Juno News - November 14, 2021


Canada does not have a climate crisis

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Austin Cho
Trudeau doubles down on tackling ＂online hate speech＂ Canadian society is obsessed with race

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

183.84

Word count

1,028

Sentence count

52


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The COP26 climate conference has finally wrapped up and we can finally get back to what we re all here to do: talk about climate change. In this episode, I talk about what I wish was said at the podium by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at COP26, and why he should have said something a little more nuanced.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The COP26 climate conference has finally wrapped up after two whole weeks of talking about climate
00:00:11.160 issues. Politicians, NGOs, activists, two whole weeks. Don't these people have anything else to
00:00:18.160 do? Don't they have real jobs to get back to? Apparently not. Lots of discussion, lots of big
00:00:23.920 rhetoric out there. Prime Minister Justin Scho, he was one of the leading figures in terms of
00:00:28.580 saying grandiose claims. Justin Trudeau said that he wants to introduce a hard cap for emissions to
00:00:34.620 Canada's own oil and gas sector, which is a departure from what he was previously saying,
00:00:39.400 and he wants to introduce a global carbon tax. Good luck with that, but it's still quite something
00:00:45.840 that he's actually saying it. So lots of heated rhetoric, pardon the pun there, but I wish there
00:00:51.900 was some more contextual, nuanced information that had been discussed at COP26. I wish when Justin
00:00:57.140 Trudeau got up to the podium and said those rather extreme propositions, I would say, with the great
00:01:04.440 gusto that he did, I wish he had actually used that opportunity at the podium to offer some other
00:01:10.480 context, like, for instance, what's really going on with Canada's emissions. I bet if you stopped the
00:01:17.700 average Canadian on the street and said, okay, pop quiz, are Canada's admissions, A, staying the same,
00:01:23.200 B, going up, you know, a fair bit, or C, going up like crazy, just, you know, going up, shooting up
00:01:30.740 through the roof, annual emissions. Which one is it? I think you get a lot of people, maybe a majority
00:01:35.640 of them, pick that last option, that emissions are just, they're just out of control. Because you hear
00:01:41.020 more and more people say, look, the climate crisis, it's getting more and more dire, more and more
00:01:45.820 imminent out there. It was quite something to see CBC post an editorial note from one of their chief
00:01:51.420 editors saying they've decided this is it. They're actually going to start really talking about
00:01:57.380 climate change, the climate crisis. They're finally going to really start covering this. They just said
00:02:02.140 this the other week. I'm like, well, I don't know, what have you guys been doing, like, the past 10
00:02:06.000 years? I think you've been talking about it a lot, maybe too much, but oh no, now they say they're
00:02:10.980 finally going to get serious and talk about it more and more because the situation is so dire. So Canadians,
00:02:16.260 I think, would answer to a survey that, yeah, emissions just out of control. Not the case.
00:02:22.820 Not the case at all. In fact, they are in some respects totally flat, and in other respects,
00:02:29.080 they're going down. What do you mean, Fury? How can it be both ways? Well, let me explain.
00:02:33.200 First of all, if you go to a site that shows where emissions are at in Canada, they have a little line
00:02:39.240 graph there, and the line is pretty much flat. I mean, it goes a little up and down, but for the past 20
00:02:45.500 years, Canada's emissions have been flat. It's at about 725 megatons per year. Sometimes it's a bit
00:02:52.940 higher, sometimes it's a bit lower. And here's the thing, though. If that number has been flat,
00:02:58.540 and yet for the past 20 years, there have been hundreds of thousands of people coming to Canada,
00:03:03.480 more people being born, more people immigrating, and so forth, the population has considerably
00:03:07.480 increased. So that's kind of something, that the emissions are flat, but there's more people
00:03:12.540 doing stuff, stuff that would presumably create emissions, which is why they're also able to
00:03:18.280 conclude, and I'm just talking about government reports here, this is all from the government,
00:03:23.100 from the Liberal government's own various departments that they manage, that Canadians' emissions,
00:03:28.060 as individuals, have gone down 20% over the past 20 years. Emissions are dropping. Canadians'
00:03:36.540 per capita emissions are dropping big time. How did this come about? Well, these government
00:03:42.100 reports say there's innovation, there's technological breakthrough, and then they put regulation in
00:03:47.420 the mix. I would imagine that they would like to argue regulation plays a greater role than it does,
00:03:51.900 because government would always like to flatter themselves into thinking that the things that
00:03:55.940 they are doing are the most integral things. But I think that really the R&D and the innovation
00:04:01.280 from industry, through their own volition, not because the government forced them to, but because
00:04:05.740 they're always working on new things, building a better mousetrap, and emissions-intensive
00:04:10.880 activity, whatever sector it's in, that's actually expensive for the producers, so they, for their
00:04:16.280 own motives, they actually want to bring down their emissions as well, and it's happening, and it's
00:04:21.620 working. Why doesn't Justin Trudeau, up at the podium at COP26, why doesn't he say that? Why doesn't
00:04:26.700 he take the opportunity to say, okay guys, I know you're going all crazy about climate crisis, imminent
00:04:31.300 threat, but I just gotta level with you about what's really going on with our emissions. They are not
00:04:35.660 increasing. Well, because I think if he did actually level with people about that, one thing they would
00:04:40.600 start to think about, particularly if they saw that industry's own R&D and innovations is what's
00:04:45.900 behind that, they'd go, well, what's the point of these COP26 gatherings, really? What's the point of
00:04:51.320 this carbon tax stuff? I mean, maybe it's all just kind of a red herring. Maybe whether or not this stuff
00:04:57.740 even happened, the emissions would still go down. Because in truth, the government stuff, the NGO stuff,
00:05:03.300 the activist stuff, that's actually a sidebar. It's not actually the main event, even though we're led
00:05:08.800 to believe a court battle about the carbon tax is actually the main issue about environmental
00:05:14.140 approaches here in Canada, when they're not. What all these very smart and accomplished
00:05:18.500 industrious people are doing back at their private sector jobs and so forth, working on new innovative
00:05:23.880 technology, that's actually the main event. It doesn't have much to do with government, and it obviously
00:05:29.500 then diminishes the arguments that government should be doing all these things that they're doing
00:05:34.120 in the first place.