The Candice Malcolm Show - Trudeau doubles down on his failed climate schemes

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

00:00:04.680 released their new climate plan alongside the NDP. Their plan is doubling down on a failed

00:00:10.520 climate scheme, setting more unrealistic target emissions. Is there an alternative though? Is

00:00:16.380 there a realistic plan out there that can both protect our natural environment while also putting

00:00:20.900 our economy first and putting our national interest first? I'm Candice Malcolm and this is the Candice

00:00:25.580 Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program. So as you likely saw

00:00:40.240 yesterday, Tuesday morning, the Trudeau NDP government released their new carbon plan. It is

00:00:46.480 doubling down on a very bad strategy that they have had from the beginning. So among other things,

00:00:52.340 they promised to spend $9 billion in taxpayer money, new taxpayer dollars spending to reduce

00:00:59.300 Canada's emission. The plan seeks to reduce Canada's emissions by 42%, focusing on cutting the oil and gas

00:01:06.200 sector as part of a pie in the sky plan to meet our 2030 reduction goal. Trudeau's plan promises to

00:01:12.820 make carbon capture tax credits available to the industry by 2022. No details on that. We're told

00:01:18.660 that they will be released soon. The government will also put in place a sales mandate to ensure

00:01:24.460 that 20% of new light duty vehicles sold in Canada will be zero emissions by 2026, spending a bunch of

00:01:31.500 money, $400 million in fact, on installing charging stations for electric vehicles across the country,

00:01:38.400 more rebates, more schemes. So we see lots and lots of spending, lots and lots of money, kind of thin

00:01:44.460 on plans, and very little about how much this will cost the average Canadian taxpayer, how much it will

00:01:50.060 cost you and I, everyday Canadians, living our lives through increased taxes, increased prices. So

00:01:55.580 joining me today to help make sense of this climate action plan, Trudeau's government schemes to reduce

00:02:01.980 climate change, I'm very pleased today to be joined by Dr. Ross McKittrick. Ross is a Canadian economist

00:02:08.220 specializing in environmental economics, and he's also a policy analyst, a senior fellow over at the

00:02:13.780 Fraser Institute. He is a professor of economics over at Wealth University. He's a prolific writer. He

00:02:19.440 has been writing on this topic for a very, very long time, the author of several books. You can find

00:02:24.200 all of his work. It's available at rossmckittrick.com. So Ross, thank you so much for joining the show

00:02:30.500 today. My pleasure, Candice. So I want to get your thoughts on Dustin Trudeau's plan that he announced

00:02:37.500 yesterday. What do you make of it? Is it grounded in reality? Is it possible that he is going to

00:02:42.620 accomplish the targets that he lays out? Well, the first thing that struck me, I went through it,

00:02:48.220 it's almost 150 pages long. Nowhere in that whole report is there any mention of how much this is

00:02:54.200 going to cost people. And that kind of omission isn't accidental. I think they genuinely don't care.

00:03:03.520 I mean, it's been the pattern with this government's climate policies all the way along.

00:03:08.240 They set targets, they announce rules, and there's no analysis of the costs. I was involved in a project

00:03:15.740 last year through the Fraser Institute to put some costs out there for people to begin to give them

00:03:21.580 some sense of how much the carbon tax is going to hit. But the government itself does not do any cost

00:03:27.400 analysis. And that, to me, suggests both that they're very careless in their policy development

00:03:35.240 process. But also, it's ideologically driven. There's no sense of balancing costs and benefits

00:03:42.020 here. This is a green ideology. And as far as they're concerned, they don't care how much it's

00:03:50.420 going to cost. The second thing that strikes me here is it's so out of step now with the geopolitical

00:03:59.580 situation that we're in. They are talking about radically scaling back the Canadian energy sector

00:04:06.220 right at the time when Europe is practically begging us to increase our export capacity for oil and natural

00:04:13.580 gas so that they can get off of Russian sources. And it's really bizarre just in terms of European and

00:04:23.580 global security that now that the world is really cleaved into the West, where countries like Canada

00:04:33.020 and the US that have huge reserves of oil and gas, and we're also democracies and cooperative countries,

00:04:39.440 and we could supply other countries and other regions. And then you've got the dictatorships. You've

00:04:44.900 got Russia and some of the Middle Eastern countries and Venezuela. And this government's plan is basically

00:04:52.420 consigning the world to do business with dictators. And they're saying, don't count on us, we are going

00:04:58.260 to be scaling back our production capacity with what are unrealistic targets. But if they actually plan

00:05:05.620 to implement them, the only way they can do it is essentially shutting down large parts of the Canadian

00:05:11.220 energy sector, right at the time when the world is telling us they would really like us to ramp up

00:05:16.580 production. Well, it seems like Justin Trudeau's strategy has been one that doesn't

00:05:22.260 please anybody. Because basically, when you look at the analysis over at the CBC, and what the left is

00:05:27.620 saying about this is that it doesn't go far enough, it doesn't cut oil enough. We look back at Canada,

00:05:33.060 we had the worst emissions record in the G7 in 2021, despite the fact that the climate change is

00:05:40.100 supposedly Justin Trudeau's main priority. So the left isn't happy with him. On the right, there's just

00:05:46.340 incredible frustration, especially in parts of the country that produce energy, like Alberta with

00:05:51.700 the way that pipelines and projects have just been strangled with regulation. And so it doesn't seem

00:05:57.140 like he's really pleasing anybody. Why do you think he takes this approach where he doesn't really come

00:06:04.260 out and ban energy and oil and gas? He doesn't do what the left really wants. But at the same time,

00:06:10.980 we don't see the kind of production and growth that the economy is really begging for.

00:06:16.420 Well, don't go giving him any ideas. I think that he would like to move a lot more aggressively. It's

00:06:24.020 probably just the advisors that he has, and also the people in the civil service who understand the

00:06:31.380 way the economy works, who succeed in putting the brakes on some of the worst elements of his thinking.

00:06:37.940 I actually sympathize with the criticism on the left that despite all the blather in this report,

00:06:45.700 there's very little in the way of concrete action. In the end, it comes down to a few more subsidy

00:06:50.660 programs, a proposal that by 2035, they're essentially going to ban internal combustion engines.

00:06:58.580 Well, he'll be out of the picture, hopefully long before then. But otherwise, it's just talking around

00:07:06.500 the issues. And there's all the usual phrases in these kinds of reports about it's time to take bold

00:07:12.580 action and we need transformative change. But when you turn the page looking for what the bold action

00:07:19.620 is and the transformative change, it's just they're on to the next topic now. And so someone on the left

00:07:25.540 who was looking for really concrete measures would come away disappointed by the end of it because

00:07:32.820 there's nothing there. From an economics point of view, the other thing that jumps out here is

00:07:37.860 they spent a long time selling the carbon tax. Okay. And on the economic logic of a carbon tax is

00:07:43.380 it's the only thing you do. It's all you need is a carbon tax. You put a price on the emissions and

00:07:47.860 then let the market figure out what's the cheapest way of cutting emissions in response. So they have the

00:07:53.620 carbon tax and it's pretty steep and it's going to get very steep over the next few years. But it's as if they've

00:08:00.580 decided, yeah, it doesn't work after all, because now we've got 150 pages of new regulations to throw

00:08:06.420 at people. If they believed all their own rhetoric about the carbon tax, they wouldn't need any

00:08:11.620 regulations. Those would be superfluous and they wouldn't be needed. So the fact that they're

00:08:19.620 introducing all these new rules, it just undermines their own logic as far as putting in place a carbon

00:08:27.300 tax as their main policy platform. Well, and the sort of talking heads that we see in the legacy

00:08:33.620 media talking about how the carbon tax is actually a free market approach. Well, it isn't, to your

00:08:39.140 point, a free market when you're also adding in thousands of new regulations to try to strangle the

00:08:44.660 industry. It is a free market approach if you use a carbon tax instead of regulation. If you use the

00:08:53.380 carbon tax and regulation, it's worse than either one alone. So they're really giving us the worst of

00:09:00.500 both here. That's interesting. And one of the things we just learned, the parliamentary budget

00:09:04.580 officer last week put out a report stating that most households see a net loss from the carbon tax

00:09:10.820 despite the rebate scheme. So the liberals repeatedly said in their partisan talking points during the

00:09:16.180 election that most families will be better off because of this rebate and that they won't have a net

00:09:21.540 loss from the carbon tax. That isn't true. They continue to use these rebate schemes and promise

00:09:26.740 to do so without much accountability. I wonder, Ross, if you could talk about what a better alternative

00:09:32.900 would be for people who care about the environment, people who are worried about climate change.

00:09:39.140 If the carbon tax doesn't reduce emissions and it doesn't save Canadian households money,

00:09:45.380 it's a failed program. What would you suggest as an alternative?

00:09:50.580 Well, we have to back up a step and ask where these emission reduction targets came from in the first

00:09:56.900 place because there's this false notion that, well, if you care about dealing with climate change,

00:10:04.740 what we need to do is hit a 30 or 40% emission reduction target. But that's not a logical step

00:10:14.180 for Canada to reduce our emissions by that amount. The research over the years, especially since the

00:10:20.420 Kyoto Protocol came into place, was that when countries like Canada, when we reduce our emissions,

00:10:25.860 all that happens is the emitting activity just moves somewhere else. We just end up importing

00:10:30.820 the carbon content, but it's produced in China or India or countries like that. So all the pain that we

00:10:37.460 endure from these emission reduction programs doesn't actually reduce global emissions of CO2.

00:10:45.940 What we would be better off doing is helping countries like China and India make the transition

00:10:52.260 from coal to natural gas and improving their energy efficiency. And they can get onto the same kind of

00:11:01.540 trajectory which we are on, which is our emissions are still going up, but a slower than population growth

00:11:07.940 where our emissions per capita are going down. And that's really the appropriate target, especially

00:11:14.740 given that this government wants to increase population considerably through a very expanded

00:11:21.620 immigration program. The number one driver for us of greenhouse gas emissions growth is population 1.00

00:11:27.540 growth. And so this is another contradiction. I think people on the left are picking up on this as

00:11:33.780 well, that the same government that really wants to push the main driver of greenhouse gas emissions up

00:11:41.300 is also putting forward proposals that we should get emissions down. I don't think there's a lot of

00:11:49.140 scope for a country like Canada to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions like the whole talk around net zero.

00:11:55.540 Technically, that is completely impossible unless you're prepared to shut the whole country down.

00:12:00.180 And so as long as we keep circling around that that kind of a buzzword rather than talking about

00:12:05.860 where the global emissions are really coming from and how we can help those countries

00:12:09.860 make a transition, it it ends up just being a sterile discussion that goes nowhere.

00:12:16.580 Well, you wrote recently in the Financial Post, I want to talk about this article,

00:12:19.700 you wrote that conservatives who want to lead on climate issue must start debating extremists who

00:12:23.940 currently dominate the discussion. And in that piece you wrote about the problem with trying to achieve

00:12:28.100 net zero is that it would destroy our economy, basically, and that we need to sort of start talking

00:12:32.900 about the issue in a different way. So I'm wondering if you could sort of lay out what

00:12:36.900 your advice would be if you were advising the next conservative leader of this country.

00:12:41.540 If you're going to start the whole discussion, just taking at face value all the premises of

00:12:47.060 the liberal talking points, you end up down the same dead end. Promising compliance with the Paris

00:12:55.780 Treaty or ambitious emission reductions with no way to achieve it that don't involve imposing massive costs on

00:13:02.340 the country. Someone at some point needs also to stand up and say most of what you hear on climate,

00:13:09.700 including from the Prime Minister is untrue. And for example, right at the beginning of yesterday's

00:13:17.460 report, they talk about the problem of rising forest fires. Well, you can look up the number of forest

00:13:24.660 fires each year in Canada, they're on the Ministry of Natural Resources website, they've been going down in

00:13:30.180 Canada since 1990. Environment Canada and climate change has made it clear, they don't see any evidence of

00:13:38.180 increased extreme precipitation in the Canadian record, which goes back many decades. Things like

00:13:44.420 that, that's what we need to push back against. And I think it'll take a bit of courage. And it also means a

00:13:51.300 political leader has to actually get tutored on the subject and learn what's really going on and what's really in the

00:13:57.140 expert reports. Because groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they put out reports,

00:14:03.380 and they explain all this. And yet, what people see in the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail is a cartoon

00:14:11.060 version of the report that isn't an accurate summary of it. So I would like to see a conservative politician,

00:14:18.900 or any politician push back on it by saying, let's stick with the mainstream information and the actual

00:14:27.140 data. And when you look at that, this is not an existential crisis. This is not an emergency. We're

00:14:33.460 not going to destroy our economy to address this. It's one of the many issues we have to deal with. And

00:14:40.660 so we'll deal with it by setting targets and goals that make sense for a country like Canada. But we're not

00:14:48.100 going to treat this as a three alarm fire that requires us to take emergency measures that

00:14:55.380 will end up destroying the economy. Well, we see so many politicians, especially in the liberal

00:15:01.460 government or in the US on the Democrat side, take advantage of any weather event or any extreme weather

00:15:07.460 event and directly link it to climate. You mentioned forest fires. We saw that repeatedly by the Trudeau

00:15:14.500 government. I can't help but wonder. I mean, I see these high school students going out on protests,

00:15:19.460 and I know that it's because of the things that they're taught in schools, the messages being

00:15:24.020 relayed to them. Most newspaper companies and media companies in Canada have dedicated climate change

00:15:29.300 reporters whose job day in and day out is to create news around the issue of climate change, whether there

00:15:34.740 is any news to be reported on or not. And so as a result of all these things, activism within schools,

00:15:41.380 universities as well as media and politicians, of course, using the extremist rhetoric,

00:15:47.540 we have this feeling that climate is a pressing issue. You wrote about this in the Financial Post

00:15:52.580 piece as well, that most people, by pulling data in the US, Canada and the UK, they talk about how

00:15:58.020 climate is their top priority or a top priority. But then whenever the policies are put in to make

00:16:04.580 their energy more expensive, to make gas more expensive, they sort of revolt. And we saw that in Ontario with

00:16:10.020 the McGuinty-Winn government. So I'm wondering if you can comment on the sort of propaganda around

00:16:16.100 climate change and how that impacts our politics.

00:16:19.700 Greg Phillips- It, you make a good point that young people, especially growing up in Canada,

00:16:26.980 are bombarded from all sides, including the entertainment sector, that climate change is a crisis.

00:16:33.460 And what they don't hear from the government, apart from pushing back against the inaccuracies of the

00:16:41.460 alarmist message, they're never told what it's going to cost. In fact, what they're consistently told is,

00:16:47.940 there's this existential crisis, it's going to destroy us all. And guess what, the solutions will

00:16:52.180 make us better off. It's actually a big economic opportunity, new industries, wonderful new jobs.

00:16:58.580 So when plans like what the government put out yesterday, to the extent it talks about the

00:17:02.900 economics, it makes these promises that, don't worry, this will actually make us all better off.

00:17:08.980 And what we saw, as you mentioned, the Parliamentary Budget Office came out with a report that said,

00:17:14.500 no, what the government said on this last year was untrue. This will make most people worse off.

00:17:20.180 And the whole Green Revolution will make people a great deal worse off. It can't do anything else if 1.00

00:17:27.940 it really makes energy more expensive and forces people to use less energy. You have to make people

00:17:34.100 worse off. It does point, though, I guess, to the shallowness of the alarmist ideology in the general

00:17:45.620 public, in the sense that when people really perceive a crisis, they will incur any cost to deal with it.

00:17:55.620 But despite the fact that polls do show, apparently, a high level of support for climate action,

00:18:04.900 people are not willing to incur a high cost to address it. And I think because, in the end,

00:18:13.700 they've accepted the idea that, yes, there's a climate crisis, and it won't cost anything to deal

00:18:20.260 with it. Or if it costs anything, it's just a few people in the energy industry that will lose a bit

00:18:24.740 of money, but they can afford it. So let's just go ahead and do it. What they don't see is this is

00:18:31.940 going to cost me my job, and this is going to put my family's budget in the hole or going to make it

00:18:38.660 too expensive to heat the house. Once that starts to be the story, then what looked like strong support

00:18:47.540 for climate action evaporates. Now, you brought up the Ontario example, and I think that's a perfect

00:18:52.580 example. The McGuinty Wind government thought they had a huge amount of popular support for their

00:18:57.380 climate plans. I mean, and the polls showed it, that it was very popular. They won elections on these

00:19:02.500 plans to rejig the electricity system. And then they did it, and the price of electricity more than doubled,

00:19:09.780 and the public threw them out. And so when this government

00:19:15.460 commissions polls and gets advice that, hey, this is going to be really popular with the public,

00:19:22.020 remember, part of that is you've told the public, this won't cost anything, and in fact,

00:19:27.300 we'll make them better off. And when that turns out not to be true, those polls are worthless.

00:19:34.500 It's so interesting. And it's like we have to relive it over and over again, because those of us in

00:19:39.220 Ontario went through this with McGuinty in 2012 and 2014 with Wynn. And here we are with the same

00:19:46.740 people advising Justin Trudeau that were advising McGuinty back then, and they're trying to implement

00:19:51.300 some of these same plans. One other piece that I wanted to ask you about, apart from your Financial

00:19:56.500 Post article that you wrote, and I didn't know this, but you talked about how the Intergovernmental

00:20:02.820 Panel on Climate Change and its recent Six Assessment Report does not use terms like emergency

00:20:08.740 or catastrophe to describe the climate issue. And an individual named William Nordhaus won the 2018

00:20:15.540 Nobel Prize in Economics for work that showed, among other things, that the best response to climate

00:20:20.660 change focuses mainly on adaption rather than mitigation. His cost-benefit analysis shows that

00:20:27.380 trying to stop climate change would be far worse for the world than doing nothing. This is so

00:20:33.620 groundbreaking, and yet this is not what we hear. We don't hear this from conservative politicians. We

00:20:39.060 hardly hear it at all in the media. You know, only people like yourself writing in more conservative

00:20:45.460 leaning newspapers do we hear this kind of thing. How can we get the message out that there is a better

00:20:53.380 solution to trying to preserve the environment and set up climate change? And that is not by coming up

00:20:59.860 with all of these government schemes to try to meddle with the economy, but rather focusing on how we

00:21:04.980 can adapt to a changing climate. Well, you're asking, in a sense, what I've spent 20 years trying to do,

00:21:16.420 which is just explain what the economics shows here. And Nordhaus' analysis is very well known within

00:21:24.500 economics. It's known in the climate science community too. I mean, a lot of people in the

00:21:30.580 climate science community get really frustrated with Nordhaus because they would like to see

00:21:37.620 economists making a case for dramatic emission reductions. But, and Nordhaus definitely is not the

00:21:44.100 only one. It's that whole field that's worked on what's called integrated assessment modeling.

00:21:50.100 They keep coming back with the same message that in the case of CO2 emissions, and we're specifically

00:21:56.420 talking about CO2 emissions, it is so expensive with current technology to try to reduce them. You

00:22:02.580 really end up having to tell people to stop using energy. And so, yes, there's some low value CO2 emissions

00:22:10.580 that we could eliminate. But otherwise, over the next 100 years, unless technology changes dramatically,

00:22:17.060 we are looking at just adapting to the changes, which historically has turned out to be not very

00:22:24.660 costly for economies to do. And here again, there's just a huge amount of empirical evidence that

00:22:31.380 climatic variations don't impose big costs on advanced economies. They're more costly for poor countries,

00:22:41.140 but then the answer to that is to help the poor countries become wealthy and not trap them in

00:22:47.940 poverty by telling them to stop using energy. So it's going back to the question of, you know,

00:22:57.060 what's the alternative here? I would say the alternative, and this is a consistent message over

00:23:02.980 many decades in the economics field, is think about the climate issue the way we think about every other

00:23:09.220 issue, which is compare the costs and benefits of what you're proposing to do and don't overdo it and

00:23:16.340 don't promise things that you couldn't afford to do. On other forms of air pollution, we have made

00:23:22.900 dramatic emission reductions. So particulates and sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, for instance,

00:23:30.980 tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles. We hardly even measure carbon monoxide in

00:23:35.780 Canadian cities anymore. There's only a handful of places because the levels went so low once cars had

00:23:41.220 catalytic converters put on them. And so that was a case where there was a technology that came out

00:23:46.420 that it's very inexpensive and it eliminates the emissions. And so that dealt with the problem. It

00:23:54.100 made sense to be very ambitious. Same with particulates. Scrubbers and better motor vehicle engines

00:24:01.940 dramatically reduce particulate pollution in the cities. So we could set ambitious targets and meet them

00:24:07.620 and not interfere with the economy in the process. So that made sense. Carbon dioxide is different. This is

00:24:15.060 really key for people to understand. If you're going to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions around the world,

00:24:21.860 you're basically telling people to stop using our main sources of energy without providing them an alternative.

00:24:28.100 And that's why for many decades, this climate issue has gone nowhere because there's no way around that

00:24:38.020 technical constraint. Well, there's so much good news from this story that we don't focus on. And instead,

00:24:47.700 it's like we have this sole focus on climate change without talking about the broader

00:24:52.660 environment and some of the better strategies to deal with. So I really appreciate your time,

00:24:58.180 Ross, today and all the work that you do. I encourage people to go over to his website,

00:25:03.540 RossMcKittrick.com and find all of your writing and all of your reports on this topic. Thank you so

00:25:09.300 much for joining the show today. Thanks, Candice. My pleasure.

00:25:12.100 Hey, thanks for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:25:15.940 I'm Candice Malcolm.

The Candice Malcolm Show - March 30, 2022

Trudeau doubles down on his failed climate schemes

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