice Age around 1880. But there were protesters outside,
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and they were yelling and screaming, you know, climate emergency, end of the world.
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So the city just buckled, and they passed this climate emergency. And like the city of Calgary,
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I'm sure a lot of the people that work on the council probably think that there will be no
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consequences. Well, there were in the case of Ottawa. And that's why the city of Ottawa is a
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cautionary tale for governments around the world. In fact, that is the name, that is the title of our new
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report, looking at the infeasibility of the plan, and also the negative repercussions. And by far,
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the biggest negative repercussion, I would say, is that because of very flimsy wind and solar power,
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which is going to become Ottawa's primary energy source, we're going to see major blackouts in the
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middle of the winter, you know, minus 30, and you get a blackout, you'll have a lot of people die.
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A lot of people don't realize it. But in Texas, you know, it was only a little below freezing
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when they lost their power, and they lost it because the wind died just before the storm hit.
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A lot of media will tell you, oh, no, it's because the fossil fuels failed. Well, the reason they
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failed is because not only did they have to compensate for the extreme cold by Texas standards,
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but they had to compensate for 58% of all the electricity, because a little before the storm
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hit, 58% of their electricity was coming from wind and solar power. But the wind died, the solar panels
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got covered with snow. And so boom, they lost 58% of the whole state's power. So the natural gas,
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of course, had to ramp up quickly. They compensated to some extent. But then when it got really cold,
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too, they just simply couldn't keep up. And so believe it or not, people don't know this, because
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of course, media won't tell you, since it would make wind power look bad. 700 people died. 700.
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Okay, and this is in a state where minus two is considered very cold. I think if it happened in
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Ottawa, you'd see thousands of people die. And they came within just a few minutes of their whole
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electricity system completely crashing. So that's a cautionary tale, too. And people should take that
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a lot more seriously, because Texas is not cold by your standards. It's not cold by Ottawa standards.
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Imagine what would happen if suddenly, bam, our electricity system collapsed and didn't come back
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for weeks. I mean, we would see the whole city would be completely ruined. And you know, the funny
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thing is, Sheila, we would also see pollution skyrocket. Because you know, what has actually
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gone through the roof and sales over the last few years? Wood burning fireplaces? Oh, yeah, I'm sure.
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That too. But home generators. Yeah, if you actually look at the statistics for the leading home
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generator, producer, it's it runs with different fossil fuels, of course, it produces electricity,
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so that when you have a blackout, you don't have your furnace conk out or whatever. Anyway,
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their sales have gone through the roof. And an interesting article by Robert Bryce in the Wall
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Street Journal said this is pretty good evidence that the system is becoming very unstable. And people
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don't trust it. You know, their stock prices have gone zoom. So yeah, there are some advantages if
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you're a wind and solar power manufacturer, or if you make home generators. But that would,
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of course, cause a lot more pollution around the city of Ottawa.
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You know, I'm glad that you called it a cautionary tale. Because, you know, especially with Calgary
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and their brand new mayor, making this climate emergency declaration as Alberta experienced almost
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four weeks of an incredible deep freeze. By any measure, there are some really huge price tags
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attached to these virtue signaling initiatives. It may seem just like virtue signaling. But this
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really costs the residents of these cities, a lot of money, besides making all those things that you
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rely on, unreliable. For example, you just lived through a major snowstorm. How do you think electric
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Well, imagine electric snow plows. I mean, when you're ramming through like four feet of snow or
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something, you don't want a little flimsy electric battery powering you. You know, that's another
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element of Ottawa's plan, which is completely insane, and also very dangerous. The fact is,
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they want to electrify our complete transportation infrastructure, not just the buses, not just the
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snow plows, not just all the city equipment, but they want everybody in the city to drive electric
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cars. And yet, electric cars are highly unreliable. Just take a step back. If we look at buses, for
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example, in Berlin, Germany, just last winter, they had all sorts, you know, something like two dozen
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buses break down in the middle of their routes, because they only get about half the range when it's
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that cold. Minus six for them is very cold. I'm sure for us, yeah, that's right. So they're finding
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a lot of them simply break down. And so Ottawa would experience that. We'd also experience, of course,
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huge amounts of time to charge them up. And that actually is interesting, because one of our advisors,
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Brian Leyland, who's a consulting engineer from New Zealand, he says, look, he says, look, the average car
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run by gasoline goes into a service station, and in five minutes, it fills up and it's gone.
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If you're trying to fill a electric car, you know, charge it up, it's going to take you anywhere from
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half an hour to an hour. So at least six times longer. So what you're going to need is six times
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more filling stations, because you have to have enough, enough space for them to sit while they're
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being charged. So suddenly a city like Ottawa, which might have, I don't know, 200 gas stations or
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something, you have to multiply that times at least six. So suddenly they're going to be like
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everywhere, you know, so the costs are incredible with respect to that. And, you know, Brian also
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says something really quite interesting. He says, you know, generally speaking, when you move forward
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with new technologies, you're doing it because it's greater convenience, you know, they're more
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efficient, everything else. He said, for example, the Model T, it was a big improvement over the
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horse and buggy. But he says the electric car is a step backwards to a car with a tiny petroleum
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tank, as he calls it. And it takes forever to charge. He says, enormously inconvenient, you don't
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want to break down in the winter, because how quickly would you have battery power, if you're
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actually heating your vehicle with battery power. So all in all, what you're going to see is Ottawa
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citizens being left stranded on street corners at the coldest weather, because the buses will break
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down, and they cost twice as much. And yet they're spending a billion dollars on all these new buses,
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you know, and as we've talked about before, one of the consequences of this is huge increases in the
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cost of living. We were talking earlier, I think in a previous interview about a 40% rise,
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approximately, in property taxes, just to pay for their climate plan. You know, so the other thing
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is, of course, many of the things they're putting up are not particularly safe. If you look at industrial
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wind turbines, just before the interview, we were talking about those turbines that collapsed, or a
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turbine that collapsed in New Brunswick. Now, these are 100 meter tall turbines, okay, they're higher than
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the peace tower. And that's what Ottawa wants to put in, to the tune of 710 industrial wind turbines
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all over the city. Now, in New Brunswick, what happened is a turbine fell down because they were
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faults in the foundation, they were actually design flaws. So the company that built them decided, well,
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we better look at our other 55 turbines, and see if their problems are similar. And they found that of
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the 55 turbines, 50 of them have to be taken down. And the cost is unbelievable. 75 to 100 million
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dollars is the cost to take down these turbines and fix the foundations. And it's going to take
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them two years. All to ratepayers too, by the way, all this, the company does not eat this cost,
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it gets passed along to the ratepayer. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, just recently in near
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Sault Ste. Marie in September, one of the turbines completely collapsed and threw blades all over the
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place. You know, in Ontario, you're allowed to have a turbine, I think it's a half a kilometer,
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or it's less than a kilometer anyways, from nearby homes. In other places in the world where they have
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had experience with turbine fires, because, you know, you get a fire 60 stories up, you don't put it
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out easily. And of course, with some of the materials like lithium and whatever burning in the
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green technology, you can't even put them out. You know, it's interesting, the fire chief in Austin,
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Texas, where they've had, you know, various issues like this, he says that the amount of water required
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to cool, you can't actually put out a lithium battery fire in an electric vehicle. It's easily
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10 times more than the amount of water required in the case of a normal gasoline-powered car.
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And, and you can't put them out. I mean, they just burn until they just burn themselves out.
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And so in places like Germany, they've actually banned parking electric vehicles in underground
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parking lots or indoor parking lots. So it's not safe. It doesn't work very well. It costs a fortune.
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You know, let's talk about, you touched on the increase to property taxes to pursue what the
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city of Ottawa wants to do. You guys have broken down the numbers in your study here. And it's
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frightening. How many people are in the city of Ottawa?
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Well, there's a million. And so when you end up with almost a $60 billion plan.
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Hang on, let's stop right there. $60 billion to pursue the climate plans in one city, Ottawa,
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between now and 2050. Please tell us what this means to the individual taxpayer.
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Well, that works out to $60,000 for every man, woman and child in Ottawa. And Bob Lyman,
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our economics advisor, he wrote part of the report, of course, that we put out actually
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Wednesday morning, which will be this morning as a result of our broadcasting the next day.
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And here are a couple of quotes. He said, the plan includes suggestions for several additional
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taxes and fees that could be imposed on city residents, the largest of which are road tolls,
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$1.6 billion on road tolls, congestion charges, $388 million, development charges, $234 million,
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road user fees, $188 million, and land transfer tax increase, $130 million.
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And he concludes this part of the report. I'm sure this was tongue in cheek. He says,
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no doubt the imposition of such charges will create some controversy.
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I love the way Bob sort of understates things. It's just beautiful. Because I mean, this is going
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to make Ottawa, you know, they say, oh, we want a robust, you know, advanced, clean city. It's going
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to make us highly flimsy with a very pathetic, weak electrical grid and transportation system.
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It's going to make us more polluted. It's going to make us bankrupt. I mean, it would simply ruin the
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city. And you know, you'd laugh one of our donors from British Columbia, I shared our report with
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them just confidentially ahead of time. And he said, oh, I really hope Ottawa does do this.
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Because then you'd have lots of people dying in a total catastrophe. And then they won't do that here.
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Yeah, yeah, it's just too bad. It would take absolute carnage in the capital city for the rest
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of the country to learn its lesson. But sometimes people do need to learn things the hard way.
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And some of these ideas that you have noted in your report, sound like they are just cooked up in a
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fifth grade classroom, where they're like, you know what we need solar panels, where are we going
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to put acres of solar panels, actually 36 square kilometers, as you've examined 36 square kilometers,
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we're just going to put them on the roof. No big deal, it'll be fine.
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And you know, the percent increase over the amount they have now is hundreds of thousands of percent,
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And where do you think you're going to put them all? I mean, you know, the Ontario provincial or
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what are they professional associations, they talk about the fact that we don't have adequate
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recycling capability, even for the amount of green energy that we have right now. I mean,
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if you take you take solar panels, and you just dump them in landfills,
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then what happens is they break down with the weather, and they leach lead and all kinds of
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toxic substances into the soil. So of course, we ship them to China where they throw them in the
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ground. And now they can leak on your house, though. Now, just leak on the roof of your house and just
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leach down into your house and make it a toxic waste site.
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Well, you know, Alan McRae in, I think, in Calgary, he's done all kinds of very interesting
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calculations on this whole issue. And he, I think it was him who actually calculated that
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the amount of energy it actually takes to make a solar panel, to, you know, ship it to its location,
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to install it, to maintain it, and eventually to dispose of it is more than the amount of energy
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that you get from these things. And so, in fact, what they are called is non-negative on net energy.
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Okay, so if you have a country which brings in more and more and more of these kinds of energy
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sources, you're going to have to import more and more electricity, okay, or import more and more
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energy or get energy from other sources to compensate for these things. You know, that's
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something a lot of people don't realize is that the amount of energy that they put out is very,
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very variable as well. I mean, obviously, and if you look at the Ontario statistics for the amount
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of energy they expect to get from wind and solar, you can see that the capacity factor or the fraction
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of the amount of energy that you get versus what you think you're going to get. In the wintertime,
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it goes to zero for solar. And I wonder why? Well, maybe it's because they're covered with snow.
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Yeah, that's right. That wouldn't help either. But wind is the opposite, actually. You get most of
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your wind in the winter. And then in the summer, it goes down to something like 13%. So they're very,
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very poor energy sources. And even environmentalists like Robert Kennedy Jr. say that if you build wind
00:22:10.520
power, you're building natural gas, because you need to have something that can ramp up and down
00:22:15.780
quickly to compensate for when the wind dies. Okay, that nuclear power doesn't do that. Hydro doesn't
00:22:21.660
do that. You really need natural gas because it reacts quickly. You can get the turbines to generate
00:22:26.680
power suddenly, you know, when you need it. And so, you know, I asked Ronald Stein, who's a
00:22:32.500
California-based electric vehicle expert. He's an engineer. He was on our radio show on America Out
00:22:38.460
Loud. And I asked him, I said, when you count the source of the electricity and how you have to make
00:22:44.400
the batteries and largely in China, you know, with materials mined by slave labor in the Congo,
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I mean, when you actually take that, if you ignore how it's made, and you don't care about human rights
00:22:55.120
or environment, do you actually save in greenhouse gases when you drive an electric vehicle? And he
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said, no, he said, you're just moving it to another location. Because if you're getting your power from
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a source that, well, natural gas, for example, that produces greenhouse gases, and if you're making it
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and processing it and highly energetic required materials, okay, to make these things takes a lot
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more energy than just to make a normal car, then he says you don't save in greenhouse gas emissions
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anyways. Now, whether it's worth reducing greenhouse gases, I mean, that's another topic. But if you
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think it is, and I say this to the city of Ottawa, if you're trying to reduce greenhouse gases, don't
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bring in electric vehicles, you know, don't bring in high, you know, wind turbines and solar panels,
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that's going to increase real pollution. It's going to kill, of course, millions of birds and bats.
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That sounds very environmentally friendly to me. Yeah, you know, Sheila, one of the things that's
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very weird is they keep talking about wind power as being environmentally friendly. Well, you should
00:23:59.180
go to Michael Moore's video. And you know, he's a well known left winger. So I mean, you would think
00:24:05.560
that he's not going to attack something that is a favorite of the left. But he shows in his movie
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Planet of the Humans, if people do a search on Planet of the Humans. And there's a two minute clip in
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there that shows how wind and solar power machines are made. And they're highly toxic. In fact,
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they're highly polluting. I would say that per megawatt, they're the most polluting energy sources
00:24:27.360
on the planet. And they kill huge numbers of wildlife, and in particular, the bats that are
00:24:33.880
killed by wind turbines. You see, when a large wind turbine blade crosses the sky, right behind it is a
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low pressure zone. And that low pressure zone is low enough that it actually bursts the lungs
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of bats. And so the bats die in their own blood. I have an expert who's a friend who's a, I have a
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friend who's an expert in bats. And he loves bats. He thinks they're the greatest thing on earth. And
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they are. I mean, they eat thousands of mosquitoes every night, every bat. And he says that the wind
00:25:04.900
turbine expansion, and you know, there's, there's a third of a million industrial wind turbines around
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the world. And these are huge, eh? Like 60 stories high. He says it's going to drive some species of bats
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to complete extinction. And as I say, that has a big impact on the mosquito population in the area.
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I'm sure if mosquitoes were voters, they would vote for wind turbines. Get rid of those nasty bats. But birds,
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and of course, some people say, oh, well, you know, there's more birds killed by cats. But cats don't kill
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condors and golden eagles and things like that. You know, the Altamont wind farm in California,
00:25:40.620
it's killed something like 3000 golden eagles since it was commissioned about so three or four
00:25:46.980
decades ago. Thousands of golden eagles. As I say, cats don't kill golden eagles.
00:25:51.960
Cats are part of nature. The cats are doing what cats do. Cats go and eat birds and mice,
00:25:58.000
and all of those sorts of things. They are part of nature, for vines or not.
00:26:04.860
Yeah. So I think what's going to happen is, I mean, I don't think they'll ever fully enable the
00:26:10.220
plan. Because when you start to have massive blackouts, people dying and things like that,
00:26:15.220
the public are going to go up in arms, and they're going to vote out any politician that supported
00:26:19.400
this. The sad thing is, it will take many years to undo the damage. You know, Rod Stein pointed out
00:26:25.820
in our interview on America Out Loud this week, he pointed out that what will happen is that when they
00:26:32.120
close down coal stations, and by the way, there's no reason to close coal stations.
00:26:36.820
I mean, coal stations can be made very, very clean if they use the latest technology.
00:26:41.300
It's a great energy source. And you know, one of the things that people don't realize about coal,
00:26:45.760
same thing with nuclear, is that it actually is a very secure energy source. Because these,
00:26:52.480
the raw materials that are needed to run nuclear stations and coal stations,
00:26:56.020
you can get like a year's supply, pile it up on the property, and you don't have to rely on
00:27:01.580
shipments or gas pipelines or whatever. So I mean, they are a very, very secure energy source. In fact,
00:27:07.780
there's a group in the United States called Secure the Grid. And they promote energy sources that don't
00:27:13.440
require having more pipelines coming in or shipments or whatever else. And the point they're making,
00:27:19.100
of course, is that you have a much more secure grid if you have enough coal on site to last for a
00:27:25.540
year or two, or enough nuclear in the case, well, that might last for 15 years. So if you really
00:27:31.000
want a secure grid, you want to have coal and nuclear part of your grid. One of the things that's
00:27:36.680
really unfortunate is in the City of Ottawa climate change plan, they don't even use the word nuclear
00:27:42.180
once, not even once. You know, they keep talking about reducing greenhouse gases. And their main way
00:27:47.720
of doing that is through these nonsensical wind and solar panels, which, of course, won't do that,
00:27:53.240
because you'll need lots of natural gas to back it up. But they don't talk about nuclear. And what they
00:27:58.160
don't realize is there's a new technology called small nuclear, small modular reactors, SMRs. And these
00:28:05.680
are being built around the world. And they can power a city like Ottawa, for example, with six small
00:28:11.040
modular reactors, you know, that would be sort of typical for a city. And they're very safe, you know, you can
00:28:16.820
put them, you don't need a lot of space for them. That's the other thing, of course, that people don't
00:28:20.980
realize, is that wind turbines have to be spaced apart far enough, that the second wind turbine has
00:28:27.420
some wind to actually generate it. Because you're taking energy out of the wind. I mean, that's how
00:28:33.040
the wind turbine works. And so if you put another one too close behind it, the wind is very weak. And so
00:28:38.580
you wouldn't get much power. So you need to have them spaced apart a certain amount. And as I said,
00:28:43.540
in places like Europe, where they actually have had serious wind turbine problems, you know, in
00:28:48.560
Denmark, you can cross the country by foot, from one side to the other, and never lose sight of an
00:28:55.000
industrial wind turbine. Not once. Okay, I suppose if you suck your head in a hole, you wouldn't see it.
00:29:00.200
But aside from that, you see them everywhere. And I mean that literally. And so they have in Europe,
00:29:07.140
a two kilometer setback in many countries, because they recognize they're they're unsightly. And anybody
00:29:13.100
who lives near them. I mean, we have a whole section in our report on the infrasound, this is low
00:29:19.260
frequency sound, the lump, lump, what that goes through the wall through your body through your
00:29:24.680
skeleton. Yeah. And there are all kinds of reports of people who develop nausea, you know, migraine
00:29:30.680
headaches, constantly feeling sick, panic attacks. And as soon as they move away from the turbine goes
00:29:36.360
away, as soon as they move back, it comes back. And so the negative impact to Ottawa's health,
00:29:42.520
of unreal 710 industrial wind turbines, I don't know where they're going to put them all. I mean, if you do
00:29:48.600
space them apart two kilometers, which they're not currently required to do, would they be able to fit
00:29:54.500
710 of them into the city? I don't know. But the bottom line is talk to somebody like Shelly Correa, for
00:30:00.700
example, from Lincoln County, she moved there because she had a boy who would benefit from a nice tranquil
00:30:07.880
environment. And Lincoln County was like Mayberry, you know, from Andy of Mayberry. I mean, it was a
00:30:13.920
wonderful place to live. And they promised they would not put up any industrial wind turbines. Well,
00:30:19.120
guess what? I think it's a half a kilometer from her house, you know, approximately, they put up a 60
00:30:24.680
story wind turbine. You know, and people who live near these things, they give you firsthand evidence,
00:30:30.080
I'm quoting it in our report, where it's actually horrible for people's local health,
00:30:35.720
okay, for the residents that live nearby. So when you look at the Ottawa plan, from a health
00:30:41.040
perspective, from a pollution perspective, from a safety perspective, from a finance perspective,
00:30:47.240
from and even from a greenhouse gas reduction perspective, or the human rights perspective,
00:30:51.900
as you put, as you mentioned, it 40,000 children working in these dangerous rare earth mineral
00:30:59.920
mines to produce batteries, so that people in Ottawa can pat themselves on the back about how green they
00:31:07.540
are. Well, that's right. In fact, Ron Stein, along with Todd Royal wrote a book called clean energy
00:31:13.720
exploitations, I believe is the title. I'll send you the link and you can put it up. Because it's an
00:31:18.840
amazing book, it goes through where do all these materials come from. And the sad thing is, unlike fossil
00:31:25.080
fuels, which are found throughout the world, and especially in Canada, I mean, it's wonderful,
00:31:29.020
we have so much of it. These sources of energy, these sources of raw materials, the rare earths,
00:31:35.420
the cobalts, the things like that, they're found in countries that have massive human rights abuses,
00:31:40.960
they have virtually no environmental protection. And a great example is cobalt. Cobalt,
00:31:47.440
artesian cobalt comes from the Congo, mostly. Interestingly enough, all the mines are pretty well
00:31:52.360
owned by China. So they ship them to China, where they use extremely good environmental controls to
00:31:57.880
produce their batteries. Not. Anyway, the bottom line is they got 40,000 children working in mines,
00:32:05.400
mining cobalt in the Congo, for example, in addition to what you were saying. And what we have
00:32:11.300
is because the spaces they have to get into to get some of the cobalt is quite small. They use children,
00:32:18.000
and they're working for something like a dollar a day under virtually slave labor conditions.
00:32:23.060
You know, they're breathing in terrible fumes, radioactive dust, everything else. And this is
00:32:29.080
going to make supposedly clean energy. You know, one of the points we make is that if Ottawa went full
00:32:35.140
blast into wind and solar power, as they're saying they will, they would be supporting some of the
00:32:41.080
worst environmental and human rights abuses on the planet. Yeah. Okay. And for nothing,
00:32:47.240
for nothing except virtue signaling, because the fraction of greenhouse gases of the world that
00:32:53.640
Ottawa produces, get this, Canada is 1.6%. Ottawa is less than a hundredth of that. So it's 0.014%.
00:33:05.260
And, you know, I contacted one of our experts in the United States, Pat Michaels, who used to be
00:33:10.200
state climatologist in Virginia. He was saying that, okay, if we use the EPA's model for what
00:33:18.440
temperature change would occur as a result of Ottawa's climate change plan, and if it continued
00:33:24.420
all the way to the year 2100, what he figured was that the temperature change would be about
00:33:30.900
one ten thousandths of a degree. We saved the world, Tom.
00:33:35.740
So if you take that number, and, you know, one of our allies, he actually took that number,
00:33:41.360
and he said, okay, if we want to reduce global temperature by two degrees or whatever,
00:33:47.200
what would it cost? It turns out there isn't enough money in the entire world
00:33:50.680
at that kind of a rate. You know, now, of course, the calculation doesn't really make much sense,
00:33:56.320
because it assumes that we are the master controllers of climate, and all we have to do is
00:34:01.280
spend enough money, and we can pull it down. But I mean, it just shows how ludicrous Ottawa's
00:34:05.620
plan is. I mean, we're spending $60,000 for every man, woman, and child in Ottawa to get
00:34:12.040
one ten thousandths of a degree change, which is at least two or three orders of magnitude lower than
00:34:18.820
anything you could ever measure, let alone feel. And, you know, this brings up a really interesting
00:34:24.320
point. Richard Lindzen was saying that if, in fact, there weren't any meteorologists and
00:34:31.160
climatologists telling people, the temperature change in their lifetime would be so small,
00:34:38.260
They would not even notice. I mean, 1.2 degrees on a global average, which is kind of meaningless,
00:34:43.740
because nobody lives in a globe. We all live in regions. But a 1.2 degree change, first of all,
00:34:50.040
would be beneficial, because we were in the Little Ice Age. But nobody's going to feel that. I mean,
00:34:55.020
in your entire life, climate catastrophe, climate crisis, they keep saying, but nobody can even feel
00:35:01.100
what's happening. You know, in Ottawa, for example, if you look at some stations, they're actually
00:35:06.980
cooling. Like on Hogsback, for example, it's actually gradual decline. And that is indeed what should
00:35:13.660
really concern Ottawa residents. Because as such a cold city, if what some of the solar scientists are
00:35:20.860
saying is true, then we're headed for global cooling. Because by the middle of the century,
00:35:25.840
we're supposed to actually be at a grand solar minimum, when all the different cycles in the sun,
00:35:31.840
they all hit rock bottom at the same time. And the last time this happened, a few hundred years ago,
00:35:37.780
it was so cold that the Thames River in London froze a meter thick, a meter thick. It never freezes,
00:35:45.040
even in the winter now. So, you know, if we're headed back to those conditions, that is far,
00:35:50.860
far more dangerous than a little bit of warming. As we say in our report, 20 times more people around
00:35:56.700
the world die to excessive cold than due to warming. And yet the city of Ottawa says nothing
00:36:03.500
about adapting to cold. They say nothing about adapting to cooling. They're all focused on
00:36:08.900
warming in a cold city. Like it is completely crazy. So, I mean, yes, we should plan for climate
00:36:16.060
change. We should adapt. We should make sure we have lots of robust energy. Because if it cools,
00:36:22.680
that's the big threat. If it cools, cities like Ottawa are going to be creamed. If all they did
00:36:28.140
was prepare for warming and put up the most flimsy and most environmentally damaging energy
00:36:33.520
sources, I mean, we'll be in very hot water because it'll be so cold.
00:36:39.680
You know, it's funny. You mentioned the two timelines are going to converge and someone's
00:36:44.880
going to be right. And someone's going to be really, really wrong. And because it's happening,
00:36:48.740
supposed to happen for both of these around the middle of the century. So Ottawa is supposed to
00:36:54.260
achieve their climate goals by 2050. And we might get mugged by reality by a cooling trend,
00:37:01.340
a solar cooling trend at roughly the same time. So someone's going to be right. Someone's going to be
00:37:05.900
wrong. But in the end, I think we all pay for it. Tom, I hear that your voice is slightly giving
00:37:11.040
way. So I'm going to ask you, where can people find your report, which is very comprehensive and
00:37:18.360
very common sense, but also support some of the other work that you're doing, both at the
00:37:24.820
Climate Science Coalition, but outside of the Climate Science Coalition. And don't forget your
00:37:30.860
podcast, Tom, you're the worst at self-promotion. First of all, the podcast, we have two podcasts
00:37:37.800
that we've pre-recorded, which are going to go up talking specifically about the problems with the
00:37:43.560
Ottawa Climate Change Plan. And that's Exploratory Journeys. And you can go to icsc-canada.com
00:37:49.660
and you click on the resources at the top and you go down, you choose Exploratory Journeys. And you can
00:37:55.340
listen to our two podcasts specifically that'll be uploaded in the next day or two about the Ottawa
00:38:00.320
plan. So our web, our homepage is icsccanada.com. And in fact, it's icsc-canada.com. And you'll see
00:38:10.160
an advertisement for our report in an article that was just published. It'll be Wednesday morning by
00:38:15.940
the time this is aired in World Commerce Review. Now the report itself is 25,000 words. And so not
00:38:22.600
too many people are going to want to read that, but you'll be happy to hear that the World Commerce
00:38:27.200
Review article is only a little over 3,000 words. And that one should be on the web as well. So we'll
00:38:32.520
be advertising all of that on the icsc-canada.com website. And we're pushing hard to get a lot of
00:38:40.360
publicity for this because this is a cautionary tale, not just for Canadian cities, but for cities
00:38:45.640
around the world that are thinking that they can actually yield to environmental activists and get
00:38:52.580
away with it. The fact is they can't because these people will use the climate emergency in Calgary,
00:38:58.280
for example, they'll use it as a lever to force you to try to get a master plan because they'll say,
00:39:05.060
well, if there's an emergency, then you've got to do something. So get to it. And if the city is like
00:39:10.280
in Calgary, like our weaklings in Ottawa, they will develop a multi-billion dollar plan. So you really
00:39:17.240
have to stop it now because the environmentalists will never be pleased. I mean, never. If you achieve
00:39:22.680
one target, they're just going to move the goalposts until you achieve that. And so you got to stand up
00:39:28.260
to them at some point, unless you're prepared to totally ruin your society. So, you know, these
00:39:34.060
politicians who think they're going to get a free ride in Calgary by declaring a climate emergency,
00:39:38.700
oh, and then they've solved it, they can go away. No, they're going to have massive consequences.
00:39:42.940
They have to stand up to the environmentalists now, before you get to the point like Ottawa,
00:39:48.360
where you're absolutely creaming the city with huge expenses. And if they enable these things,
00:39:54.360
a lot of deaths, okay, all for environmental destruction worse than you would have with
00:40:00.060
any fossil fuel plan. So yeah, they have to stand up to this. And if people want to help support us,
00:40:05.100
because this isn't our first report, we're going to put out lots of reports on these kinds of things.
00:40:09.700
They can go to icsc-canada.com, and we'd be very happy to accept their donations.
00:40:17.200
Well, you know, you're one of just a couple of small
00:40:21.220
organizations who are doing this sort of work yourself and Friends of Science and a couple other
00:40:26.940
organizations. That's it. And you're up against the foreign funding on the other side. They,
00:40:33.980
you know, they just keep getting foreign money dumped in so that they have these fossil fuel
00:40:39.060
demarketing campaigns and they are affecting our municipalities and people who say, well,
00:40:43.980
I don't work in oil and gas. It doesn't affect me. I don't care. You pay a carbon tax,
00:40:48.980
you pay municipal taxes, and that's where all these bad ideas manifest for the normal people.
00:40:54.540
So Tom, thanks so much for your hard work on this and making these big complex issues
00:40:59.980
easily digestible for normal lay people and non-scientists, because that's who it affects,
00:41:08.000
Oh, yeah. And when people hear the price tag, they say, what? $60 billion? Like, that's insane.
00:41:13.940
That's like too much for a country, let alone a city.
00:41:16.140
Yeah. If Justin Trudeau had a bad idea that cost $60 billion, we'd all be lighting our hair on fire.
00:41:22.080
But this is just the city of Ottawa. People need to understand that. Tom, I could talk to you all day
00:41:28.220
about how bad the environmentalist movement is, but I know that you're recovering from something.
00:41:33.020
And I want to thank you so much for taking the time, and we'll have you back on again
00:41:36.120
very soon when the second half of this report comes out.
00:41:42.140
You know, the federal politicians told us that the Paris Climate Agreement was non-binding,
00:41:57.680
so we shouldn't have to worry about it. But now they're bringing in federal legislation to make
00:42:01.720
the targets binding. We also saw politicians tell us that the UN Compact on Migration was
00:42:08.200
non-binding. But then we saw the federal government partner with George Soros on immigration policies
00:42:14.340
right after that. When a politician tells you that a climate emergency declaration or any
00:42:20.040
declaration agreement is non-binding, they're lying to you, and you should hold on to your wallet.
00:42:26.520
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see everybody
00:42:30.400
back here in the same time, in the same place next week. And remember, don't let the government