The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 16, 2024


Canadians are rejecting the Liberals climate agenda

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Steven Guilbeault Ralph Nader Justin Trudeau Teslas
Journalist whines about Poilievre fighting back Liberals threaten grocery stores to take the blame for inflation

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

192.59

Word count

1,519

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, I talk about the carbon tax, climate change, and the free market approach to climate change in Canada. I talk through a piece of polling that was done well, and try to explain why the government should be focusing on other areas of the economy, like clean energy and infrastructure, rather than climate change.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Despite the fact that the carbon tax is one of the least popular policies from the Liberal
00:00:04.900 government in Canada, to the point where they've literally rebranded it from the carbon tax
00:00:09.220 to the carbon rebate, if you look at a lot of policy-based polling, you'd think Canadians
00:00:13.700 still approve of it. I saw a poll like a month and a half ago that showed that 57% of people
00:00:18.780 still thought we need the carbon tax, and it's a result of policy polling being so poorly done
00:00:23.860 often. A lot of pollsters are super accurate with their national polling numbers, but when it comes
00:00:29.100 to policy-based polling, they mangle the questions, and all the questions seem to imply if you
00:00:34.220 disagree with the carbon tax that you somehow don't like the environment. So I see pulsed questions
00:00:40.120 like, do you still think we need the carbon tax to fight climate change? And if you say no, a lot of
00:00:45.120 Canadians are going to think that the implication of saying no is that they don't care about the
00:00:48.480 environment at all, whereas really it's just asking you, do you like the carbon tax or not? And that's
00:00:53.060 a far better question. I have finally found a piece of policy polling that was actually done well in
00:00:58.920 I'll read it to you and then just go over the results. So this one I think was from Innovation
00:01:03.100 that reads, the Liberal Party of Canada supports establishing clean energy regulations as a way
00:01:08.240 for Canada to show leadership in moving to net zero climate change emissions by 2035, even if it
00:01:14.220 means some increase in electricity prices. And then it reads, the Conservative Party of Canada
00:01:19.700 opposes establishing clean energy regulations and prefers the federal government to avoid increases
00:01:24.420 electricity prices and focus on encouraging investment in new technology to reduce emissions
00:01:29.600 instead. Do you tend to support the liberal approach or the conservative approach? And it shows
00:01:33.940 that only 31% of people somewhat or are very supportive of the liberal approach and 49% support the
00:01:40.700 conservatives. And I think that those saying 11% saying don't know, or 10% saying neither. I think
00:01:46.660 most of those people by the time the next election comes around will go with the conservatives. The
00:01:52.080 conservatives only need 2% more to have more than majority of Canadians supporting their agenda.
00:01:57.260 And I think this poll shows that once you kind of break away all the very abstract kind of talk
00:02:02.960 about, do you want to fight climate change or not? And you actually talk about different approaches to
00:02:08.060 the environment saying, hey, do you think that the government should be taxing people in order to get
00:02:13.060 them to act in ways the government wants? Or do you think that the government should maybe have some
00:02:16.900 incentives out there for car companies or other sort of oil and gas firms to just reduce
00:02:21.920 their emissions through better technology? Most people like market-based solutions. Most people
00:02:26.700 always choose the market-based solution. But just based on the way that the legacy media covers
00:02:32.120 these issues and the way a lot of pollsters, I think, unintentionally pull the issues, a lot of
00:02:37.480 people see it as a sort of completely binary option between liking the environment and not when,
00:02:44.220 if anything, it has been the free market that has made technology so much more efficient over time
00:02:49.740 and has reduced emissions. If you really care about emissions and you think it is the absolute
00:02:54.300 gambit to what controls the climate, you should be siding with the free market doing what it has
00:02:59.740 always done best, which has make more efficient products for people to buy. People don't like
00:03:06.140 paying that much for gasoline and they like that whatever amount of gasoline they buy lasts them as
00:03:11.200 long as humanly possible. A truck from the 1970s and a truck now are completely like in worlds apart
00:03:18.640 in terms of how efficiently they burn gas. Trucks these days are not nearly what gas guzzlers used
00:03:25.360 to be in the 70s. And I think people should own whatever vehicles they want, but people have demanded
00:03:31.060 over time that vehicles become cheaper in price and that they, in terms of their mileage,
00:03:37.760 mileage. So that even without government incentives, whenever gas prices have naturally
00:03:42.480 gone up, people have demanded more fuel efficient vehicles. And that's why we have a lot of very
00:03:47.340 fuel efficient vehicles on the road or hybrids. With the government trying to now reduce the amount
00:03:54.240 of roadways, as Stephen Gilbeau implied, and then Justin Trudeau basically says, Stephen Gilbeau is 1.00
00:03:59.420 stupid. He just misspoke. A lot of people are now, I think, seeing that a lot of the government 1.00
00:04:05.060 solutions to these problems are not just not effective actually reducing emissions. They're
00:04:09.840 incredibly brutal and grinding on the average citizen, basically trying to force you to conform
00:04:15.400 to the way that the government wants you to around the climate issue, rather than just giving out the
00:04:21.180 right incentives, having the right regulations in place that would allow companies to choose in order
00:04:26.900 to make more efficient technologies. And frankly, I really don't care about the climate change issue that
00:04:32.020 much. Shock gas, does why not care about the environment? No, I do care about the environment.
00:04:36.340 And that's why I don't care about the climate change issue that much, because it's not actually
00:04:40.100 environmental. It's basically replacing real conservationism with a more abstract idea of
00:04:46.180 trying to reduce emissions, even though Canada can hardly have an impact on that.
00:04:50.460 Anyways, but I've always cared more about what are people's costs of living? Because the great thing
00:04:55.540 about capitalism is that because people are selfish and want more fuel efficient vehicles,
00:04:59.780 they naturally end up reducing their emissions, they naturally end up reducing their environmental
00:05:04.540 impact over time. And that's a good thing. But guess what? Never has a government ever actually made
00:05:09.700 more fuel efficient vehicles through mandates. They maybe force people to buy like Teslas and other
00:05:16.480 hybrids. But over time, they usually just incentivize people to keep older cars on the road longer by
00:05:22.440 making newer cars more expensive by forcing you to pay for more expensive vehicles that meet certain
00:05:27.640 environmental standards. This is also the problem with our housing market right now is that people
00:05:32.760 are not actually buying homes that have better insulation for heating, so they don't have to
00:05:37.440 burn as much fuel, because all the zoning laws and all the environmental inspection checks you need
00:05:42.820 make it more difficult to build a house, meaning that people don't end up actually renovating their
00:05:47.640 homes. They don't end up buying new homes that are better insulated because it's too expensive,
00:05:52.280 because the government never does half measures, letting people sort of improve the way they do
00:05:58.380 things, make more efficient options slowly over time. They always make you jump from the top of
00:06:03.040 the stairs to the bottom of the stairs. It's like vehicle safety back in the 1960s and 70s with Ralph
00:06:09.020 Nader. It wasn't good enough that people would just buy more efficient, safer vehicles over time because
00:06:15.300 people actually tend to value safety. No, they have to 100% value safety. So they made cars thousands of
00:06:22.020 dollars more expensive back in the 70s so that you have to buy every little safety feature possible
00:06:26.880 in whatever new car you bought so that people just were incentivized to keep their T-birds
00:06:31.260 driving around or the Corvair that Nader thought was so dangerous because they couldn't afford the new
00:06:38.580 cars because all the new safety features were out of people's price ranges. So they drove around the
00:06:43.540 cars that were super dangerous. It's just the way that government policy tends to come back on itself
00:06:49.060 and completely contradict its intended goal. Anyways, that should be it for me today. I just
00:06:54.820 want to do a quick plug because I always do that I, Wyatt Claypool, am running for the Calgary Signal
00:06:59.380 Hill Conservative Party nomination. So if you live in these riding boundaries, buy a Conservative Party
00:07:04.780 membership. It's just $15 for a one-year membership and you'll be able to vote for me whenever the
00:07:09.360 nomination date gets called to be able to make me the nominee in your area for the Conservatives.
00:07:14.020 If you want a real Conservative, please go visit my website, WyattClaypool.com. And then I also have
00:07:19.440 my gifts and go link in the description as well. We're being sued by a billionaire developer for
00:07:25.060 defamation. It's a complete nonsense case. He has no point. He hasn't barely even submitted any evidence
00:07:30.340 that what we've said is wrong. Really, none of his evidence suggests anything that our guest writer
00:07:34.800 said about him was wrong. And our guest writer was actually fully relying on previous reporting about
00:07:39.900 him. So he's just suing us because he thinks that we can't pay for the lawsuit, unlike the Globe and
00:07:45.860 Mail where most of our information came from. Anyways, that should be it for me today. I'll be back
00:07:51.560 in another video quite soon.