Juno News - Trudeau doubles down on his failed climate schemes

00:00:00.000 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his radical environmental minister Stephen Galbault have

00:00:04.660 released their new climate plan alongside the NDP. Their plan is doubling down on a failed

00:00:10.500 climate scheme, setting more unrealistic target emissions. Is there an alternative though? Is

00:00:16.340 there a realistic plan out there that can both protect our natural environment while also putting

00:00:20.880 our economy first and putting our national interest first? I'm Candice Malcolm and this

00:00:25.120 is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:30.000 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program. So as you likely saw yesterday,

00:00:40.820 Tuesday morning, the Trudeau NDP government released their new carbon plan. It is doubling

00:00:46.840 down on a very bad strategy that they have had from the beginning. So among other things,

00:00:52.380 they promised to spend $9 billion in taxpayer money, new taxpayer dollars spending to reduce

00:00:59.260 Canada's emission. The plan seeks to reduce Canada's emissions by 42%, focusing on cutting

00:01:05.120 the oil and gas sector as part of a pie in the sky plan to meet our 2030 reduction goal. Trudeau's

00:01:11.640 plan promises to make carbon capture tax credits available to the industry by 2022. No details on

00:01:17.840 that. We're told that they will be released soon. The government will also put in place

00:01:22.260 a sales mandate to ensure that 20% of new light duty vehicles sold in Canada will be zero emissions by

00:01:29.460 2026, spending a bunch of money, $400 million in fact, on installing charging stations for electric

00:01:36.260 vehicles across the country, more rebates, more schemes. So we see lots and lots of spending,

00:01:43.060 lots and lots of money, kind of thin on plans and very little about how much this will cost the average

00:01:48.620 Canadian taxpayer, how much it will cost you and I, everyday Canadians, living our lives through

00:01:53.420 increased taxes, increased prices. So joining me today to help make sense of this climate action plan,

00:01:59.980 Trudeau's government schemes to reduce climate change, I'm very pleased today to be joined by Dr. Ross

00:02:05.500 McKittrick. Ross is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics, and he's also a policy

00:02:12.060 analyst, a senior fellow over at the Fraser Institute. He is a professor of economics over at Wealth

00:02:17.720 University. He's a prolific writer. He has been writing on this topic for a very, very long time,

00:02:22.280 the author of several books. You can find all of his work. It's available at Ross McKittrick.com. So

00:02:28.760 Ross, thank you so much for joining the show today. My pleasure, Candice. So I want to get your thoughts on

00:02:35.640 Dustin Trudeau's plan that he announced yesterday. What do you make of it? Is it grounded in reality? Is it

00:02:40.920 possible that he is going to accomplish the targets that he lays out?

00:02:44.200 Well, the first thing that struck me, I went through it, it's almost 150 pages long.

00:02:50.760 Nowhere in that whole report is there any mention of how much this is going to cost people. And

00:02:57.160 that kind of omission isn't accidental. I think they genuinely don't care. I mean, it's been the

00:03:05.320 pattern with this government's climate policies all the way along. They set targets, they announce rules,

00:03:11.880 and there's no analysis of the costs. I was involved in a project last year through the Fraser Institute

00:03:17.560 to put some costs out there for people to begin to give them some sense of how much the carbon tax is

00:03:23.160 going to hit. But the government itself does not do any cost analysis. And that to me suggests both that

00:03:32.520 they're very careless in their policy development process, but also it's ideologically driven.

00:03:39.720 There's no sense of balance and costs and benefits here. This is a green ideology. And as far as 0.98

00:03:47.160 they're concerned, they don't care how much it's going to cost. The second thing that strikes me here is

00:03:54.760 is it's so out of step now with the geopolitical situation that we're in. They are talking about

00:04:02.520 radically scaling back the Canadian energy sector, right at the time when Europe is practically begging

00:04:09.160 us to increase our export capacity for oil and natural gas so that they can get off of Russian sources.

00:04:17.880 And it's really bizarre, just in terms of European and global security, that now that the world is

00:04:28.040 really cleaved into the West, countries like Canada and the US that have huge reserves of oil and gas,

00:04:36.200 and we're also democracies and cooperative countries, and we could supply other countries and other

00:04:42.120 regions. And then you've got the dictatorships. You've got Russia and some of the Middle Eastern

00:04:47.480 countries and Venezuela. And this government's plan is basically consigning the world to do business

00:04:54.360 with dictators. And they're saying, don't count on us, we are going to be scaling back our production

00:05:00.040 capacity with what are unrealistic targets, but if they actually plan to implement them, the only way

00:05:07.080 they can do it is essentially shutting down large parts of the Canadian energy sector, right at the time

00:05:12.840 when the world is telling us, they would really like us to ramp up production. Well, it seems like

00:05:18.600 Justin Trudeau's strategy has been one that doesn't please anybody. Because basically,

00:05:24.120 when you look at the analysis over at the CBC, and what the left is saying about this is that it

00:05:28.440 doesn't go far enough, it doesn't cut oil enough. We look back at Canada, we had the worst emissions

00:05:34.600 record in the G7 in 2021, despite the fact that the climate change is supposedly Justin Trudeau's

00:05:41.640 main priority. So the left isn't happy with him. On the right, there's just incredible frustration,

00:05:47.560 especially in parts of the country that produce energy, like Alberta, with the way that pipelines and

00:05:53.160 projects have just been strangled with regulation. And so it doesn't seem like he's really pleasing

00:05:58.760 anybody. Why do you think he takes this approach where he doesn't really come out and ban energy and

00:06:05.480 oil and gas? He doesn't do what the left really wants. But at the same time, we don't see the kind

00:06:11.800 of production and growth that the economy is really begging for. Well, don't go giving him any ideas.

00:06:19.720 I think that he would like to move a lot more aggressively. It's probably just the advisors

00:06:26.600 that he has, and also the people in the civil service who understand the way the economy works,

00:06:32.840 who succeed in putting the brakes on some of the worst elements of his thinking. I actually sympathize

00:06:40.520 with the criticism on the left, that despite all the blather in this report, there's very little

00:06:46.920 in the way of concrete action. In the end, it comes down to a few more subsidy programs.

00:06:53.000 A proposal that by 2035, they're essentially going to ban internal combustion engines.

00:06:58.520 Well, he'll be out of the picture, hopefully, long before then. But otherwise, it's just talking

00:07:06.200 around the issues. And there's all the usual phrases in these kinds of reports about, it's time to take

00:07:12.120 bold action, and we need transformative change. But when you turn the page looking for what the bold

00:07:19.240 action is and the transformative change, it's just they're on to the next topic now. And so someone on

00:07:25.000 the left who was looking for really concrete measures, would come away disappointed by the

00:07:32.120 end of it, because there's nothing there. From an economics point of view, the other thing that

00:07:36.440 jumps out here is, they spent a long time selling the carbon tax, okay, and on the economic logic of

00:07:42.280 the carbon taxes, it's the only thing you do, it's all you need is a carbon tax, you put a price on the

00:07:47.320 emissions, and then let the market figure out what's the cheapest way of cutting emissions in response.

00:07:52.120 So they have the carbon tax, and it's pretty steep, and it's going to get very steep over the next few

00:07:57.800 years. But it's as if they decided, yeah, it doesn't work after all, because now we've got 150 pages

00:08:04.840 of new regulations to throw at people. If they believed all their own rhetoric about the carbon

00:08:10.040 tax, they wouldn't need any regulations. Those would be superfluous, and they wouldn't be needed.

00:08:16.520 So the fact that they're introducing all these new rules, it just undermines their own logic as far

00:08:25.160 as putting in place a carbon tax as their main policy platform.

00:08:29.320 Well, and the sort of talking heads that we see in the legacy media, talking about how the carbon tax

00:08:36.200 is actually a free market approach. Well, it isn't to your point, a free market when you're also adding

00:08:41.240 in, you know, thousands of new regulations to try to strangle the industry.

00:08:45.080 It is a free market approach if you use a carbon tax instead of regulation. If you use the carbon tax

00:08:54.200 and regulation, it's worse than either one alone. So they're really giving us the worst of both here.

00:09:01.000 That's interesting. And one of the things we just learned, the parliamentary budget officer

00:09:05.800 last week put out a report stating that most households see a net loss from the carbon tax despite

00:09:11.400 the rebate scheme. So the Liberals repeatedly said in their partisan talking points during the election

00:09:16.760 that most families will be better off because of this rebate and that they won't have a net loss

00:09:21.800 from the carbon tax. That isn't true. They continue to use these rebate schemes and promise to do so

00:09:27.160 without much accountability. I wonder, Ross, if you could talk about what a better alternative would be

00:09:33.320 for people who care about the environment, people who are worried about climate change.

00:09:37.880 You know, if the carbon tax doesn't reduce emissions and it doesn't

00:09:43.560 save Canadian households money, it's a failed program. What would you suggest as an alternative?

00:09:50.600 Well, we have to back up a step and ask where these emission reduction targets came from in the first

00:09:56.920 place because there's this false notion that, well, if you care about dealing with climate change,

00:10:04.200 what we need to do is hit a 30 or 40% emission reduction target. But that's not a logical step

00:10:14.200 for Canada to reduce our emissions by that amount. The research over the years, especially since the

00:10:20.360 Kyoto Protocol came into place, was that when countries like Canada, when we reduce our emissions,

00:10:25.800 all that happens is the emitting activity just moves somewhere else. We just end up importing the carbon

00:10:31.400 content, but it's produced in China or India or countries like that. So all the pain that we

00:10:37.400 endure from these emission reduction programs doesn't actually reduce global emissions of CO2.

00:10:45.880 What we would be better off doing is helping countries like China and India make the transition

00:10:52.200 from coal to natural gas and improving their energy efficiency. And they can get onto the same kind

00:11:01.400 of trajectory which we are on, which is our emissions are still going up, but slower than population growth,

00:11:07.960 where our emissions per capita are going down. And that's really the appropriate target,

00:11:14.280 especially given that this government wants to increase population considerably through

00:11:19.640 a very expanded immigration program. The number one driver for us of greenhouse gas emissions growth 1.00

00:11:26.760 is population growth. And so this is another contradiction. I think people on the left are

00:11:32.600 picking up on this as well, that this, the same government that really wants to push the main driver

00:11:38.760 of greenhouse gas emissions up is also putting forward proposals that we should get emissions down.

00:11:45.720 I don't think there's a lot of scope for a country like Canada to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions,

00:11:53.000 like the whole talk around net zero. Technically that is completely impossible unless you're prepared

00:11:58.280 to shut the whole country down. And so as long as we keep circling around that kind of a buzzword,

00:12:04.280 rather than talking about where the global emissions are really coming from and how we can help those

00:12:08.920 countries make a transition, it ends up just being a sterile discussion that goes nowhere.

00:12:16.600 Well, you wrote recently in the Financial Post, I want to talk about this article, you wrote that

00:12:20.120 conservatives who want to lead on climate issue must start debating extremists who currently dominate

00:12:24.680 the discussion. And in that piece you wrote about the problem with trying to achieve net zero is that

00:12:28.920 it would destroy our economy basically, and that we need to sort of start talking about the issue in a

00:12:34.200 different way. So I'm wondering if you could sort of lay out what your advice would be if you were

00:12:38.040 advising the next conservative leader of this country. If you're going to start the whole discussion,

00:12:44.040 just taking at face value all the premises of the liberal talking points, you end up down the same

00:12:50.600 dead end promising compliance with the Paris treaty or ambitious emission reductions with no way to

00:12:59.560 achieve it that don't involve imposing massive costs on the country. Someone at some point needs also to

00:13:06.760 stand up and say most of what you hear on climate, including from the Prime Minister is untrue. And

00:13:14.520 for example, right at the beginning of yesterday's report, they talk about the problem of rising forest fires.

00:13:22.680 Well, you can look up the number of forest fires each year in Canada, they're on the Ministry of Natural

00:13:27.800 Resources website. They've been going down in Canada since 1990. Environment Canada and climate change

00:13:35.400 has made it clear, they don't see any evidence of increased extreme precipitation in the Canadian

00:13:41.160 record, which goes back many decades. Things like that, that's what we need to push back against. And I

00:13:47.400 think it'll take a bit of courage. And it also means a political leader has to actually get tutored on the

00:13:53.160 subject and learn what's really going on and what's really in the expert reports. Because groups like

00:14:00.040 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they put out reports, and they explain all this. And yet,

00:14:07.000 what people see in the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail is a cartoon version of the report that isn't

00:14:12.680 an accurate summary of it. So I would like to see a conservative politician, or any politician,

00:14:20.600 push back on it by saying, let's stick with the mainstream information and the actual data. And

00:14:27.720 when you look at that, this is not an existential crisis, this is not an emergency. We're not going

00:14:33.800 to destroy our economy to address this. It's one of the many issues we have to deal with. And so we'll

00:14:41.080 deal with it by setting targets and goals that make sense for a country like Canada. But we're not going

00:14:48.200 to treat this as a three-alarm fire that requires us to take emergency measures that

00:14:55.320 will end up destroying the economy.

00:14:57.000 Well, we see so many politicians, especially in the Liberal government or in the US on the Democrat side,

00:15:04.600 take advantage of any weather event or any extreme weather event and directly link it to climate.

00:15:10.600 You mentioned forest fires. We saw that repeatedly by the Trudeau government. I can't help but wonder.

00:15:16.200 I mean, I see these high school students going out on protests, and I know that it's because of the

00:15:21.320 things that they're taught in schools, the message is being relayed to them. Most newspaper companies

00:15:26.680 and media companies in Canada have dedicated climate change reporters whose job day in and day out

00:15:31.560 is to create news around the issue of climate change, whether there is any news to be reported on

00:15:36.680 or not. And so as a result of all these things, activism within schools, universities, as well as

00:15:43.080 media and politicians, of course, using the extremist rhetoric, we have this feeling that climate

00:15:50.040 is a pressing issue. You wrote about this in the Financial Post piece as well, that most people,

00:15:54.520 by pulling data in the US, Canada and the UK, they talk about how climate is their top priority or a top

00:15:59.960 priority. But then whenever the policies are put in to make their energy more expensive, to make gas more

00:16:06.520 expensive, they sort of revolt, and we saw that in Ontario with the McGuinty-Winn government.

00:16:11.880 So I'm wondering if you can comment on the sort of propaganda around climate change and how that

00:16:18.600 impacts our politics.

00:16:19.640 You make a good point that young people, especially growing up in Canada, are bombarded from all sides,

00:16:28.760 including the entertainment sector, that climate change is a crisis. And what they don't hear from

00:16:37.480 the government, apart from pushing back against the inaccuracies of the alarmist message, they're

00:16:43.800 never told what it's going to cost. In fact, what they're consistently told is there's this existential

00:16:49.080 crisis, it's going to destroy us all, and guess what? The solutions will make us better off. It's

00:16:53.400 actually a big economic opportunity, new industries, wonderful new jobs. So when plans like what the

00:17:00.360 government put out yesterday, to the extent it talks about the economics, it makes these promises that

00:17:05.320 don't worry, this will actually make us all better off. And what we saw, as you mentioned, the

00:17:11.400 Parliamentary Budget Office came out with a report that said, no, what the government said on this last

00:17:15.960 year was untrue. This will make most people worse off. And the whole Green Revolution will make people 0.99

00:17:24.760 a great deal worse off. It can't do anything else if it really makes energy more expensive and forces

00:17:30.280 people to use less energy. You have to make people worse off. It does point, though, I guess, to the

00:17:39.080 shallowness of the alarmist ideology in the general public, in the sense that when people really

00:17:49.960 perceive a crisis, they will incur any cost to deal with it. But despite the fact that polls do show

00:17:59.880 apparently a high level of support for climate action, people are not willing to incur a high cost

00:18:07.400 to address it. And I think because in the end, they they've accepted the idea that yes, there's a

00:18:16.840 climate crisis, and it won't cost anything to deal with it. Or if it costs anything, it's just a few

00:18:22.600 people in the energy industry that will lose a bit of money, but they can afford it. So let's just go

00:18:27.160 ahead and do it. What they don't see is this is going to cost me my job, and this is going to put my

00:18:36.120 family's budget in the whole are going to make it too expensive to heat the house. Once that starts

00:18:42.440 to be the story, then what looked like strong support for climate action evaporates. Now, you brought

00:18:49.960 up the Ontario example, and I think that's a perfect example. The McGuinty Wind government thought they

00:18:55.240 had a huge amount of popular support for their climate plans. I mean, and the polls showed it,

00:18:59.480 that it was very popular, they won elections on these plans to rejig the electricity system.

00:19:06.600 And then they did it, and the price of electricity more than doubled, and the public threw them out.

00:19:11.720 And so when this government commissions polls and gets advice that, hey, this is going to be really

00:19:20.520 popular with the public. Remember, part of that is you've told the public, this won't cost anything,

00:19:26.520 and in fact, will make them better off. And when that turns out not to be true, those polls are

00:19:32.920 worthless.

00:19:33.640 That's so interesting. And it's like we have to relive it over and over again, because you know,

00:19:38.600 those of us in Ontario went through this with McGuinty in 2012 and 2014 with Wynn. And here we are with,

00:19:46.200 you know, the same people advising Justin Trudeau that were advising McGuinty back then, and they're

00:19:50.520 trying to implement some of these same plans. One other piece that I wanted to ask you about, apart from your

00:19:56.120 Financial Post article that you wrote, and I didn't know this, but you talked about how the

00:20:02.040 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its recent six assessment report does not use terms

00:20:07.640 like emergency or catastrophe to describe the climate issue. And an individual named William Nordhaus

00:20:13.960 won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for work that showed, among other things, that the best response

00:20:20.200 to climate change focuses mainly on adaption rather than mitigation. His cost benefit analysis shows

00:20:27.080 that trying to stop climate change would be far worse for the world than doing nothing.

00:20:33.160 This is so groundbreaking. And yet, this is not what we hear. We don't hear this from conservative

00:20:38.120 politicians. We hardly hear it at all in the media. You know, only people like yourself writing in more

00:20:44.920 conservative leaning newspapers. Do we hear this kind of thing? How can we get the message out

00:20:51.720 that there is a better solution to trying to preserve the environment and stop climate change?

00:20:57.640 And that is not by coming up with all of these government schemes

00:21:01.640 to try to meddle with the economy, but rather focusing on how we can adapt to a clean and changing climate.

00:21:09.480 Well, you're asking, in a sense, what I've spent 20 years trying to do, which is just explain what the

00:21:18.840 economics show is here. And Nordhaus's analysis is very well known within economics. It's known in the

00:21:26.680 climate science community, too. I mean, a lot of people in the climate science community get really

00:21:32.120 frustrated with Nordhaus because they would like to see economists making a case for dramatic

00:21:40.840 emission reductions. But, and Nordhaus definitely is not the only one. It's that whole field that's

00:21:46.680 worked on what's called integrated assessment modeling. They keep coming back with the same message

00:21:52.280 that in the case of CO2 emissions, and we're specifically talking about CO2 emissions, it is

00:21:59.160 so expensive with current technology to try to reduce them, you really end up having to tell people to

00:22:04.520 stop using energy. And so yes, there's some low value CO2 emissions that we could eliminate. But

00:22:12.440 otherwise, over the next 100 years, unless technology changes dramatically, we are looking at just adapting to

00:22:19.960 the changes which historically has turned out to be not very costly for economies to do. And here again,

00:22:27.480 there's just a huge amount of empirical evidence that climatic variations don't impose big costs on

00:22:36.360 advanced economies. They're more costly for poor countries. But then the answer to that is to help

00:22:43.000 the poor countries become wealthy and not trap them in poverty by telling them to stop using energy. So

00:22:54.520 it's going back to the question of, you know, what's the alternative here? I would say the alternative,

00:23:01.240 and this is a consistent message over many decades in the economics field, is think about the climate

00:23:07.640 issue the way we think about every other issue, which is compare the costs and benefits of what you're

00:23:11.800 proposing to do and, and don't overdo it and don't promise things that you couldn't afford to do.

00:23:20.600 On other forms of air pollution, we have made dramatic emission reductions. So particulates and

00:23:26.680 sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, for instance, tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles, we hardly even measure

00:23:34.440 carbon monoxide in Canadian cities anymore. There's only a handful of places, because the levels went so low

00:23:40.200 once cars had catalytic converters put on them. And so that was a case where there was a technology that

00:23:45.640 came out that it's very inexpensive, and it eliminates the emissions. And so that dealt with the

00:23:53.640 problem and made sense to be very ambitious. Same with particulates. Scrubbers and better motor vehicle

00:24:01.000 engines dramatically reduce particulate pollution in the cities. So we could set ambitious targets and meet

00:24:06.680 them and not interfere with the economy in the process. So that made sense. Carbon dioxide is

00:24:13.000 different. This is really key for people to understand. If you're going to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide

00:24:20.840 emissions around the world, you're basically telling people to stop using our main sources of energy without

00:24:26.280 providing them providing them an alternative. And that's why, for many decades, this climate issue has gone nowhere,

00:24:34.600 because there's no way around that technical constraint.

00:24:39.080 Well, it's there's there's so much good news from this story that that we don't focus on. And instead, it's like we have this

00:24:48.680 sole focus on on climate change without talking about the broader environment and some of the better

00:24:54.200 strategies to deal with. So I really appreciate your time Ross today and all the work that you do. I

00:25:00.840 encourage people to go over to his website Ross McKittrick dot com and and find all of your writing and

00:25:07.800 all of your reports on this topic. Thank you so much for joining the show today. Thanks, Candice. My pleasure.

00:25:12.760 Hey, thanks for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:25:18.680 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm.

Juno News - March 30, 2022

Trudeau doubles down on his failed climate schemes

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript