generalspeaking

Environmental Bona Fides : Carbon Tax

"Global energy consumption was up 2.3 percent in 2018, roughly double the average annual growth rate since 2010."
"Fossil fuels met almost 70 percent of the new demand for the second year running, with demand for natural gas especially strong. Global natural gas consumption was up 4.6 percent, while oil rose 1.3 percent and coal increased 0.7 percent."
"China, India and the United States accounted for 70 percent of all energy demand and 85 percent of the net increase in emissions."
"In the United States, natural gas demand spiked ten percent ... an increase roughly equivalent to the gas consumption of the United Kingdom. That spike was complemented by strong demand for oil, especially from the petrochemical sector. American oil demand was up by 540,000 barrels per day in 2018, the largest increase in the world. That resulted in a 3.1 percent increase in U.S. carbon emissions."
International Energy Agency report, Paris

"I often hear concerns from investors about Canada's falling position in the world."
"Our capacity to grow and advance our economy is stalling."
Dave McKay, chief executive, Royal Bank

Former President Barack Obama was an especial darling of the U.S. environmental groups. They saw him as one of their own, steeped in concern over the environment, concerned over Global Warming and with them in a concentrated effort to stem the tide of growing carbon emissions blamed as human-made threats to nature as we know it, the effects of petrochemicals, their extraction and energy use deleterious to the future of the planet.

Protesters said Obama's entire presidential legacy rests on the Keystone XL project. Photograph: James Fassinge

At a time when the United States was using massive amounts of dirty coal to keep its energy needs afloat, and fracking was proliferating to the alarm of geologists, President Obama sturdily kept faith with his nation's confirmed environmental activists, portraying himself as committed by delaying and then finally refusing to allow a Canadian pipeline to be built to carry Canadian crude to refineries on the U.S. West Coast. At the very same time, American pipelines were given the green light.

American environmental organizations fighting the Keystone XL pipeline say there’s no climate-change plan Canada could possibly adopt that would make them back down.

So that's that. Canada now has an heir to Barack Obama's legacy as the Green Knight, with Justin Trudeau tilting at the very same windmills and in the process halting any progress in Canada to convey Western oil and gas to Eastern Canada, content to preserve the tradition of Canada importing Saudi oil and leaving Alberta oil in the ground, on the way to ostensibly curing Canada of its addiction to heating winter homes and operating factories with fossil fuels.

Justin Trudeau's administration has now succeeded in bring a carbon tax to all provinces in the country and its territories. This puts the Liberal government's aspirational stamp of environmental progressivism indelibly in place. As the Environment Minister in the Liberal Cabinet stated: "It's a fact that pricing pollution is the most cost-effective way to cut pollution". Others argue that without carbon there would be no life on Earth.

The federal Environment and Climate Change department recently released its latest study which claims that Canada has been warming at twice the average rate of the entire world. Canada, scolded retiring environment commissioner Julie Gelfand, is not doing enough to combat climate change. What the Environment and Climate change report also stated is that the warming is "effectively irreversible"; that what happens outside our borders will fashion our future.

China and India are using more coal than ever before. With three billion people combined in China and India alone, Canada's modest 37 million population hell bent on reducing reliance on traditional energy resources to run the economy the question is what good is Canada's reduction in use and associated strategy of taxing energy in the face of those gigantic populations and their countries' determination to grow their economies irrespective of signing on to the Climate Change agreement?

Not to be discouraged, and happy to do its part, Canada forges ahead with two bills meant to further hamper fossil fuel extraction, refining, delivery and use. Certain beyond any doubt to be costly to the country's prosperity, but assured to be pleasing to environmental concerns, Canada's climate change policies are lonely initiatives in a larger sea of complete indifference by the very countries whose use and abuse of the environment proceeds apace.

Global Energy and C02 Status Report: Oil -- International Energy Agency

Labels: Canada, Carbon Tax, Climate Change, Energy, Environment

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 10, 2019