Flimsy, fake rationale for imposing Canada’s pernicious carbon tax
On April Fool’s Day the Trudeau Liberal federal government’s draconian Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act came into force in Canada–a fitting day on which to inflict a punishing carbon tax law on Canadians. It applies to provinces that do not have their own carbon tax regimes that meet “national standards,” currently Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick.
The Preamble to this law, based on the fake premise of manmade global warming/manmade climate change, is full of the usual pseudoscientific tropes and untruths about a pretend planetary climate emergency.
The Preamble, the rationale and justification for the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, decoded in caps (emphasis added):
BECAUSE 97% SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS (fake claim, long ago debunked many times over):
Whereas there is broad scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate change;
BECAUSE URGENTLY SAVING THE PLANET (blatant scaremongering):
Whereas recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are at the highest level in history and present an unprecedented risk to the environment, including its biological diversity, to human health and safety and to economic prosperity;
BECAUSE WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE (more blatant scaremongering):
Whereas impacts of climate change, such as coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, increases in heat waves, droughts and flooding, and related risks to critical infrastructures and food security are already being felt throughout Canada and are impacting Canadians, in particular the Indigenous peoples of Canada, low-income citizens and northern, coastal and remote communities;
BECAUSE THE GRANDCHILDREN (emotional blackmail):
Whereas Parliament recognizes that it is the responsibility of the present generation to minimize impacts of climate change on future generations;
BECAUSE IT’S A PLANETARY CLIMATE EMERGENCY (fake, phoney, non-existent):
Whereas the United Nations, Parliament and the scientific community have identified climate change as an international concern which cannot be contained within geographic boundaries;
BECAUSE THE UN TOLD US TO (obeisance to “non-binding” UN diktats):
Whereas Canada has ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, done in New York on May 9, 1992, which entered into force in 1994, and the objective of that Convention is the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system;
BECAUSE THERE IS ONE IMMUTABLE, CORRECT GLOBAL TEMPERATURE (which the UN’s IPCC made up out of thin air):
Whereas Canada has also ratified the Paris Agreement, done in Paris on December 12, 2015, which entered into force in 2016, and the aims of that Agreement include holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;
BECAUSE THE PARIS AGREEMENT SAYS WE HAVE TO (“non-binding” UN agreement):
Whereas the Government of Canada is committed to achieving Canada’s Nationally Determined Contribution – and increasing it over time – under the Paris Agreement by taking comprehensive action to reduce emissions across all sectors of the economy, accelerate clean economic growth and build resilience to the impacts of climate change;
BECAUSE AN URGENT “NATIONAL PROBLEM” (non-existent, lying to Canadians):
Whereas it is recognized in the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change that climate change is a national problem that requires immediate action by all governments in Canada as well as by industry, non-governmental organizations and individual Canadians;
BECAUSE WE LOVE ORWELLIAN LANGUAGE (“pricing” is a tax grab):
Whereas greenhouse gas emissions pricing is a core element of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change;
BECAUSE WE’RE GONNA MODIFY YOUR BEHAVIOUR (micromanage your life) . . .
Whereas behavioural change that leads to increased energy efficiency, to the use of cleaner energy, to the adoption of cleaner technologies and practices and to innovation is necessary for effective action against climate change;
. . . BY BEATING YOU HARDER AND HARDER WITH THE PRICING STICK (citizen abuse):
Whereas the pricing of greenhouse gas emissions on a basis that increases over time is an appropriate and efficient way to create incentives for that behavioural change;
BECAUSE WHOSOEVER EMITS CARBON DIOXIDE HAS TO PAY (does breathing out count?):
Whereas greenhouse gas emissions pricing reflects the “polluter pays” principle;
BECAUSE IF THE PROVINCES REFUSE TO DO IT . . .
Whereas some provinces are developing or have implemented greenhouse gas emissions pricing systems;
. . . WE’LL MAKE THEM . . .
Whereas the absence of greenhouse gas emissions pricing in some provinces and a lack of stringency in some provincial greenhouse gas emissions pricing systems could contribute to significant deleterious effects on the environment, including its biological diversity, on human health and safety and on economic prosperity;
. . . BECAUSE WE CAN AND WE WILL:
And whereas it is necessary to create a federal greenhouse gas emissions pricing scheme to ensure that, taking provincial greenhouse gas emissions pricing systems into account, greenhouse gas emissions pricing applies broadly in Canada
The Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act is a dishonest legislation right from the start, i.e. the title – greenhouse gases are not “pollution.” This from the Liberal government that promised to develop policies and legislation based on science and evidence. It has the fingerprints of the UN’s anti-human, anti-democratic sustainable development program all over it, citing agreements and commitments that Canadians were never consulted about or able to vote on, such as the UN’s 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (basis for the UN’s Agenda 21, Millennium Development, 2030 Agenda), the Paris Agreement, and the UN’s unscientifically-derived, made-up global target temperature rise of no more than 2°C (oh wait, no, they reduced it for added hysteria value down to 1.5°C!).
Ontario is currently challenging the constitutional validity of the law in the Court of Appeal for Ontario. That’s good news, but unfortunately putting the cart before the horse. We first need a court case about whether or not manmade global warming/manmade climate change is actually a scientifically-proven catastrophic thing. To prove that, we need a baseline of empirical evidence as to what the natural influences on the ever-changing climate are, and then empirical evidence of what, if any, is man’s contribution causing additional change over and above that.
Sadly, at the moment there is nothing like this kind of national climate science review on the horizon for Canadians.
“Sinister” UN globalist power grab, declaration of war on national sovereignty
The UN Global Compact for Migration aims to “leverage” migration in order to achieve “all Sustainable Development Goals”
Canada has foolishly, irresponsibly signed the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (which James Delingpole calls “the UN’s sinister blueprint for migration hell”).
The UN claims that
This Global Compact is the product of an unprecedented review of evidence and data gathered during an open, transparent and inclusive process … (Section 10)
However, the draconian “migration hell” agreement has not been debated or voted on in Canada’s Parliament, PM Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government did not inform Canadians, Canada’s taxpayer-funded state broadcaster the CBC has not enlightened its audience, and most of the mainstream media have remained deaf, dumb, and blind about it.
The UN Global Compact references “sustainable development” 22 times, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 13 times. The UN Global Compact’s plans for nightmarish unfettered, aggressive, free-for-all migration are paired with mandates to meet the UN’s dictatorial “sustainable development” goals.
“Sustainable development” is nothing more than a brazen power grab, the UN’s excuse for a bid for supranational unelected, unaccountable global governance, coerced wealth redistribution, deindustrialization, and the abrogation of national sovereignty, individual freedoms, and democratic rights.
The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development grew out of the 1992 UN Agenda 21 “programme of action” for sustainable development. The UN created an imaginary planetary climate emergency, supposedly caused by plant food carbon dioxide driving fictitious manmade climate change, which can only be “fought” by UN fiat, diktat, and command-and-control over everyone and everything. The UN decrees that “Sustainable Development” must be at the core of and govern every single human endeavour, including migration.
Thus, the following UN Global Compact directives (emphasis added):
The Global Compact is rooted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development … Migration contributes to positive development outcomes and to realizing the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development … The Global Compact aims to leverage the potential of migration for the achievement of all Sustainable Development Goals…” (Section 15)
Collect, analyse and use data … with a view to inform the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and related strategies and programmes at the local, national, regional and global levels.” (Section 17)
… develop research, studies and surveys on the interrelationship between migration and the three dimensions of sustainable development (Section 17)
… commit to ensure timely and full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Section 18)
Promote the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals … as well as the Paris Agreement … (Section 18)
Invest in programmes that accelerate States’ fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals (Section 18)
Invest in sustainable development at local and national levels in all regions …. drive sustainable development (Section 18)
We commit … to harness the benefits of migration as a source of sustainable development … (Section 35)
Ensure the full and effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development … by fostering and facilitating the positive effects of migration for the realization of all Sustainable Development Goals. (Section 35)
… commit to … aligning the implementation of this Global Compact with … the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development … (Section 39)
Increase international and regional cooperation to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. (Section 39)
The UN Global Compact for “safe and orderly” (come one, come all) migration is yet another pernicious, insidious UN scheme to advance and enforce its destructive, sovereignty-robbing policies, regulations, laws, and diktats meant to hobble states and tighten the noose of “sustainable development” around the necks of industry, resources, and people.
At the same time the UN Global Compact gives “migrants” the unprecedented “right” to migrate, and foists them on states without the vote or agreement of their citizens. It gives migrants more special rights and freebies than any hardworking or homeless Canadians have ever received. Migrants to Canada will become persons with special status beyond the reach of mere mortal Canadians, who are left to foot the hefty migration bill.
YouTube commentator AmazingPolly brilliantly puts the special status given to migrants into shocking perspective. She posits that under the UN Global Compact, 225 million migrants will become de facto UN citizens that the UN will use, without doing any of the heavy lifting, to colonize signatory states. As she puts it, migrants become walking, “portable UN jurisdictions.” Wherever they go, they will have the protection and “rights” given to them by UN fiat, and the host signatory country is saddled with providing and paying for them. Every migrant will in effect be planting a UN flag in the nation of his or her choice, says AmazingPolly.
The UN Global Compact IS binding, and legally so
Pundits and politicians have been telling us that what’s in the Global Compact is nothing to worry about, because it’s “non-binding.” Andrew Lawton exposes the lie.
The 34-page “Intergovernmentally Negotiated and Agreed Outcome” claims that it is “non-legally binding.”
“This Global Compact presents a non-legally binding, cooperative framework that builds on the commitments agreed upon by Member States in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.“ (Section 7)
Ezra Levant of Rebel Media points out that Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act mandates that the Global Compact IS, without question, legally binding:
3 (3) This Act is to be construed and applied in a manner that (f) complies with international rights instruments to which Canada is signatory.
The Global Compact would appear to be an “international rights instrument” and Canada has signed it and the Act must comply with it.
In fact, the EU has already proclaimed that it is “the legal framework on which the participating countries commit themselves to build new legislation.”
Canada, for one, is currently being governed as if UN agreements such as UN Agenda 21, the UN 2030 Agenda, the UN Paris Agreement, et alia, all of them supposedly “non-binding” agreements, are legally binding. In the case of the so-called “non-binding” Paris climate agreement, the Trudeau government in Canada has been acting on and implementing the “commitments” (for example blocking fossil fuel industry operations and needed pipelines) and developing laws (“carbon” taxation) in order to fulfil the UN diktats contained in it.
Trudeau, an apparent globalist (“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada … the first postnational state“) and admirer of “basic dictatorship,” has stated that Canada should take the lead in implementing the UN Global Compact. In fact, he has already been acting in accordance with it, judging by his open Twitter invitation to all comers and the huge number of immigrants/migrants, supposed asylum-seekers heeding the call and streaming illegally across the border from the USA into Canada.
The intentions of Canada’s leaders were made clear when they signed the UN Global Compact, thereby pledging to
… commit to … ensuring that the words in this document translate into concrete actions for the benefit of millions of people in every region of the world. (Section 14)
… a whole-of-government approach is needed …(Section 15)
The UN Global Compact will criminalize “migration speech”
One of the many truly chilling and Orwellian aspects of the UN Global Compact is that signatories agree to engage in “sensitizing and educating media professionals on migration-related issues and terminology” in order to “promote independent, objective and quality reporting.”
While supposedly “in full respect for the freedom of the media,” signatories are directed to mete out punishment by withholding public funding if the media haven’t been properly sensitized and educated, and therefore are guilty of committing migration wrong-think.
In other words, the media must become government propaganda machines or suffer the consequences. The EU even went so far as to say that “criticism of migration will become a criminal offense.”
So read, share, and discuss while you still can without risking jail!
The UN controls how Canadians are permitted to live their lives
Canadians are increasingly subject to the UN’s globalist “programme of action.” Very few know anything about it. None voted for or consented to it.
Michael Snyder explained the objective:
…the globalists want to use “sustainable development” as an excuse to micromanage the lives of every man, woman and child on the entire globe.
In other words, unelected, unaccountable, dictatorial global governance. It’s being implemented in plain sight, but with stealth, cunning, and collusion, orchestrated by “a bewildering array of institutions that have been well hidden behind the scrim of modern life,” according to investigative journalist Elizabeth Nickson, author of Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage.
Agenda 21, the 1992 “United Nations Programme of Action From Rio,” focuses on the environment and “sustainable development.” Based on 27 “Principles” from the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, it is a “non-binding agreement” signed by 178 countries, including Canada.
In 2015, Agenda 21 was revised and re-named “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The tagline is “Transforming Our World”—and they really mean it. The document spells out “17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”, and was “adopted by world leaders in September 2015.”
Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda are globalist public policy blueprints—diktats from the UN, an anti-democracy world body that seeks to erase national sovereignty, personal freedoms, property rights, and aims to transfer wealth by fiat, de-industrialize thriving economies, and de-populate the world. Incremental steps to achieving those ultimate goals are being implemented by local, provincial and federal governments in Canada, under the guise of “saving the planet” from a non-existent manmade global warming climate emergency.
So, what are examples of UN Agenda 21/Agenda 2030 policies forced on Canadians? For starters, you need politicians co-opted and willing to believe in the great planetary manmade climate emergency fiction. They are influenced, bedazzled, or dependent enough on the $1.5 trillion “climate change” industry to do the hallowed UN’s bidding. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of such politicians at all levels of government. Many may not even understand what they are doing or how they are being manipulated by the UN’s eco-foot soldiers, the zealous eco-fanatical ENGOs, often foreign-funded, who openly work against the interests and welfare of Canadians.
In Ontario, Premier Kathleen Wynne parrots the key word from the UN’s 2030 Agenda tagline to explain a draconian, untenable, wrecking-ball of a “climate change” plan in fulfillment of the UN’s diktats (emphasis added):
We are on the cusp of a once-in-a-lifetime transformation. It’s a transformation of how we look at our planet and the impact we have on it…It’s a transformation that will forever change how we live, work, play and move.
Wynne’s Liberal government has sworn fealty to a dictatorial non-Canadian, unelected, unaccountable globalist boss, rather than working in the best interests of Ontarians, as is her mandate.
The Ontario Liberals love to use the same language found in the UN’s Agenda 21/2030 Agenda bibles. For example, opponents of fake-green, economically-useless, environmentally-destructive wind turbine factories must prove, as detailed in Section 142.1 (3) of the Ontario Environmental Protection Act that a given project will cause “serious and irreversible harm” to plant/animal life or the natural environment, or “serious harm” to human health—insurmountable burdens of proof, as we shall see. And where did the wording “serious” and “irreversible” harm come from? You can find it in Principle 15 of the the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development:
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
The UN’s Principle 15 means that though there may be “threats of serious or irreversible damage,” if you cannot demonstrate “full scientific certainty” of these threats, then the “measures to prevent environmental degradation” may proceed. The possibility of “threats of serious or irreversible damage,” even the degradation of the very environment that the UN and its willing agents are supposedly saving from “environmental degradation,” does not prevent government approval of “green” projects. The “precautionary approach” is transparently lopsided and clearly disadvantages opponents of “green” policies.
Such is the anti-democratic influence of the UN’s Agenda 21, enshrined in Ontario’s Environmental Protection Act and in the terms of reference for the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal, a quasi judicial court mandated to adjudicate “applications and appeals under various environmental and planning statutes.” Despite scores of appeals of industrial wind turbine project approvals, only two or three have been partially successful, with final outcomes to be determined. They are most likely fated to lose, because the laws have been written to guarantee appellant failure.
In rural Ontario, the war on private property rights is on. The Liberal government is overhauling four provincial land use plans. Taking steps to “protect natural heritage and water, grow the Greenbelt” sounds sensible, but the objectives to limit “suburban sprawl” and “address climate change” give the game away. Rest assured that property owners will have less and less say over what they are allowed to do with the land they own, until they are forced to abandon it. Many victims of industrial wind turbine torture have already been driven out of their homes.
Elizabeth Nickson (emphasis added):
…a plan that has been carefully devised and put in place over the last 30 years. These planners have created an entirely new culture in rural areas, a culture of deliberate decline that has not only already damaged the suburbs but plans to eradicate them. Suburbanites will, over the next decades, be methodically moved into the cities which will become choked, toxic, and controlled by an iron system of regulation…
The federal Liberals are also on the UN Agenda 21 and 2030 bandwagon. Take the UN’s lofty Principle 22:
Indigenous people and their communities and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize and duly support their identity, culture and interests and enable their effective participation in the achievement of sustainable development.
The Trudeau government recently announced it would adopt and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “in accordance with the Canadian Constitution” with the expectation of “harmonizing Canada’s laws with the standards set in the declaration.” The UN’s standards, not Canada’s. As the Financial Post’s Kevin Libin wrote:
…more material than whether the UN declaration rises to legal levels or not is whether some First Nations simply assume the global edict enhances their sovereignty in the eyes of the world. To them, Canadian legal arguments would be rendered irrelevant.
Loss of national sovereignty, an end to personal freedoms, remote control over every aspect of life.
The fact is that the revolution, under the name of the environmental movement, has declared war on your property, war on your livelihood, war on your families, and war on truth and logic. Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development [is] driven by those who seek to transform our society into little soviets of non-elected boards and councils and regional governments, answerable to no one.
This is the true bleak future, a real climate change in our culture that Canadians should fear and resist for the sake of their grandchildren.
Wynne’s obeisance to the U.N.’s “climate change” queen
If ever you wanted additional proof that Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne is a faithful, loyal follower of the U.N.’s bid for global governance, enforced wealth redistribution, de-industrialization, and de-population (all of it aka Agenda 21) by means of a deliberately-fabricated planetary climate emergency, look no further than her tweet today (see above).
- Why was Figueres, an unelected, unaccountable U.N. kommissar, invited to stick her nose into the domestic and sovereign affairs of Canada and Ontario?
In her tweet, she proudly announces meeting with Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s “climate change” queen, who presumably gave the premier a pat on the head (much like manmade-climate-change-huckster Al Gore did last November) for her latest catastrophic fake-eco move to impose a pernicious “carbon” cap-and-trade scheme on Ontario, which is supposed to somehow dial down the (nonexistent) manmade climate change that is not happening despite the alarmists’ best efforts to have us see what plainly isn’t there. The tweet contains no less than three photos of Wynne posing with the U.N. apparatchik.
So why was Figueres, an unelected, unaccountable U.N. kommissar, invited to stick her nose into the domestic and sovereign affairs of Canada and Ontario anyway? (Not only that, but she was also given a free platform in the National Post to spout her malignant propaganda.)
So there they are, Wynne and Figueres, sitting at the table for their photo op, all smiley-smiley, with Wynne presumably re-pledging fealty to the U.N. climate orthodoxy. The flags of Canada, Ontario, and the U.N. stand guard in a neat row behind them to lend an air of credible dominion to the whole thing.
There’s a direct line of dots connecting the deliberate lies of the U.N.’s Christiana Figueres about “emissions” causing global warming, to the disastrous Wynne-McGuinty phoney-green policies, to the suffering of the people in rural Ontario, victims of the economically useless, environmentally destructive industrial wind turbines, and ending in the economic decline of Ontario and the exploitative taxation and impoverishment of the people.
The real play is not about a better, cleaner environment, but rather about a concerted bid for global governance and control, and in the process destroying democracy, sovereignty, industry, progress, and personal freedom of choice.
Ontario’s Team Agenda 21, Wynne’s approval from climate huckster Al Gore
On Thursday, November 21, 2013, it was on full public display – Ontario’s Team Agenda 21 (carbon trader Al Gore, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Environmental Defence Executive Director Tim Gray, Minister of the Environment Jim Bradley, Minster of Energy Bob Chiarelli), assembled in Toronto to congratulate itself and celebrate the closing of the last coal plant in Ontario, and to announce a new step further into the disastrous black hole that is the province’s energy program (outlaw the burning of coal altogether), and to be anointed and blessed by the high priest of man-made climate doom-and-gloom, Al Gore, who pronounced, “You’re doing a fantastic job”.
This was clearly not an Ontario government event. There was no Province of Ontario logo – neither on the podium, nor on the backdrop. The event was apparently conceived, organized and hosted by the unelected, unaccountable “green” activist NGO, Environmental Defence, an organization apparently funded in large part by foreign money.
Only Tim Gray, Kathleen Wynne and Al Gore spoke. The Ministers of Energy and the Environment each provided mute support throughout the event, as props perched stiffly on high chairs on the stage.
Tim Gray, Executive Director, Environmental Defence Fund explained the purpose of the gathering:
Today, UN talks in Warsaw enter their final hours. And we all know that…people will have largely lost hope that world leaders are going to…act together to fight climate change. And with that going on at an international level we thought it was even more important to showcase something real, something that’s being done here in Ontario, for proving that it can be done, that bold leadership on climate change is possible, and that today Ontario is poised to kick the coal habit forever…. [Applause]
Kathleen Wynne acknowledged the apparent and unelected leadership role that Environmental Defence enjoys in her government: “Your job is to push us, right? So I appreciate that…I want to thank Tim and everyone at Environmental Defence for putting together this fantastic event.”
As Parker Gallant has asked, who is really setting Ontario’s ruinous energy policies?
Premier Wynne:
Thank you very much, Tim, and thank you so much for your introduction, for the work you that you do. As you were just discussing: your job is to push us, right? So I appreciate that…I want to thank Tim and everyone at Environmental Defence for putting together this fantastic event. And I’m very pleased to be joined by our Minister of Energy, Bob Chiarelli, and our Minister of the Environment, Jim Bradley…Bob has shown tremendous leadership on energy issues in Ontario, and I’m very proud to have him in that role and Tim has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues since the 1980s and is helping to drive our issues in that portfolio…and Tim, it’s wonderful to have you here in that role…and it’s a huge honour to be here with you, Mr. Vice-President, thank you very much for being here.
Both Premier Wynne and Al Gore made sure that they listed every notable weather event they could think of as supposed proof-positive that man-made global warming is an indisputable fact (because the corrupt, disgraced IPCC said so). They also both managed to insult those good people who do not believe that the case for catastrophic man-made global warming has been proven (“their heads very firmly in the sand”, “deniers”), but who also know that climate does change, as it has done throughout the ages. Premier Wynne said:
The IPCC, a group that consists of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned us once again that our climate system is getting warmer. In fact, they say that it is unequivocal that our climate system is heating up. I think that there’s no denying that climate change is happening, even though some still have their heads very firmly in the sand and there is no denying that the urgency of the discussion of infrastructure construction, for example, across the country, is heightened by this reality…
If climate change is left unchecked it will lead to rising sea levels, more sweltering heat waves, more disappearing glaciers, and extreme weather events that could have potentially devastating consequences on our health, on our environment, our economy, and our lives. And, of course, there are aid agencies and global leaders saying that climate change has already contributed to humanitarian disasters like typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
So if we don’t move to reverse climate change now, we can see even more catastrophes around the globe. And we’ll have to deal with the aftermath of more events like the flooding that we experienced here in Toronto and in Calgary over the summer…
Both Wynne and Gore spoke about “our moral duty” (a duty which they themselves may very well have proven to have betrayed, by perpetuating and acting wilfully, opportunistically and recklessly on the basis of the hoax of anthropogenic global warming):
And I would contend it’s our moral duty to take action to protect our children, our grandchildren, and our fellow citizens. We’re lucky today to be in the presence of a man who’s been fighting on these fronts for many years.
Premier Wynne went on to announce that her government would be introducing legislation to make the burning of coal illegal. By closing all coal plants in Ontario, and by planning to enact a law to ban burning of coal, Premier Wynne is placing Ontario in grave danger, according to energy analyst and expert Tom Adams. He cites the example of Japan, which moved away from coal but kept its coal plants in good working order, so that they could be used if needed. Following the Fukishima disaster, they have now have proven to be critically important back-up sources of energy, and “are the reason that the lights are on in Japan.”
Al Gore spoke next, and took it upon himself, as the some sort of self-proclaimed global governance potentate, to thank Premier Wynne “on behalf of all around the world,” and, in so doing, reminding the investors in the room of “the nature the climate challenge and the opportunity it presents” (i.e. as enabled by the Green Energy Act, to fleece taxpayers/ratepayers with 20-year guaranteed above-market returns for useless industrial wind turbines). He said:
Thank you all for coming. And may I say, first of all Premier Kathleen Wynne, congratulations on your vision and leadership, thank you for the steps that you have taken and have announced today. I will elaborate in a moment as to why they are so significant for our world as a whole, but I have to say on behalf of all around the world – to understand the nature of the climate challenge and the opportunity it presents, ah, thank you, you’re doing a fantastic job. [Applause]
Then Gore, described by Ezra Levant as a “jet-setting, multiple-mansion-owning, twenty-times-normal-electrical-bill-consuming, oil and gas gazillionaire”, went on to play the moral courage card, with words that may very well prove to be his own undoing when more people begin to understand that he was a major force in helping to lead the world astray with the massive fraud of a fake planetary emergency – designed as rationale for a UN-directed breaching of national sovereignty, erosion of democracy, and a bid for world governance and enrichment – and that he profited enormously by doing it:
Years from now, depending upon the circumstances that we allow to unfold, the next generation will ask one of two questions. If they see the continuation of super storms, and deadly droughts, and tropical diseases ravaging temperate zones, and sea level rise, and the collapse of governance in places where the storms are too powerful and too frequent for people to recover and adapt to survive – if they do not have hope, if they look at their children and feel a sense of despair, they would be well-justified in asking of us, what were you thinking? Why did you not act?
But if they look around them and see a world in renewal…if they feel hope in their hearts and look at their children and feel definitely their future is going to be brighter still, they’ll look back and ask of us, how did you find the moral courage to change, to rise up, to act – and part of the answer will be: Ontario, Canada, led the way. [Applause]
If you have ever wondered what Agenda 21 looks like in a government, it was on full display at this event with all its hallmark features:
– an unelected, unaccountable, well-funded, extreme-eco NGO lobby group that is for all intents and purposes calling the shots, having played an important role in influencing the creation of draconian, anti-democratic, subsidy-heavy legislation, in this case the Green Energy Act, giving free rein to useless, supposedly “green” alternative energy sources such as industrial wind turbines that have cost Ontarians billions and untold grief to those forced to live with them;
– the invocation of the UN’s dishonest IPCC as a credible climate science authority;
– a government in such hopeless thrall to the fake premise of man-made global warming as the cause of climate change that it has lost all integrity, reason and duty of care to do what’s right for its people and the economy;
– and a venal, corrupt, profiteering, mendacious, self-righteous, manipulative celebrity to put his creepy brand of approval on the whole catastrophe.
Help, there’s an ICLEI in my backyard! (Part Two)
The wolf in sheep’s clothing in Ontario
In Part One we tried to understand why useless and destructive industrial wind turbines continue to be forced on unwilling communities in rural Ontario. The Government of Ontario seems to be in the grip of powerful unelected, unaccountable interests that makes it care little for the democratic process, the welfare of the people or the health of the economy.
We discussed how Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, devised by the United Nations, is a plan to inventory and control everything and everyone on the planet. The rationale for the plan is the phoney prognostication of catastrophic climate change brought about by supposed man-made global warming. The leading promoter of this massive doom-and-gloom scenario is the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). As James Delingpole put it in his must-read book Watermelons:
…the ‘evidence’ that has been provided for us by the sources of supposed authority (our political leaders, the media, the scientists…) is so corrupt as to be meaningless.
In 1992, Canada was one of the 179 countries to “surrender their sovereignty”, as Delingpole writes, “by signing up to perhaps the most far-reaching and constrictive code of environmentally correct practice in the history of the world …” He describes Agenda 21/Sustainable Development as “a document right up there in significance with the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta (though with exactly the opposite effects).” He explains that Agenda 21 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing:
…it contains no legally binding obligations. But then, it doesn’t need to, for its apparently voluntary codes can be enforced – and are regularly enforced – via a mechanism over which sovereign governments have little control anyway: the vast, labyrinthine, democratically unaccountable behemoth that is the United Nations.
Delingpole explains further:
…the apparently ‘voluntary’ codes are enforced in such a way as to pass unnoticed by those outside the system. Those within the system include politicians…UN technocrats, green activists and environmental NGOs. Those outside the system are people like you and me. We don’t know how Agenda 21 works because we are not meant to know.
Delingpole quotes from a 1998 UN discussion paper that suggests how best to keep us in the dark:
This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’…would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’…So, we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management, or smart growth.
So there you have it: an agenda, rationalized by a fake planetary emergency, that easily crosses sovereignty lines, and that is deployed and enforced by an unelected, unaccountable body using “lies, deception and a form of Orwellian Newspeak” to hide its true purpose and actions.
Agenda 21 at the local level: “And there ain’t nothing you can do about it”
In Part One we saw how unelected, unaccountable environmental NGOs played a prominent and proud role in creating Ontario’s undemocratic Green Energy Act in 2009. Their malignant influence has not waned since then. Read Parker Gallant’s exposé of who really sets Ontario’s energy policies.
At the local level, things are no better.
As James Delingpole explains in Watermelons, Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is enforced at the local level in small, seemingly unstoppable increments through ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, “the UN-funded pressure group responsible for promoting Agenda 21”. First, local environmental activists form a lobby group, and urge the local councils to sign up with ICLEI to “become part of ICLEI’s network of local governments working together to advance sustainability“. (See the list of ICLEI Canada members here.)
Delingpole describes what happens next:
ICLEI bestows accolades on the local government…for its efforts at advancing the valuable cause of sustainable government. In turn, the local government entity can then boast about its achievements in publicity handouts, showing voters how sensitive and caring it is. These ratings also make it far more likely that the local council will receive grants and/or other financial inducements from any number of UN or…government-sponsored initiatives. In return…the local council feels honour-bound to promote the ‘sustainability’ agenda it has committed to…
He adds: “And there ain’t nothing you can do about it.”
Freedom Advocates lists some of the consequences:
While some of these policies sound good on the surface, they result in consequences such as: high-density housing scams…open space where access is not allowed; government “partnering” with favored private businesses and non-profit agencies using your tax money…undermining Constitutional administration of government; managed control over your life; mismanagement of public utilities; prohibitions on natural resource management leading to increased fire hazards, lack of water, and private property restrictions; increased taxes, fees, regulations and restrictions.
What’s in a word: sustainability
So, is ICLEI or an ICLEI-based mindset or activity operating in your local community? Even if your town is not a direct member of ICLEI, it is subscribing to ICLEI indirectly by virtue of membership in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, itself an ICLEI member.
Sustainability is hiding in plain sight everywhere in your community. To see it, all you have to do is conduct an online search for the terms ‘sustainable development’ or ‘sustainability’ on the websites of your local governments, schools, colleges and universities, community centres, non-profit and charitable organizations, foundations and institutes. Chances are you will find countless examples of that word popping up, either in the names of organizations, or committees, curricula, programs, funding, mission statements, planning documents, recommendations and reports, official pledges, policies, bylaws, rules, regulations and other legislation. As Delingpole writes:
You thought ‘sustainability’ meant desirable, manageable life-goals…Sustainable Development sounds like a good thing…but in fact its underlying philosophy has much more to do with taxation, regulation and control.
ICLEI at work in your town
The 2011 recommendation from the Town of Milton’s Director of Planning and Development clearly shows the straight-line connection from the origins of the concept of sustainability (which eventually gave birth to Agenda 21), to the automatic infiltration of the concept into municipal governance, to the required implementation of the concept in order to qualify for funding and incentives (emphasis added):
Town of Milton staff is developing a Sustainability Plan for the Town that will be adopted as an amendment to the Official Plan. This plan will ensure the Town meets the requirements under the Agreement for the Transfer of Federal Gas Tax Revenues and also allows the Town more freedom when applying for funding and incentives.
As Mayor and Council may be aware, the word sustainable, and the associated implications, has become a permanent part of planning within a municipality. The Bruntland Commission coined the most often used definition for the term and states that sustainable development is that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Sustainability initiatives within municipalities can be found in all areas; from policy creation, to new developments, to redevelopment within a built area, as well as in operations and programs. Creating an overall plan to guide these activities has become an integral part of entrenching sustainability in the corporate municipal culture.
Conditions surrounding the Federal Gas Tax have further provided motivation for plan development. An Agreement for the Transfer of Federal Gas Tax Revenues under the New Deal for Cities and Communities allows municipalities to tailor funding to suit local requirements. Section 8.2 of the Municipal Funding Agreement (MFA) requires that, over the life of the Agreement, municipalities develop or enhance an Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP).
In 2010, The Town of the Blue Mountains published a gorgeous, glossy 126-page book called The Blue Mountains Sustainability Path, wherein the fine print says that its preparation was carried out “with assistance from the Green Municipal Fund, a fund financed by the Government of Canada and administered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities”. The cover, however, proclaims that the book was “created by the people of the Blue Mountains and their friends”. This makes it look as if the voters had full knowledge, input, buy-in, or agreement with the contents of the document. This may not have been exactly the case.
On page 5, the book describes how The Town of the Blue Mountains created its ‘sustainable path’. With funding from the previously mentioned Federation of Canadian Municipalities, it started by having ‘Community Partners’ adopt the same definition of sustainability which spawned Agenda 21, the identical one used by the Town of Milton above. Then the Community Partners formed a Sustainable Path Implementation Steering Committee (ISC) to which they also elected a few members of the public (who must show fealty and “formally declare support for the implementation of The Sustainable Path by signing and submitting an Implementation Declaration”). The terms of reference say the ISC is not a committee of the Town, and that “The Town of the Blue Mountains acts as Stewards of the Plan.” Community collaboration and agreement to the plan are thus rationalized. No municipal voting or referendum on the overall direction or commitments required. It’s likely that most of the communities across Ontario and Canada have employed similar procedures for developing and implementing Agenda 21-inspired “sustainability paths”, guided by ICLEI’s boilerplate solutions and action plans.
ICLEI Canada provides “toolkits” for every conceivable sustainability initiative:
Research has identified a set of tools to promote behavior change: obtaining commitments, using prompts, utilizing social norms, designing effective communications, providing incentives, and removing external barriers. Not all tools need to be utilized in any one campaign, but note that they are most effective when used in combination with each other.
ICLEI’s publication Leadership & Legacy: Handbook for Local Elected Officials on Climate Change is instructive, to say the least. It’s the perfect propaganda and brainwashing document on the subject of (debunked) man-made global warming and catastrophic climate change for the unsuspecting or opportunistic elected official, paid for by your tax money: “This resource was made possible thanks to the generous support of Natural Resources Canada: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Division.”
Another 111-page ICLEI document, made possible again “thanks to the generous support of Natural Resources Canada: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Division”, i.e. your tax money, is Having the Climate Conversation: Strategies for Local Government. If you believe that the notion of man-made global warming is a hoax, and that there is no catastrophic planetary climate change emergency, and that it has all been concocted for nefarious power-grab reasons, and that the IPCC’s lies and data fakery have spawned a huge and lucrative climate change/carbon trading/alternative energy industry, then this handbook makes for very depressing reading indeed. ICLEI provides every communication trick and rationale known to man to help public officials continue to maintain the fiction. For example, on page 52, we read:
Extreme weather events can provide very effective teachable moments where climate change messages become highly relevant to the experiences of an audience. Whether experienced first- hand or remotely in other areas of the world, these events tend to be vivid and dramatic. They also tend to receive considerable attention in the press, which can be used to spark interest and trigger dialogue. Such events can include floods, heat waves, ice and wind storms, or forest fires. These events make it easier to envision a warmer, wetter, and more extreme world, and to anticipate some of the environmental and economic impacts that such a future would bring. As such, extreme events can be effective catalysts for changing behaviour and initiating a dialogue on the need for more adaptive and resilient communities.
Perhaps the most revealing section starts on page 94, in the section called Communication Challenges, especially Challenge #4-Climate Change Uncertainty, on page 99.
Three main areas of uncertainty exist when making climate change projections: The lack of complete knowledge of how climate works; natural variability in the climate system; and the inability to predict what humans will do in the future that has impacts on the climate.
Despite these admissions, the document nevertheless proceeds to explain the IPCC’s ludicrously contorted “Confidence Terminology” and “Degree of confidence in being correct” and its “Likelihood Terminology” and “Likelihood of the occurrence/outcome”, ratings that are somehow supposed to make IPCC predictions believable. You have to see the charts to understand how absolutely feeble and puerile this stuff is, and yet government and the media routinely and dutifully repeat the IPCC’s fabricated, bogus “Extremely likely” rating it has given to its latest fraudulent claims.
The final “Communication Challenge” is odious in its use of language: “Challenge #5-Dealing with skeptics and deniers.” That would be us, and good luck with that!
It ain’t over ’til it’s over
James Delingpole wrote in Watermelons, “And there ain’t nothing you can do about it” but the State of Alabama, for one, did do something:
Alabama became the first state to adopt a tough law protecting private property and due process by prohibiting any government involvement with or participation in a controversial United Nations scheme known as Agenda 21.
Resistance is not futile. Our American neighbours have some advice on how to fight back. The best one is that knowledge is power. Get informed, and become powerful. But you won’t find out much about any of this from the majority of the mainstream media, who take man-made global warming and catastrophic climate change as a given. Do your own research about Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, ICLEI, the IPCC, “green” legislation, “green” NGOs, Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Monitor your local, provincial and federal governments and follow the money.
Help, there’s an ICLEI in my backyard! (Part One)
The cause of the Ontario Liberal government’s industrial wind turbine madness
Why, against all that is rational, ethical, and in the best interests of the people, is the Ontario Liberal government continuing to impose thousands more of the useless, destructive, dangerous, costly, un-green, landscape-blighting industrial wind turbines on large swaths of rural Ontario? The premiers McGunity/Wynne apparently did not do their homework on the efficacy of their green ambitions, which have proven to be economically, environmentally and socially ruinous. And yet Premier Wynne, successor to resigned-in-disgrace McGuinty, is undeterred, charging full blast into further unmitigated disaster, all the while making platitudinous, clichéd promises: ‘My responsibility is to make sure that going forward, we have a better process in place, and that’s what we’re doing.’ It’s a heartless, bullying process of the cruelest sort when you consider the absolute uselessness of it all. All industrial wind turbine operations and development should be stopped immediately.
Why is the Wynne Liberal government wilfully persisting with this monstrous insanity in the face of a colossal failure of fiduciary care? What kind of special craziness is this? What is really going on here?
The answer is unsettling, to say the least. It may be the case that the Ontario Liberal government is in thrall to an international stealth operation that has nothing to do with green, ‘saving the planet’, or improving the lives of the people of Ontario. Here is how author James Delingpole describes the phenomenon:
…the once-worthy cause of environmentalism has been suborned by the international Left as a proxy issue designed to mask its real agenda: the destruction of the capitalist system; global wealth redistribution; the removal of property rights; a gradual takeover by democratically unaccountable Left-leaning bureaucrats and technocrats belonging to organisations like the United Nations and the European Union. Agenda 21 – born at the Marxist Maurice Strong’s Rio Earth Summit – is a key part of this campaign.
Man-made global warming, given as the ostensible rationale for implementing Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, is proving to be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. It is a manufactured global crisis which has corrupted science, scientists, the scientific method, science journals, politicians, governments, most of the establishment media, the once well-intentioned green movement. The majority of the mainstream media, for example, takes it as an absolute given that man-made global warming climate change is a fact. The leading proponent of the global warming fiction is the dishonest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the Climategate scandal confirmed to have been deliberately falsifying scientific data to build the fake case of man-made global warming. The massive operation to lie to the world was aided and abetted by such people as the propagandist fear-monger, profiteer and opportunistic carbon trader Al Gore, and Canada’s own celebrity eco-hypocrite David Suzuki.
Governments and proponents of harmful and costly actions to combat supposed man-made global warming have openly averred they will remain unswayed by the facts. As Forbes reported earlier this year (In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their ‘Science’):
In 1988, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald: “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Even with the latest evidence that does not support a theory of man-made global warming or a positive correlation between rising CO2 levels and temperature, the IPCC does not do the right thing and unequivocally give us the glad tidings. Instead, the IPCC persists in obfuscating the truth and coming up with new fantastical assertions, based on its discredited computer simulations, that the missing warming that didn’t show up in the last ten to 15 years is actually hiding in the deepest nethers of the world’s oceans.
UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, a plan to inventory and control everything and everyone on the planet
So what is the UN Agenda 21, and what does Canadian exiled-in-China Maurice Strong have to do with it? A clue is what Strong, as the then-secretary general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, said at the opening of the UN’s Rio Earth Summit in 1992:
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
The master plan ‘to bring that about’ is the UN’s Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, which is
…a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area.
… the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.
And, further, the UN’s Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is a blueprint for global governance.
To understand the full impact of the implementation of Agenda 21, underway now for more than 21 years, and its effect on our sovereignty, our freedoms, our productivity, our property, our lives, read James Delingpole’s book Watermelons, and/or study this explanation. Agenda 21 has already been responsible for untold hardship, land seizures, and starvation in some of the developing regions of the world.
An absolutely brilliant essay describing the crux of the climate science debate, the red-herring sideshows, the deathly silence of the mainstream media about the scientific data, the tactics of the “regulating class” who would rule us using fake man-made global warming as a cudgel, the narrowly-averted coup for sovereignty-ending global dominance, and the importance of the Internet in really saving the planet and helping to disseminate the truth, is Climate Coup-The Politics (How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control) by Dr. David M.W. Evans.
ICLEI (ick-ly), the unelected organization to implement Agenda 21 locally
At the UN’s Rio Earth Summit, a total of 179 nations, including Canada, officially signed Agenda 21. So how does the UN attempt to do this? At the local level, the answer is with ICLEI, an unelected, non-governmental organization (NGO), created at the UN in 1990. ICLEI Canada may be sitting in your backyard in communities across Ontario and the rest of Canada, stealthily directing its suggested ‘sustainable’, ‘smart growth’, ‘high density mixed use development’, ‘green’ policies and programs agreed to by your municipal councils. ICLEI, at first named the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, now called Local Governments for Sustainability, is
… the world’s leading association of cities and local governments dedicated to sustainable development. We are a powerful movement of 12 mega-cities, 100 super-cities and urban regions, 450 large cities as well as 450 medium-sized cities and towns in 84 countries.
Ontario municipalities influenced by ICLEI – is it lurking in your backyard?
ICLEI Canada lists 12 Ontario towns, cities and regions as members, including the towns of Aurora, Essex, Halton Hills, Oakville, Blue Mountains, the cities of Greater Sudbury, Guelph, Hamilton, Kitchener, Thunder Bay, Toronto, and the Durham Region. With the exception of Aurora, all of these municipalities are also included in the 57 municipalities that are affiliated with ICLEI in another way, namely as part of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities‘ (FCM) Partners for Climate Protection (PCP), which is a partnership between the FCM and ICLEI. Across Canada, over 240 municipalities have joined the FCM/ICLEI PCP program since it began in 1994, and have made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gases and act on climate change. According to the FCM website, the 240 municipalities wedded to the PCP objectives ‘cover all provinces and territories, and account for more than 80% of the Canadian population’.
ICLEI entrenched in your community slowly but surely
Municipalities in Ontario, whether or not they are direct members of ICLEI, or committed to ICLEI via FCM and ICLEI’s PCP program, have had a multi-headed monster of planned ‘sustainability’ foisted on them. As we mentioned, the sustainability dogma has been justified on the basis of the IPCC’s massive hoax of a man-made global warming crisis, and propangandized by the transparent hucksterism of global warm-mongers Al Gore and David Suzuki. The people of Ontario have been saddled with a fake climate change emergency from two directions. One is from the top down, with the imposition of the draconian, democracy-robbing, wind-turbine-proliferating, and financially ruinous Green Energy Act, lobbied for by unelected NGOs like the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association and its Alliance:
To convince the government…The Green Energy Act Alliance brought over European experts on advanced renewable tariffs, and held several events at which high profile environmentalists, such as Dr. David Suzuki, reinforced the call for legislation similar to that in Europe. The Alliance also made numerous recommendations on what the legislation should include, particularly: advanced renewable tariffs, guaranteed access to the grid system and an obligation to purchase the green power produced.
The fake emergency is also insisted on from the bottom up with the low-key, do-good-sounding, multi-channel infiltration of an unelected, international authority, ICLEI, armed with its ‘tool kits’ to colonize its agenda in local governments.
In Watermelons, James Delingpole details the method of infiltration. To begin, local environmental activists with the ICLEI mind-set, ‘spouting the mantra, Think Global, Act Local’, say they want to help. They urge the local council to sign on to the cause of sustainability to combat man-made climate change. On a superficial level, a lot of the ideas sound reasonable, voter-pleasing, progressively ‘green’, and the local councils sign on, in part seduced by the prospect of eligibility for government grants and other financial incentives. Thus local governments are committed to promoting and implementing the ICLEI-suggested agenda, such as ‘smart growth’, ‘high density housing’, restrictions on land use and more.
All of this happens without your vote, probably without your knowledge, and even without the awareness of some of your elected municipal representatives, and most certainly without understanding the full import of this incremental, stealth progression to achieving the Communitarianism aims inherent in the UN’s Agenda 21/Sustainable Development plan.
Part Two will deal with more on ICLEI in your communities.
The Global Warming Doctrine and its phoney planetary emergency
We carry on connecting the dots: back from the economically-useless, environmentally-destructive, socially-corrupting industrial wind turbine in your backyard to the origins of the ideology that is continuing to blind, deafen and dumb down the Ontario Liberal government as it stumbles and bumbles with its failed, billion-dollar boondoggle of an alternative energy program.
In the brilliant speech below (with bold emphases and links added) given to the World Federation of Scientists in August 2012, then President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, discusses the economic consequences of the bogus science and the zealous ideology and propaganda of man-made global warming:
The real problem is not climate or global warming, but the Global Warming Doctrine and its consequences. They may eventually bring us close to a real planetary emergency. Absolutely unnecessarily, without any connection with global temperature. The arrogance with which the global-warming alarmists and their fellow-travellers in politics and the media present their views is appalling. They want to suppress the market, they want to control the whole of society, they want to dictate prices (directly or indirectly by means of various interventions, including taxes), they want to “use” the market.Continue reading to understand that the malevolent factors outlined in this speech are the same ones that have influenced the Wynne/McGuinty failures and driven Ontario straight into its current scandalous economic, environmental and social quagmire.
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The Man-made Contribution to Global Warming Is Not a Planetary Emergency
Magistral Lecture to the World Federation of Scientists
Erice, Sicily, August, 2012
by Václav Klaus, President, Czech Republic
MANY THANKS for the invitation to attend your conference and to speak here. I appreciate that a mere politician, a former economist, has been invited to address this well-known gathering of highly respected scientists. If I understand it correctly, this year’s seminar is devoted to the discussion of the role of science and of “planetary emergencies”.
To the first topic, I want to say very clearly that I don’t see a special role for science which would be different from doing science. I have, of course, in mind “normal science”, not a “post-normal science” whose ambitions are very often connected with political activism. The role of scientists is not in speculating on the probabilities of events that cannot be directly measured and tested, nor in promoting a pseudo scientific “precautionary principle”, nor in engaging in activities which are the proper function not of scientists but of risk managers.
To the second topic, I have to say that as a conservatively-minded person, I am unaware of any forthcoming “planetary emergency”, with the exception of those potential situations which would be the consequences of human failures – of human fanaticism, of false pride, and of lack of modesty. But these are problems of political systems and of ideologies.
This brings me to the topic of my speech. I will try to argue that current as well as realistically foreseeable global warming, and especially Man’s contribution to it, is not a planetary emergency which should bother us.
I am not a climatologist, but the IPCC and its leading spokespersons are not climatologists either. I am content to be a consumer of climatology and its related scientific disciplines. In this respect, I am located – in the economic jargon – on the demand side of climatology, not on the supply side.
There are many distinguished scientists here, and some of them are on the other side. I have no intention to break into their fields of study. By expressing my doubts about a simple causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate, I do not have the slightest ambition to support one or another competing scientific hypothesis concerning the factors leading to global warming (or eventually cooling).
Nevertheless, my reading both of the available data and of conflicting scientific arguments and theories allows me to argue that it is not global warming caused by human activity that is threatening us.
My views about this issue have been expressed in a number of speeches and articles in the last couple of years all over the world. The book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” [1] has already been published in 18 languages, last month even in Indonesian. The subtitle of the book asks, “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” The real problem is not climate or global warming, but the Global Warming Doctrine and its consequences. They may eventually bring us close to a real planetary emergency. Absolutely unnecessarily, without any connection with global temperature.
This doctrine, as a set of beliefs, is an ideology, if not a religion. [2] It lives independently on the science of climatology. Its disputes are not about temperature, but are part of the “conflict of ideologies”. Temperature is used and misused in these disputes. The politicians, the media and the public – misled by the very aggressive propaganda produced by the adherents of the global warming doctrine – do not see this. It is our task to help them to distinguish between what is science and what is ideology.
Believers in the global warming doctrine have not yet presented its authoritative text, its manifesto. One of the reasons is that no one wants to be explicitly connected with it. Another is that to put such a text together would be difficult because this doctrine is not a monolithic concept which can be easily summarized. Its subject matter does not belong to any single science. It presents itself as a flexible, rather inconsistent, loosely connected cascade of arguments, which is why it has quite successfully escaped the scrutiny of science. It comfortably dwells in the easy and self-protecting world of false interdisciplinarity which is really a nondisciplinarity, it is an absence of discipline.
My reading of this new incarnation of environmentalism can be summarized in the following way:
1. It starts with the claim that there is an undisputed and undisputable, empirically confirmed, statistically significant, global, not local, warming;
2. It continues with the argument that the time series of global temperature exhibit a growing trend which dominates their cyclical and random components. This trend is supposed to be nonlinear, perhaps exponential;
3. This trend is declared to be dangerous for the people (in the eyes of “soft” environmentalists) or for the planet (by “deep” environmentalists);
4. This temperature growth is postulated as a solely or chiefly man-made phenomenon attributable to growing emissions of CO2 from industrial activity and the use of fossil fuels;
5. The sensitivity of global temperature to even small variations in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is supposed to be very high;
6. Exponents of the global warming doctrine promise us a solution: the ongoing temperature increase can be reversed by radical reduction in CO2 emissions [3];
7. They also know how to bring about their solution: they want to organize emissions reduction by means of the institutions of “global governance”. They forget to tell us that this is not possible without undermining democracy, the independence of individual countries, human freedom, economic prosperity and a chance to eliminate poverty in the world;
8. They rely on the undefined and undefinable “precautionary principle”. Cost benefit analysis is not relevant to them.
This simple scheme can be, undoubtedly, improved, extended, supplemented or corrected in many ways, but I believe its basic structure is fair and correct.
I do not believe in any one of these eight articles of faith and I am not alone. There are many natural scientists and also social scientists, especially economists, who do not believe in them either. The problem is that most genuine scientists do science and are not willing to discuss this doctrine in the public space.
An additional problem is that natural scientists and social scientists do not talk to each other. They only come into contact with self-proclaimed interdisciplinarists who are very often mere dealers in second-hand ideas. Social scientists, in particular, tend to be silenced by seemingly authoritative statements that “the science is settled”, while natural scientists assume a priori that there is nothing “hard” in the social sciences.
Politicians – after having abandoned other ideologies – heartily welcomed this new one. They became rapidly convinced that playing the global warming card is an easy game to play, at least in the short or medium run. They hoped the voters would appreciate their caring about issues more serious than the next elections. The problem is that the politicians (to say nothing about the media) do not take into consideration the long-term consequences and costs of measures demanded by this doctrine.
How to make a change? I dare say that science itself will not make the change, regardless of its achievements. The Global Warming Doctrine is not based on science. Accordingly, scientific debate itself cannot bring it into disrepute. The course of the worldwide global warming debate more or less confirms this elementary methodological argument. Serious scientific research continues to bring us new pieces of knowledge almost on a daily basis, but it has not brought and will not bring us any decisive breakthrough in the public debate on this topic. Climate is a complex system. In spite of the dreams of believers in general systems theory, any scientific discovery concerning this topic will always be only a partial one.
Can a decisive change come as a result of new empirical data? I doubt it. It is evident that the current temperature data confirm neither the alarmist and apocalyptic views of the believers in the GWD, nor their quasi-scientific hypotheses about the exclusivity of the relationship between CO2 and temperature. The world has not warmed for the last 15 years, but that is too short to shatter the whole carefully built edifice of the global warming doctrine. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that some of us have been arguing that a century in climatology is too short to prove the ongoing global warming as a new long-term trend. That is why, for the sake of symmetry, we must accept that a decade is not sufficient to do the opposite.
Discussing technicalities in more and more depth will not help us, because the supporters of the global warming doctrine are not interested in them. We are not dealing with people who are authentically interested in science, in objective truth, in identifying the causes of incremental changes in temperature. For them, the temperature data are just an instrument in their plans to change the world, to suppress human freedom, to bring people back to underdevelopment. Their ideas are the ideas of ideologues, not of scientists or climatologists. Data and theories, however sophisticated, will not change their views.
I mentioned my economic background. Let me turn attention to what the field of economics – with all of its internal disagreements – says to that:
1. Economists believe in the rationality and efficiency of the spontaneous decisions of millions of individuals. They believe in “the wisdom of people” rather than in the wisdom of governments and of their scientific advisors. They do not deny that market failures happen, but they have many reasons to argue that government failures are bigger and much more dangerous than market failures. They consider that jumping on the bandwagon of the global warming doctrine is an example of a serious government failure which undermines markets, human freedom and human prosperity;
2. Economists, at least since Frederic Bastiat, have considered it their duty to warn policymakers against unintended consequences and against failing to differentiate between what is seen and what is not seen;
3. Economists have at their disposal a rather developed subdiscipline called “energy economics”. They know something about scarcity, as well as about prices, and they have to warn governments against playing with them.
4. Economists believe in rational risk-aversion, not in the precautionary principle;
5. Economists are aware of externalities and have worked with them for a long time. It is their own concept: it was not discovered by environmentalists. They consider it dangerous in unqualified hands. After decades of studying it, they do not see the world as full of negative externalities a priori;
6. Economists base their thinking about intertemporal events on a rather sophisticated concept of discounting. It was the misunderstanding of discounting in the climatologic modeling that brought me into the subject of global warming some years ago;
7. Economists have some undeniable experience with the analysis of time series. Statistical and econometric methods used in economic analysis are full of sophisticated models not used in natural sciences, because these are based mostly on the analysis of crosssection data samples. They know something about the problems with the imperfect quality of data, about measurement errors, about data mining, about the precariousness of all kinds of averages and other statistical characteristics. They also have some experience with computer modelling in complex systems, with pseudocorrelations, with the sensitivity of parameter adjustments, etc. For that reason they are convinced they have the right to comment on the statistical analyses of climatologists. [4]
Based on all that:
First, economists do not see the outcome of the cost-benefit comparisons of CO2 emission reductions as favourably as the adherents of the global warming doctrine. They know that energy demand and supply patterns change only slowly. They see the very high degree of stability of the relationship between manmade carbon dioxide emissions, economic activity and emissions intensity, and possess no hypothesis for expecting a radical shift in this relationship. Emissions intensity (as a macro phenomenon) moves only very slowly and does not make miracles. The very robust relationship between CO2 emissions and the rate of economic growth is here, and is here to stay.
If somebody wants to reduce CO2 emissions, he must either expect a revolution in economic efficiency (which determines emissions intensity) or start organizing a world-wide economic decline. Revolutions in economic efficiency – at least in relevant time horizons – have never been realized in the past and will not happen in the future either. It was the recent financial and economic crisis, not a technological miracle or preaching by the IPCC, that brought about a slight – and probably temporary – reduction in CO2 emissions. The GWD adherents should explain to the people world-wide that to achieve their plans economic decline is inevitable.
Secondly, the relationships studied in natural sciences are not influenced by subjective valuations of the variables in question, nor by any rational (or irrational) behaviour, nor by the fact that people make choices. In social or behavioural sciences, it is more difficult. To make rational choices means to pay attention to inter-temporal relationships and to look at opportunity costs. It is evident that by assuming a very low, near-zero discount rate the proponents of the global warming doctrine neglect the issue of time and of alternative opportunities.
A low discount rate used in global warming models means harming current generations (vis à vis future generations). Undermining current economic development harms future generations as well. Economists representing very different schools of thought, from W. Nordhaus at Yale [5] to K. M. Murphy at Chicago [6], tell us convincingly that the discount rate – indispensable for any intertemporal calculations – should be around the market rate, around 5%, and that it should be close to the real rate of return on capital, because only that rate reflects the true opportunity cost of climate mitigation.
We should not accept claims that by adopting low discount rates we “protect the interests of future generations”, [7] or that opportunity costs are irrelevant because in the case of global warming “the problem of choice does not exist” (p. 104). This uneconomic or perhaps anti-economic way of thinking must never be accepted.
Thirdly, as someone who personally experienced central planning and attempts to organize the whole of society from one place, I feel obliged to warn against the arguments and ambitions of the believers in the global warming doctrine. Their arguments and ambitions are very similar to those we used to live with decades ago under Communism. The arrogance with which the global-warming alarmists and their fellow-travellers in politics and the media present their views is appalling. They want to suppress the market, they want to control the whole of society, they want to dictate prices (directly or indirectly by means of various interventions, including taxes), they want to “use” the market. I agree with Ray Evans that we experience the “Orwellian use of the words ‘market’ and ‘price’ to persuade people to accept a control over their lives” [8]. All the standard economic arguments against such attempts should be repeated. It is our duty to do it.
To conclude, I agree with many serious climatologists who say that the warming we may expect will be very small. I agree with Bob Carter and other scientists that it is difficult “to prove that the human effect on the climate can be measured” because “this effect is lost in the variability of natural climate changes” [9]. Provided that there are no irrational attempts to mitigate the human effect on global temperature, the economic losses connected with the warming we may expect will be very small. The loss generated as a result of the completely useless fight against global warming would be far greater.
Footnotes
[1] Klaus, V.: Modrá, nikoli zelená planeta: Co je ohroženo, klima nebo svoboda?, Praha, Dokořán, 2007; English version: Blue Planet in Green Shackles, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington DC, 2008. Italian version: Pianeta blu, non verde, IBL Libri, Torino, 2009.
[2] I was recently in California. In my hotel room Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” was next to the Bible.
[3] This is what Ray Evans calls „The Theory of Climate Control“, Quadrant, No. 3, 2008.
[4] I would like to mention at least R. McKitrick and S. McIntyre and their attack on the bastion of the GWD, on the so called „hockey stick“.
[5] A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, Yale University Press, June 2008
[6] Some Simple Economics of Climate Changes, paper presented to the MPS General Meeting in Tokyo, September 8, 2008
[7] M. Dore: “A Question of Fudge”, World Economics, January–February 2009, p. 100
[8] The Chilling Costs of Climate Catastrophism, Quadrant, June 2008
[9] Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, New York City, March 2009, p. 23. Professor Carter’s arguments are more developed in his book “Climate: The Counter Consensus”, Stacey International, London, 2010
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