Will GLOBAL carbon tax law emerge from Poland climate change conference？ (Guest： Michelle Stirling)
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Summary
In this episode, Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science joins me to talk about her predictions for the United Nation's COP21 climate change conference in Katowice, Poland this week, and what she thinks will come out of it.
Transcript
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I'm here all this week in Katowice, Poland, covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
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But before I left, I had you, our viewers, in mind.
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I pre-recorded a show with my friend, Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
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And as you know, Michelle Sterling is a United Nations watcher.
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It's her job, it's her mission to cover the United Nations Climate Change Policies.
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She knows where they come from and where they're going.
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And tonight on the show, she and I talk about her predictions for this United Nations Climate
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Change Conference and what she thinks will come out of all of this.
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So joining me now is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
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And she's our UN watcher about all things climate change.
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And since by the time this goes to air, I will already be in Poland, exposing the hypocrisy
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that takes place at these UN climate change conferences, I thought it would be fun to have
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Michelle on to talk about some of our predictions for Poland and to see if any of them come true.
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Now, there's a lot of talk about how these, and it has come up recently around the UN Compact
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for Migration, but a lot of the talk is how these UN compacts or PACs like the Paris Accord
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So it really doesn't make a difference if we sign on to them.
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Well, I would argue, then why sign on to them at all?
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But it seems as though that once we do sign on to these allegedly non-binding agreements,
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they do become the basis for Canadian policy and Canadian law.
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And I think Robert Lyman has noted that in a number of his pieces that we have on our YouTube
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channel, where by instituting some kind of an assumed democratic agreement about things.
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And remember, most of the countries in the world are not democracies, then people move
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forward and these incremental movements keep moving up the scale.
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And the environmental groups especially have found that, you know, encouraging the government
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to set certain policies means that next time they can come back and, as Robert Lyman says,
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beat them about the head with a two-by-four because they never met that and that they must do more.
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And I've seen recently that the minister, McKenna, is planning on going there and even creating
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Now, the present targets that we have for GHG reduction, greenhouse gas reduction, are impossible
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to meet without totally decimating the economy of Canada.
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There's no magic, clean growth solution around the corner, no matter what people think or pray
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So, you know, it is true that you sign on to something and then people start moving goalposts
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Now, Catherine McKenna is going to this, the Climate Change Conference.
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In fact, she's already there while we are recording this.
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You mentioned that you think that she's going to be proposing even higher targets for Canada.
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Canada, doesn't that seem a little bit crazy considering there are legal challenges launched
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by Canadian provinces against this carbon tax that she hasn't even imposed yet?
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It's not even imposed on us and she's already raising it.
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I mean, you have to realize one of our concerns is that there are factions within the eco groups
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and green groups that are pushing for a global carbon tax law.
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And we're presently running across Canada billboard campaign pointing out that a global carbon
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tax law is a road to ruin because carbon taxes are taxes on everything.
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And, you know, if you look at the roots of where carbon taxes come from, they come from
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the sulfur dioxide cap and trade emissions trading.
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And it seemed like this was a great way for Enron to make a lot of money.
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So this idea became elaborated to carbon dioxide.
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The difference is sulfur dioxide is a very specific kind of gas to industrial emissions in general,
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whereas carbon dioxide is everything and everyone.
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So you can imagine a global carbon tax law for Canadians that would decimate Canada because
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We are in the middle of one of the coolest biggest countries in the world.
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And when you look in terms of democracy, you can see that, you know, these foreign agents,
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foreign countries deciding your fate based on your carbon emissions would completely decimate
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your sovereignty and put you at risk of embargoes.
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I mean, we saw after President Trump stepped out of the Paris Agreement, which was non-binding
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and voluntary, the first thing that happened is that President Macron of France threatened
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So if you don't get back into Paris, I won't let you do any trade with Europe, with the European
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So, you know, it is, it does become binding because it becomes the leader.
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You know, and it's funny now that you mentioned President Macron, because at the time he was sort
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of the climate change, Justin Trudeau of Europe, if you will.
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And, you know, he was the anti-Trump at the time.
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But right now he is facing mass protests in his own country against his carbon tax.
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And he's agreed to cancel his carbon tax for at least the next six months.
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I don't know why he thinks that's going to, it's going to alleviate the opposition if
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But it's funny how the tables have sort of turned on him in this opposition to carbon
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Well, you know, in Europe, there's, I think, around 11,000 companies that are now trading
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And, you know, they're quite interested in pushing that worldwide, because there's a group
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of billionaires, foreign billionaires, the Climate Works Foundation, they've been spending
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$600 million a year worldwide, and funneling that money through environmental groups to try
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and push this concept of a global cap and trade.
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And to do that, of course, you need a price on carbon.
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In the specific instance of Macron, he originally, or his country originally, told everybody,
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oh, you should drive diesel cars because you get more mileage and they emit less CO2.
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Well, it happens that they emit more NOx and more soot.
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So when it's a humid day in Paris, they have some of the worst air quality in the world, because
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So a few years ago, people invested heavily in diesel on the advice of the government.
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Now the government is saying, okay, we're going to really tax you on your economical
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We're going to tell you that you should dump your diesel car and buy an electric one.
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And of course, they also instituted this law that everybody had to have one of these yellow
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vests in their car in case they had a breakdown on the highway.
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And that's the origin of the yellow vests, because people are like, how much nanny state
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So, you know, it's really, we see that these climate change policies that have been implemented
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The unintended consequences have not been discussed.
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The cost-effectiveness and the cost-benefit analysis has not been done.
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And you get these bad outcomes, like in Paris, horrible air.
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So we are going to have all kinds of unintended consequences happening in Canada, and we already
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We have people in Ontario being pushed into heater poverty because of the FIT contracts,
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the women's solar, which is pretty much useless there.
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So there's lots of these green policies that are instituted to save the planet, but really
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You know, and that's a great point, because, you know, Donald Trump is often touted at these
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Actually, when I was at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany last year, they built
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an effigy, like a 12-foot-tall effigy of him, and they burned it afterwards.
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But he's touted as a climate criminal, and yet carbon emissions are falling under Donald
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And China's often touted as this, you know, as Justin Trudeau would say, their ability
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to turn their economy on a dime and make changes that are greening the economy.
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But they're dumping carbon into the atmosphere.
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If you care about those sorts of things, I really don't.
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But, I mean, and especially in the United States, their embrace of fracking is helping
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So, really, it's not really about carbon emissions, though, is it?
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You know, China, interestingly enough, is financing and opening coal-powered fire plants in all kinds
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of developing nations, whereas these environmental groups are attacking and blocking banks and
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insurance companies in the West from investing or insuring coal plants and coal operations worldwide.
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So, you have to wonder who is funding those ENGOs.
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You know, it's very similar to there's a power line story on Tom Steyer, which outlines the fact
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that he has allegedly gone green, but his company, Farallon, in the background, is running around
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So, you know, what we find is there's a kind of a confluence of geopolitical power plays.
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That means that countries that do have fossil fuels are trying to figure out how to get some
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kind of trade balance, probably through carbon trading, back from the countries that do have
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lots of fossil fuels, and we find that transnational corporations, like big companies like Power
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Corporation, which is a Canadian corporation, it's really, though, very much with its feet
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So, Power Corporation has been funded the David Suzuki Foundation, for instance, which is the
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main blocker of pipelines in Canada and a big proponent of wind and solar.
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And, you know, if you start following the money trail there, you find that their interests
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are more associated with Europe and the French law on two degrees, that every company that
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is invested there must have this climate risk plan.
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Much more interested in that than they are in Canada's situation.
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Or they have commercial interests that would be more benefited rather than standing up for
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Yeah, I mean, and our politicians make outlandish claims, like Catherine McKenna always saying
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that, you know, the economy and the environment go hand in hand.
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Um, I, I don't disagree, but what she means is carbon taxes help the economy.
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We just did, I'm not sure if you saw the Wendy Mesley exchange with Catherine McKenna when a
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grain farmer from Saskatchewan tried to explain to the environment minister that it doesn't work
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that way, that farmers are price takers and not price setters.
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And so when you add this extra cost into the supply chain, farmers have to eat that.
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And she had the audacity to say, like, farmers need to be more efficient.
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And she talked about zero tillage farming as though she had just invented it instead of
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it being something that farmers have done since probably before McKenna was born.
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But there's just this disconnect and this lack of, I don't know if they truly don't
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understand or if they don't care that this will cost the average consumer a whole heck
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Well, I think that what they care about is that these major pension funds and corporations
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are deeply embedded in the UN principles for responsible investment.
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And that group has a guru named Al Gore as their leader on ESG issues.
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But, you know, you find their case de depot, the Canadian pension fund, the UN joint chiefs
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And so, you know, you've got all these huge pension funds with their money tied to this
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signatory relationship, which is, again, voluntary at the UN PRI.
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But once you sign on, one of their principles, number six, is that you must comply or explain.
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So these groups like the UN PRI and the CEP worldwide are skewing markets worldwide because they're climate
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And, you know, you have to realize that carbon markets are worth a lot of money.
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But what is carbon dioxide and what is a carbon market?
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It's the lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no one.
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So this is what you're being asked to pay for is an invisible substance.
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And when that price gets translated into the carbon markets, what happens is that people
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can make billions of dollars on pollution in China because in the cap and trade system,
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So, you know, Baker McKenzie, I may have mentioned this before, Baker McKenzie of New Zealand had a
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PowerPoint where they showed that the World Bank and a private fund made $1.2 billion in 23 minutes
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So you can see that there's no particular intention to shut down or reduce those emissions in China.
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And really, you know, I don't think that the carbon dioxide from China is such a big problem.
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And the minister keeps saying, oh, Canadians, you know, we have to stop polluting.
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Well, if you look at the National Air Surveillance Program in Canada, Air NAPS, it's called it.
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Anyway, if you look at the air quality in Canada, we've been paying for pollution in Canada for 50 years.
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And what's been reduced is the noxious emissions.
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Carbon dioxide is not on the list of pollutants in Canada.
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So the minister has her science mixed up and her policy mixed up.
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And I don't really think that she does care about the average citizen.
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Further to this, it should be noted that the minister's husband won a more than $700,000 award
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from the Skoll Global Threats Foundation, I believe it was, Jeff Skoll.
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Jeff Skoll is the producer of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.
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So I have to ask, how impartial is this person in reviewing climate policies?
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You know, that's an interesting fact and actually something I didn't know about my friend Climate Barbie.
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I wanted to ask you, what do you think is going to come from this conference in Poland?
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Like I said earlier, when this airs, I will be there investigating all the hypocrisy.
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But what do you think is going to be accomplished, good or bad?
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While I'm there, what do you think is on the agenda?
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Well, I've seen go by that it's gender and green.
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They've created these cardboard chairs in the lobby that are completely recyclable.
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I've also seen that Katowice in Poland, just to rub it in their faces,
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open the conference with the coal miners band playing,
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and they have displays of coal all over the place, which is fun.
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Yeah, so, you know, it's hard to know because, you know, there's so many problems in the world.
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And Bjorn Lomborg, years ago, you know, sent out a kind of an inquiry to a number of economists
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and other people as to what were the most important things to solve in the world
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It would cost like maybe $100 billion, which is a tiny portion of what is being blown on climate change.
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And these are real problems like sanitation, water, access to clean water, vaccinations, maternal health,
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things that the world could easily address for the most part for a very small amount of money.
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And instead, we have an international conference addressing gender issues and going green in Poland,
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So you can see that, you know, I see it as a kind of diversion, because if they're going to try and implement
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And is it going to be like a global carbon tax law?
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You say, okay, our town requests that people don't let their dogs soil the earth without picking up after them.
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So they say, okay, now there's going to be a law, the institute of law.
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So this will be transferred at the level of the UN.
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There are people like Rockstrom et al., who is one of the scientists who's written a paper.
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And in it, he and his colleagues thought that a $400 carbon tax by law would be a great idea.
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They don't do it through thinking about how things are affected.
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Rapid decarbonization, the stopping of the use of fossil fuels, oil, gas, coal, would mean mass deaths.
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This is from a professor, Professor Michael J. Kelly at Cambridge.
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He's an engineering professor, and he's looked at, you know, the potential for wind and solar to replace fossil fuels.
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We have a new report on that actually called In the Dark on Renewables.
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And we rebut Deloitte Insights and Climate Reality.
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And you would think that organizations like Deloitte would actually go to some power generation engineers and get an informed opinion.
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But they must be listening to Al Gore and the IPCC.
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So, you know, whatever is going to come out of this UN conference, I doubt that it will be good.
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And I will say also, one of the things that the IPCC's most recent report has recommended strongly is biofuels.
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In 2007, John Ziegler, who was the special rapporteur for the UN, told the UN and the IPCC that this is a crime against humanity.
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It's a crime against humanity to use arable land for something you're going to put in a fuel tank when people are starving in the world.
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But this is a central feature of the IPCC's SR-15.
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Yeah, and our friend Marayan Pools made a fantastic documentary about just that.
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The use of arable land for the growth of biofuels and government policies that are directing farmers into biofuels as opposed to producing food.
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And how it's harming farmers, local food production, and everywhere and everyone along the supply chain.
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That movie's called The Uncertainty has settled, and I recommend that everybody take a chance to watch it.
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Now, Michelle, I want to wrap up our interview, but I want to give you a chance to plug Friends of Science
00:22:25.820
and let everybody know how they can find out what your latest reports are and how they can support you.
00:22:34.300
You can join Friends of Science on our homepage.
00:22:37.800
You can click on the Donate Membership button, and you can join there.
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We have a blog, which is filled with all kinds of information.
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He's a former public servant with the federal government, 27 years of experience in the GHG file, and also 10 years a diplomat.
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We just released a report called Faulty Premises Equal Poor Public Policy on Climate.
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Another report, In the Dark on Renewables, Rebutting Deloitte and Climate Reality.
00:23:10.960
And 34, The Global Composition of Emissions, that was by Robert Lyman.
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And one that everybody should read, Carbon Kleptomania.
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Because, you know, the government keeps saying, oh, we're going to give you a carbon dividend,
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and you'll make more money back than what you spend on carbon taxes.
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Maybe you can give somebody a membership as a Christmas gift.
00:23:38.760
Because throughout the year, we offer biweekly reports on FOS extracts, news from around the world on climate and energy.
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We offer CLI-SCI, a roundup of recent climate reviews.
00:23:53.080
We do press releases every couple of weeks, videos.
00:23:58.360
Look at our video channel, YouTube, our YouTube channel, and share all of our stuff, please.
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Yeah, I like what Friends of Science does, because you break down the policy into what it means in reality.
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Those UN releases, they're so wordy and complicated.
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But what Friends of Science does is translate it into a normal person's life.
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Just someone to cut through the UN language of it all.
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Michelle, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
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And I want to thank you for all the work that you do to shine a light on the kleptocracy of the United Nations climate change policies.
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And I hope everybody has a look at our new video called Canada is in the Oil Olympics.
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And see where we stand in terms of our world competitors.
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And also have a look at our billboard campaign, our new billboards.
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We also have a video on that on our YouTube channel.
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This is really not a conference behind me about climate change.
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It's not about whether or not carbon emissions are changing the weather and affecting humanity.
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It really is about shifting wealth from the developed world to the underdeveloped world using climate change and carbon taxes and carbon credits as the tool to do it.
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And a lot of people at the top are getting very rich through these sorts of schemes.
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I'll see everybody back home at the same time in the same place next week.
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And remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.