A Planet that Might not Need Saving: Can CO2 Even Drive Global Temperature?

Climate change has ingrained itself so deeply in the public consciousness that it’s likely an article of faith that the foundational science was all conducted, tested and confirmed decades ago. Surely to goodness, exactly how carbon dioxide (CO₂) behaves in the atmosphere is “settled science”, right? That more CO₂ emitted equals more heat and higher temperature is a cornerstone of the ruling scientific paradigm. And yet, finds Jim Mason, the detailed dynamics of how, when and to what degree CO₂ transforms radiation into atmospheric heat are anything but settled. So much remains unknown that recent academic research inquiring whether CO₂ at its current atmospheric concentrations can even absorb more heat amounts to breaking new ground in climate science. If it can’t, notes Mason, then further changes in CO₂ levels not only won’t drive “global boiling”, they won’t have any impact on climate at all.

Electric Vehicles (EVs) – by which are usually meant battery-operated electric vehicles, or BEVs – have long been touted in many countries as the central element in the strategy for stopping global climate change. Canada is no exception. The Liberal government’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Stephen Guilbeault, has mandated that by 2030, 60 percent of all vehicles sold in Canada must be BEVs, rising to 100 percent by 2035. In anticipation of the accompanying surge in BEV sales, the federal and Ontario governments have offered huge subsidies to battery manufacturing companies. But now, EV sales are stagnating and automobile manufacturers that were rushing headlong into EV production have dramatically scaled back their plans. Ford Motor Company has even decided that, instead of converting its Oakville, Ontario plant to EV production, it will retool it to produce the Super Duty models of its best-selling – and internal combustion engine-powered – pickup truck line.

Heating up the rhetoric: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (top left) has declared; prominent voices such as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (top right) insist it’s “settled science” that “humans are to blame” for global warming; this view has been accepted by millions worldwide (bottom). (Sources of photos: (top left) UNclimatechange, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (top right) World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom) Takver from Australia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

A big part of the justification for forcing Canadians into EVs has been that we must “follow the science.” Namely, the “settled” science which holds that the planet’s atmosphere is heating dangerously and that humans are the cause of this via our prodigious emissions of heat-trapping gases – mainly carbon dioxide (CO₂) – which are magnifying the atmosphere’s “greenhouse” effect. Over the past several decades the accompanying political rhetoric has also heated up, from initial concerns over global warming and a threatened planet – terms that at least accommodated political and scientific debate – to categorical declarations of a “climate emergency”. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asserted last year, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

The foundational term “follow the science” is loaded, however. It is code for “follow the science disseminated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” Article 1 of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change actually defines climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity”. Elsewhere the document clearly identities CO₂ emitted through the burning of fossil fuels as the causative human activity. So the UN and IPCC long ago limited the scope of what is presented to the public as a scientific investigation and decided not only on the cause of the problem but also the nature of the solution, namely radically driving down “anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

The worldwide climate change movement has proved remarkably successful in creating what is known as a “ruling paradigm”. This phenomenon is common in many fields and not necessarily harmful. But in this instance, what is billed as a scientific endeavour has strictly limited the role of open scientific inquiry. The “science” that the movement wants humanity to follow is the result of inferential, inductive interpretation of empirical observations, declared to be “settled science” on the basis of a claimed consensus rather than as a result of controlled, repeatable experiments designed not to reinforce the paradigm but to test it for falsifiability, in accordance with the scientific method. This paradigm has allowed Guterres, for example, to claim that “for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.” But it is missing (or attempts to exclude) a key element: rigorous experimentation that subjects the theory on which the paradigm is built to disinterested scientific scrutiny.

Following whose science? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate change as being solely “attributed directly or indirectly to human activity,” particularly the burning of fossil fuels, thus limiting not only the scope of public discourse but pertinent scientific inquiry as well. (Sources: (left photo) Robin Utrecht/abacapress.com; (middle photo) Qiu Chen/Xinhua/abacapress.com; (graph) IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report)

Thankfully, some scientists still are conducting this kind of research and, for those who value and follow properly-done science, the results can be eye-opening. Two recent scientific papers appear of particular interest in this regard. Each is aimed at assessing the role of CO₂ in influencing atmospheric temperature. Nobody doubts whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; the real questions are how much additional radiant energy CO₂ is currently absorbing (such as due to the burning of fossil fuels) compared to the past, and what impact this has on the climate.

One might have thought such work would have been done 30 or more years ago but, apparently, it has not. That additional CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere absorbs additional radiant energy, and that such additions do so in a linear fashion, are two of climate change theory’s critical premises. So it would seem crucial to establish scientifically whether gases emitted due to human activity – like CO₂ – are capable of raising the Earth’s atmospheric temperature and, accordingly, justify their assigned role of causative agent in humanity’s planet-threatening villainy. The papers discussed below thus deal with questions of profound importance to climate change theory and the policy response of countries around the world.

If CO₂ is not actually an effective current driver of atmospheric temperature, the implications are staggering.

How – and How Much – CO₂ Traps Heat in the Atmosphere

The first paper developed a mathematically rigorous theory from first principles regarding the absorption of long-wavelength radiation (LWR) by a column of air as the concentration of CO₂ (or other greenhouse gases such as water vapour, methane, ozone or nitrous oxide) increases in the atmosphere.

The Earth receives solar energy mainly in shorter wavelengths, including visible light. According to NASA, just under half of this incident radiation reaches the ground, where it is absorbed and transformed into heat. Of that half, just over one-third is radiated back into the atmosphere; about one-third of that amount is absorbed by heat-trapping gases, including CO₂. (The air’s main constituents of oxygen and nitrogen are essentially transparent to both incoming visible radiation and outgoing LWR). Importantly, CO₂ can only absorb meaningful amounts of LWR in two specific bands, but in these bands, it can absorb all of it.

The greenhouse effect, oversimplified and distorted: This seemingly easy-to-understand info-graphic downplays the fact that a large proportion of incoming solar radiation returns to space, omits the key fact that there would be no life on Earth without the natural greenhouse effect, and leaves out the most significant greenhouse gas of all: water vapour. (Source of image: EDUCBA)

The paper employs formulae whose explanation exceeds the scope of this article, but in simplified terms the theory predicts that at some concentration – designated as “C” – one-half of the LWR in the absorbable band is absorbed. Importantly, the theory postulates that the absorption of LWR does not increase in a linear fashion along with the increase in atmospheric CO₂. Instead, as the gas concentration increases, the incremental amount absorbed decreases. At twice the C value – 2C – only three-quarters of the incident radiation would be absorbed. And at 3C, seven-eighths.

By 10C, 99.9 percent of the absorbable LWR is being absorbed. In effect, the atmosphere has become “saturated” with the gas from a radiation-absorption perspective and further increases in CO₂ have negligible effect on absorption. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 1. As one can see, it is distinctly non-linear in nature, but is instead exponential, asymptotically approaching 100 percent absorption.

Figure 1: Theoretical graphical depiction of absorption of incident radiation as a function of the concentration of an absorbing gas, in this case forming the core of a theory concerning how long-wave radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric CO₂. (Source of graph: Jim Mason)

This graph could appear quite scary at first glance. After all, as more CO₂ is added to the atmosphere, more LWR is being absorbed, suggesting more heat is being retained instead of escaping to outer space. So doesn’t the Figure 1 curve suggest that, with CO₂ concentrations rising and potentially doubling during our era compared to pre-Industrial times, global warming is indeed occurring, CO₂ is indeed the cause, and the IPCC’s warnings are justified? The answers depend on what the value of C actually is for CO₂ and what the concentration of CO₂ is in the atmosphere today. In other words, on where the Earth now sits along that curve, and where it sat when the pre-Industrial era came to an end. That, in turn, will require actual physical experiments – and these are covered later.

Figure 2: View from end of air column showing random positions of radiation-absorbing gas molecules, with red circles representing their associated radiation-absorbing cross-section. (Source of illustration: Jim Mason)

The non-linear LWR/absorption relationship can be understood conceptually as follows. Each physical CO₂molecule has what amounts to a surrounding area of radiation-absorption capability to specific bands of LWR. This area is “opaque” to those bands. The LWR rising from the Earth’s surface is absorbed if it travels onto this area; outside of it, it is not. The areas can be thought of as little opaque spheres around each molecule, which when viewed externally look like circles. The area of these circles is referred to as the radiation absorption cross-section.

Viewed from the end of the column of air, the circular cross-sections formed by all the CO₂ molecules in the air column will effectively add up to some overall fraction of the air column’s cross-sectional area becoming opaque to the LWR. Radiation that strikes any of that area will be absorbed; radiation travelling through the rest of the column’s cross-sectional area will pass into space.

At some concentration of molecules – dubbed C in this essay, as mentioned – half of the column’s cross-section will be opaque and absorbing the incident LWR. This is illustrated in Figure 2. It is of relevance that because the gas molecules are randomly present in a column of air, when viewed from the end they will overlap; the overlapping areas cannot absorb the same radiation twice. C is the concentration at which the effective opaque area, taking into account all the overlapping, is one-half the column’s cross-sectional area.

If the gas concentration is then increased by C, i.e. is doubled, the new molecules will also have an associated opaque area equal to half of the column’s cross-sectional area. Half of this, however, will coincide with the half that is already opaque, so will have no impact. The other half, or one-quarter of the column’s cross-section, will become newly opaque and start absorbing LWR. If the concentration is again increased by C, the new molecules will also have a total opaque area equal to one-half the column cross-section, but three-quarters of this will coincide with already-opaque area so only one-quarter of that one-half, or one-eighth in total, will become new radiation-absorbing opacity.

Figure 3: Illustrative depiction of radiation-absorption cross-section illustrating how the transparent area, where additional molecules would be exposed to the radiant heat source and, therefore, would absorb radiation, is progressively reduced as more molecules are added; after several more iterations, this leads to radiation absorption “saturation” after which no further radiation is absorbed no matter how many more absorbing molecules are added, since all radiation in that wavelength band is already being absorbed. (Source of illustrations: Jim Mason)

This progression is illustrated in Figure 3, but is perhaps more easily visualized in Figure 4. Here, the half of the cross-sectional area of air column that was rendered opaque by the CO₂ molecules is shown as being all on one side of the column. The opacity caused by each successive addition of C number of CO₂ molecules is shown in a different colour and is positioned to highlight the impact on the remaining transparent cross-sectional area. As can be seen, each successive increase in concentration of C increases the amount of radiation absorption by decreasing amounts – by a factor of two. After ten such increases, the transparent fraction of the column would be reduced to 0.1 percent of its area so that 99.9 percent of the incident radiation is being absorbed.

Although the foregoing description is conceptually correct, a full understanding of natural processes and of the theory requires taking several other considerations into account, most of which are outside the scope of this discussion. One aspect that is important to understand: as mentioned above, CO₂ and other greenhouse gases only absorb outgoing radiation efficiently in particular regions (bands) of the electromagnetic spectrum; they absorb little or none in other bands and are therefore “transparent” to any radiation in those bands. The above discussion applies to the regions of the spectrum where the gas can absorb radiant energy at 100 percent.

Figure 4: Alternative depiction of the reduction in incremental radiation-absorbing area as the absorbing gas concentration is increased in multiples of the concentration that absorbs 50 percent of the incident radiation. As in Figure 3, successive sets of molecules are indicated by red, orange and yellow with another set added, induced in green, while blue represents the remaining transparent area. (Source of illustration: Jim Mason)

Another aspect – which becomes important in the following section – is that the Earth’s surface temperature varies by location, weather, time of year and time of day. This will affect how much radiant energy goes out in various wavelengths in various places, and the absorbing gas’s absorption capacity. While the theory holds that this does not alter the basic non-linearity of absorption nor the “saturation” phenomenon, it could alter the point at which “C”, or 50 percent absorption, is reached – something that can be tested through experimentation.

Net of all this is that if the theoretical formulation is correct, one would expect to see a curve similar to Figure 1 for any individual greenhouse gas – or combination of gases – and a radiant energy source of any temperature, with the curve’s specific shape depending on the gas and/or mixture of gases and the temperature of the radiant energy source. From such a curve, it would be possible to determine the concentration at which the gas is absorbing 50 percent of the maximum energy that it will absorb when its concentration is increased to a very large value.

The paper that develops this theoretical formulation is entitled Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases and was co-authored in June 2020 by William A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer. It is highly technical and would be very difficult for anyone without a strong background in mathematics and science, ideally physics, to understand. Accordingly, the accompanying figures in this article that illustrate the paper’s key ideas in a format accessible to the layperson were produced by me, using information derived from the paper’s figures and text.

‘In order to properly understand the greenhouse effect one must take into account the nonlinearity of the effect of increased concentration of greenhouse gases,’ Watkins notes. ‘The source of the nonlinearity may be thought of in terms of a saturation of the absorption capacity of the atmosphere in particular frequency bands.’

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Van Wijngaarden is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto with a more-than 40-year academic track record and nearly 300 academic papers to his credit, while Happer is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University in New Jersey who had a 50-year-long academic career and nearly 200 papers to his credit. Both authors also have numerous related academic achievements, awards and organizational memberships, and have mentored hundreds of graduate students. Happer happens to be an open skeptic of the IPCC/UN climate change “consensus”, while Van Wijngaarden has testified in a court case that the IPCC’s climate models “systematically overstate global warming”, an assertion that is incontrovertibly true.

Although their paper was not peer-reviewed and, to date, has not been published in a major academic journal, and although both scientists have endured smears in news and social media as climate skeptics or “deniers”, there has not been any known attempt to refute their theory following publication, such as by identifying errors in the logic or mathematics of their theoretical formulation. Accordingly, their paper is in my opinion an example of good science: a coherent theory aimed at explaining a known phenomenon using rigorous scientific and mathematical principles and formulae, plus supporting evidence. It is also, critically, one that can be subjected to physical experimentation, i.e., is disprovable, as we shall soon see.

Running hot: William A. van Wijngaarden (top left) and William Happer (top right), two highly credentialed physicists with outstanding academic track records, are among scientists who are openly critical of the IPCC’s accepted climate models which, as 40 years of temperature observations have clearly shown, “systematically overstate global warming”. (Source of bottom graph: CEI.org)

This opinion is supported by the fact that the same phenomenon of non-linearity and absorption saturation, along with an associated equation referred to as the Beer-Lambert Law, is discussed by Thayer Watkins, a mathematician and physicist, and professor emeritus of economics at San José State University. “In order to properly understand the greenhouse effect one must take into account the nonlinearity of the effect of increased concentration of greenhouse gases,” Watkins notes. “The source of the nonlinearity may be thought of in terms of a saturation of the absorption capacity of the atmosphere in particular frequency bands.”

Subjecting the LWR Absorption Theory to Experimentation – Or, Science the Way it Should be Done

The second paper was published in March of this year and reports on experiments conducted to test van Wijngaarden and Happer’s theory, in accordance with the standard scientific method, using several different greenhouse gases. If the experiments were properly designed to realistically duplicate natural processes and if they then generated results inconsistent with the theory, then the van Wijngaarden/Happer theory could be considered disproved. If the experiments produced results consistent with the theory, the theory would not be proved but would increase in plausibility and justify further experimentation.

Figure 6 clearly shows experimental curves that are qualitatively the same as the theoretical curve in Figure 1 derived from van Wijngaarden/Happer’s paper and the equation noted in Watkins’ website discussion.

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The experimental setup is depicted in Figure 5. It was designed to allow the concentration of CO₂within a column of gas (in kilograms per square metre of column area, or kg/m²) to be varied in a controlled way and to measure the fraction of the incident radiation that is absorbed at any concentration. The “column” of gas was contained within a cylinder comprised of a 1-metre length of 150 mm diameter PVC pipe, with polyethylene windows at either end to allow ingress and egress of the radiation. CO₂ concentration was changed by injecting measured amounts of the gas via a central valve. Water valves on the cylinder bottom were used to allow an identical volume of gas to escape, thereby maintaining the pressure in the cell. (The background gases into which the CO₂ was mixed are unimportant since these remained constant, with only the CO₂concentration varied.)

Figure 5: Diagram of the laboratory setup for measuring the absorption of thermal radiation in CO₂. (Source of illustration: Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases, Figure 7)

The radiation source was a glass vessel with a flat side containing oil maintained at a constant temperature. Adjacent to the flat side was a copper plate with a graphite surface facing the gas cell. This ensured that the radiant source, as seen by the cell, was uniform in temperature over the cross-section of the cell and had the radiation profile of a black body at the chosen temperature. The selected temperatures of 78.6°C and 109.5°C were, states the paper, “chosen randomly but in a manner that allowed reliable measurement of radiation intensity and demonstrated the influence of temperature on the saturation mass value.”

Results for CO₂ are illustrated in Figure 6, which is taken directly from the paper. The two selected temperatures are separately graphed. Figure 6 clearly shows experimental curves that are qualitatively the same as the theoretical curve in Figure 1 derived from van Wijngaarden/Happer’s paper and the equation noted in Watkins’ website discussion. From the graph it is possible to determine that the concentration of CO₂ that results in absorption of 50 percent of the absorbable radiation – the value of C introduced earlier – is about 0.04 kg/m² for a LWR temperature of 78.6 °C (the one that is closer to the actual average temperature of the Earth’s surface, which NASA lists as 15 °C).

Figure 6: Absorption of incident radiation versus concentration of CO₂, with concentration expressed as a weight per cross-sectional area of atmospheric column (kg/m2), using two experimental LWR temperatures. Absorption is effectively measured as the fraction of the total incident radiation that is absorbed in the test column, which is determined by comparing it to an identical test column that maintains the zero-point concentration throughout. The reason that A saturates at less than 1 is because there are many wavelengths in the incident radiation that CO₂ does not absorb, which pass through the column regardless of the CO₂ concentration, with only the other wavelengths being absorbed. (Source of graph and mathematical formula: Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases, Figure 8)

As the paper notes, the chosen temperatures, while higher than the Earth’s mean surface temperature, facilitate reliable measurements of the radiation intensities and clearly show the effect of temperature on the saturation mass value or, equivalently, the value of C. Specifically, the graphs clearly show that the value of C decreases as the temperature of the radiant source decreases (although with only two points, the nature of the relationship cannot be reliably determined). The implications are discussed in the following section.

This experimental paper is entitled Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases and was co-authored by Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński and Jarosław Młyńczak. It was published in the journal Applications in Engineering Science and cites copious sources, though it does not appear to have been peer-reviewed. Kubicki is an assistant professor in the Institute of Optoelectronics in the Military University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland. Kopczyński appears to be a colleague at the same institution specializing in the atmospheric distribution of aerosols, while Młyńczak is an adjunct professor at the same institution. All three have authored or co-authored a number of scientific papers.

Is CO₂ Even Capable of Driving Global Temperatures Higher?

According to a reputable atmospheric tracking website, on September 2, 2024 the Earth’s atmospheric CO₂concentration was 422.78 parts per million (ppm). Each ppm worldwide equates to a total atmospheric weight of 7.82 gigatonnes (Gt). The cited concentration therefore amounts to 3,300 Gt of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the Earth’s surface area is 5.1 x 10¹⁴ m², assuming a uniform CO₂ distribution, this concentration can be translated into the units used in the above-cited experiment as 6.48 kg/m² across the Earth’s surface.

This figure might appear at first glance to be a misprint, as 6.48 kg/m² is approximately 160 times the CO₂ C value of 0.04 kg/m² – the concentration that absorbs 50 percent of the incident LWR. Six-point-six times the C value – the level that absorbs 99 percent of the incident LWR – is still only 0.264 kg/m². Beyond this, further increases in gas concentration have no impact on absorption or, hence, on temperature. The Earth’s current concentration of CO₂ is, accordingly, over 24 times as high as what is needed to achieve the 99 percent absorption value established by experimentation.

Long past the point of change? The Earth’s currently estimated CO₂ concentration of 422.78 parts per million (ppm) is 27 times the estimated CO₂ saturation level; even in the pre-Industrial era, CO₂ concentrations were more than 12 times that level, suggesting the current rise in CO₂ concentration is incapable of driving global temperature. (Source of graph: climate.gov)

The implications of this are quite staggering. According to climate.gov, the CO₂ concentration in the pre-Industrial era was 280 ppm and prior to that it oscillated between about 180 ppm and 280 ppm. This means that even the pre-Industrial CO₂ concentrations were between 64 and 100 times the C value, as well as being more than 10 times the concentrations needed to reach 99 percent absorption. The CO₂ concentration, then, was saturated multiple times over with respect to LWR absorption. A glance back at Figure 2 once again makes it clear that at neither of these CO₂concentration ranges (covering present times and the pre-Industrial era) were the changes to CO₂ concentration capable of having any substantive impact on the amount of LWR being absorbed or, consequently, on atmospheric temperatures – let alone the Earth’s whole climate.

Further, they probably never did. According to the published paper Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO₂ Over Phanerozoic Time, the CO₂concentration has never been less than 180 ppm during the so-called Phanerozoic Eon, which is the entire time during which all the rock layers in the geological column, from the Cambrian upwards, were deposited. So there has never been any point during this significant span of Earth’s history when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was not “saturated” from a LWR absorption perspective. Consequently, throughout that entire period, if the new theory and recent experimentation are correct, changes in CO₂concentration have been incapable of having any discernible impact on the amount of LWR absorbed by the atmosphere – or, accordingly, on the global climate.

It’s true that increasing CO₂ concentration could be capable of driving global atmospheric temperature higher – but only if it began at vastly lower concentrations than exist at present or at any known previous time. If such a time ever existed, it is long past. At the current order of magnitude in its concentration, CO₂ simply appears not to be a factor. If further experimentation also generates results consistent with the van Wijngaarden/Happer theory, it would appear that CO₂is incapable of having any impact on atmospheric temperature at all. It cannot, accordingly, be the primary source of “global warming” or “climate change”, let alone of a “climate emergency” or “global boiling”.

While experimental results consistent with a theory do not prove the theory to be true, and replication of the initial results by the three Polish researchers would be very desirable, the experimental results to date are certainly inconsistent with the current ruling paradigm that CO₂ emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the cause of current climate change and, indeed, that the effect of each increase in concentration is accelerating. According to the rules of decision-making in science, unless the experiment can be shown to be mal-designed or fraudulent, the inconsistency between experiment and theory proves, scientifically, that the current paradigm is false.

The incidence and recession of the Ice Age (top), the Medieval Warm Period (bottom left) and the more recent Little Ice Age (bottom right) are just a few examples of global temperature fluctuations that happened independently of the current era’s burning of fossil fuels or increasing CO₂ levels. Shown at top, northern mammoths exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of North American Mammals; bottom left, peasants working on the fields next to the Medieval Louvre Castle, from The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry, circa 1410; bottom right, Enjoying the Ice, by Hendrick Avercamp, circa 1615-1620. (Source of top photo: wallyg, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Moreover, the new theory and experimental result are consistent with numerous empirical observations that are also inconsistent with the ruling IPCC/climate movement paradigm. Examples abound: the occurrence and recession of the Ice Age, the appearance and disappearance of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and the Little Ice Age – all without any CO₂ from the burning of fossil fuels – the steady decline in atmospheric temperatures from 1940 to 1975 while CO₂ levels steadily increased, and the relative flattening of atmospheric temperatures since about 2000 despite CO₂ levels continuing to increase. But if the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere has long been above “saturation”, then its variations have no real impact on the climate – as these observations indicate – and something else must have caused these climate variations.

‘Despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence,’ the three Polish co-authors write in their experimental paper.

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To this can be added the failed predictions of the temperature models and of the dire consequences of not preventing further CO₂ increases – such as the polar bears going extinct, the Arctic being free of ice, or Manhattan being covered by water, to list just a few. But again, if the atmosphere has long been CO₂-saturated with respect to LWR absorption, then the additional CO₂ will have no effect on the climate, which is what the failure of the predictions also indicates.

These results, at the very least, ought to give Climaggedonites pause, although probably they won’t. For the rest of us, they strongly suggest that EVs are a solution in search of a problem. It may be that the technology has a place. The alleged simplicity ought to have spinoff advantages, although the alleged spontaneous combustibility might offset these, and the alleged financial benefit might be simply the consequence of government subsidies. Left to its own devices, without government ideological distortions, the free marketplace would sort all this out.

Climate scare à la carte. (Source of screenshots: CEI.org)

More importantly, these results ought to cause politicians to re-examine their climate-related polices. As van Wijngaarden and Happer put it in their paper, “At current concentrations, the forcings from all greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H₂O and CO₂ are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude…” The term “forcings” refers to a complicated concept but, at bottom, signifies the ability (or lack) to influence the Earth’s energy balance. The words “forcings…are saturated” could be restated crudely in layperson’s terms as, “CO₂ is impotent.”

Kubicki, Kopczyński and Młyńczak are even more blunt. “The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO₂ and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence,” the three Polish co-authors write in their experimental paper. “In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge.”

If, indeed, the CO₂ concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere is well beyond the level where increases are causing additional LWR to be absorbed and, as a consequence, changing the climate, then all government policies intended to reduce/eliminate CO₂ emissions in order to stop climate change are just as effective as King Canute’s efforts to stop the tides. The only difference being that Canute was aware of the futility.

Jim Mason holds a BSc in engineering physics and a PhD in experimental nuclear physics. His doctoral research and much of his career involved extensive analysis of “noisy” data to extract useful information, which was then further analyzed to identify meaningful relationships indicative of underlying causes. He is currently retired and living near Lakefield, Ontario.

Related Topics:#C2CJournal #ClimateScience climatechange CO2AffectOnTemperature CO2TemperatureDriver feature JimMason

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Why the Trump Administration is Unlikely to Impose Import Tariffs on Canadian Oil and Natural Gas

Published on November 25, 2024

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From the C2C Journal

By George Koch

Few things about Donald Trump’s recent election are causing worse disarray worldwide than the incoming U.S. President’s vow to erect a tariff wall against all imports in order to spur a resurgence in American manufacturing might. Canada’s up to $200-billion-a-year worth of oil and natural gas exports lie at stake, feared to be among the new Administration’s tariff targets. But how strong is the basis for such fears? Probing the political psychology of Trump’s economic and trade policies and examining the intricate mechanism that is North America’s vast integrated oil and natural gas sector, George Koch illuminates the role Canadian energy can play in the U.S. economic revival and the Trump team’s geopolitical drive for global “energy dominance”.

Tariff,” U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump was fond of saying with a smirk, “it’s my favorite word.” It was enough to curdle the blood and wobble the knees of political leaders, trade officials and business groups around the world – not least in export-dependent Canada. This was one Trumpian campaign line not swatted aside by critics as bombast, trolling, dog-whistling to the “extreme right” or unhinged fantasy. And with evident good reason.

After all, it was President #45 who after rising to political prominence largely on his promise to go after “bad trade deals” had upended 70 years of U.S. trade policy by imposing tariffs on Chinese (and some Canadian) imports and demanding to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was returning candidate Trump who picked as his running mate J.D. Vance, whose life story growing up amidst family wreckage in rural Ohio is almost the embodied result of a hollowed-out manufacturing economy, and who today is an articulate frontman for the something-less-than-free school of international trade. And it is President-elect Trump who has nominated prominent advocates of “America-first” trade policy – in which tariffs are central – to become his Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of the Treasury.

Tariff king: Consistent with his first presidency, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to pursue an “America-first” trade policy this time. Shown, Trump speaking during an America First Policy Institute gala at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate, November 2024. (Source of photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Few sectors in any country stand to suffer greater damage from U.S. tariffs than Canadian energy. Canada’s fossil fuel production is at record levels, with crude oil averaging 5.8 million barrels per day so far this year and natural gas well over 18 billion cubic feet per day. Exports of these key commodities (plus natural gas “liquids” like ethane and propane) are valued at more than $134 billion per year – another measure has it at US$160 billion – with exports of petrochemicals generating billions more. Canada’s oil and gas sector is directly responsible for $210 billion of the nation’s GDP and 25 percent of its exports.

Yet while the industry today is a marvel of leading technology, deep expertise and operating efficiency, Canadian energy remains costly to produce, heavily taxed and saddled with ever-increasing regulations, such as the recently announced federal “emissions cap”. Moreover, the remoteness of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin – the world-scale producing region that covers most of Alberta plus northeast B.C., southern Saskatchewan and a corner of Manitoba – imposes costs not incurred by U.S. producers. Constraints on export capacity effectively trap oil and gas within Western Canada, dampening regional benchmark commodity prices. And the industry remains over-dependent on the U.S. market; the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline will enable at best 20 percent of Canada’s crude oil production to access offshore markets, while the country’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal is not yet operational.

This critical industry thus sits exposed and vulnerable to U.S. tariffs. A levy of 10-20 percent – the rate Trump has said he wants to slap on all imports – would be catastrophic, reducing Canada’s energy exports by an estimated 22 percent, causing domestic pricing to collapse and, with it, any new capital investment. Thousands would lose their jobs and government deficits would soar. Rory Johnston, a Toronto-based oil market researcher and founder of Commodity Context, describes Canada as “uniquely vulnerable to market pressure posed by U.S. refineries.”

“Uniquely vulnerable”: Canada’s oil and natural gas production is setting records and generating 25 percent of the country’s overall export earnings; a 10-20 percent U.S. import tariff could wreak catastrophic damage. (Sources: (graph) CAPP; (left photo) MikoFox, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (right photo) Green Energy Futures, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

But is the threat of such a tariff imminent – or even credible? The evidence to date – partial and indirect though it may be – suggests not. More profoundly, the logic of U.S. self-interest and of Trump’s stated policy objectives points away from tariffs on Canadian oil and natural gas.

First the evidence. Trump had barely been declared victor in the November 5 Presidential election before voices on both sides of the border began talking about creating a tariff “exemption” for Canadian fossil fuels. Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce in Trump’s first term, called fears of such a tariff “overblown” and said he “can’t imagine” his former boss imposing them. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also said she was “not worried”. Then again, she also wrangled for herself invitations to key events such as next month’s meeting of the Western Governors’ Association, as well as Trump’s Inauguration in January, to make sure Alberta’s message gets through.

Similar views have been expressed by other knowledgeable sources from industry, trade and investment organizations. They note that Trump has done this very thing before; the renegotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement of 2019 notably excused oil and natural gas flows from any tariffs. A further favourable indication is Alberta’s recent admission to the U.S. Governors’ Coalition for Energy Security, a group of 12 states that have banded together to cooperate on policies that promote reliable and affordable energy.

Guys who get it: Among Trump’s Cabinet nominees are North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (left) and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright (right), both known for their vigorous support of oil and natural gas development and free North American trade in energy products. (Sources of photos: (left) Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (right) Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Another positive sign is that alongside Trump’s pro-tariff Cabinet picks have come nominations of individuals with a deep understanding of North America’s petroleum sector. Douglas Burgum, a successful software entrepreneur and currently Governor of North Dakota, is slated to become Secretary of the Interior, chairman of the newly created National Energy Council and a member of the U.S. National Security Council. Burgum’s primary mandate is to promote innovation and investment by cutting through the thicket of new restrictions on oil and gas development that President Joe Biden had imposed. Chris Wright, founder of Liberty Energy and an unashamed industry booster, has been nominated to become what one U.S. commentator describes as “the most knowledgable secretary of energy the nation has ever had.” Lee Zeldin, another pro-industry figure, has been tapped to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

The fundamental objective underlying all of Trump’s trade policy is to strengthen American manufacturing. It is something he has articulated since before entering politics in 2015; it can accordingly be regarded as sincere.

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Equally noteworthy is that, in contrast to the widespread and bipartisan clamouring for tariffs on Chinese imports, nobody in the U.S. is demanding that Trump target Canadian energy. Even Bernie Sanders, the avowedly socialist Senator from Vermont who wants a “windfall tax” and higher government royalties imposed on all oil producers, appears indifferent to import tariffs. And while U.S. environmental groups don’t like any free trade in oil and gas, they devote most of their energy to pushing their government towards restrictive European/Canadian-style climate-change policies or a new UN “climate damages tax.” The American fossil fuel sector, meanwhile, is not only in favour of tariff-free trade in energy products – including with Canada – it opposes tariffs on anything.

The evidence to date, however hopeful it may seem, remains inconclusive. Trump prides himself on his unconventional and unpredictable nature. This is what causes America’s adversaries – most notably Communist China – the greatest consternation. Regardless of his previous decisions on trade issues, if Trump thinks imposing tariffs on Canadian energy imports make sense now, he will do so.

“Manufacturing superpower”: The fundamental objective underlying Trump’s trade policy is to reverse the long slide of American industry through decades of globalization – mainly by targeting offshore manufacturing. Shown at top and middle, Trump at campaign event at Dane Manufacturing in Waunakee, Wisconsin, October 2024; at bottom, an assembly line for automobile engines. (Sources of photos: (top and middle) AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall; (bottom) Alliance Employment Services)

Logic and self-interest, however, also point away from such tariffs. The fundamental objective underlying all of Trump’s trade policy is to strengthen American manufacturing. It is something he has articulated since before entering politics in 2015; it can accordingly be regarded as sincere. Trump wants to halt and if possible reverse that sector’s long slide through decades of offshoring and globalization that crippled or wiped out whole industries all over the U.S., especially in the Midwest heartland. These are the places Trump promised to help, this lies at the core of his slogan “Make America Great Again”, and these are many of the people who sent him to the White House the first time and stuck by him through the depths of his ignominy following his second, failed Presidential run. This year, Trump ran on a platform to transform his country back into “it’s my favorite word.”.

To accomplish that dramatic – some would say grandiose if not unachievable – objective, Trump intends to punish countries that use subsidies, favouritism and other policies to unfairly advantage their own industries and flood the U.S. with underpriced goods, harming domestic producers and preventing new ones from starting up. China may be hit with tariffs as high as 60 percent. He will also target imports believed to threaten U.S. national security (such as electric vehicles vulnerable to hacking by foreign enemies) while working to reduce dependence on imports of strategic materials or components critical in wartime. And he wants to close loopholes allowing China to bypass U.S. tariffs by locating production in proxy countries – especially the two countries adjoining the U.S.

Mexico has gone quite far down the road of partnering with Chinese companies, and Trump’s key advisors have warned that Mexico will be held to account for it. Canada is certain to be scrutinized as well, but can probably allay similar U.S. concerns by avoiding becoming a backdoor and way-station for Chinese goods, something Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland already promised last week. This will require several key policy commitments, as well as competent, rigorous enforcement (always a questionable assumption for this Liberal government). It will also be necessary to continue matching U.S. tariff-related moves against China, as Canada did earlier this fall in imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs and aluminum.

Closing the back door: Trump is determined to eliminate loopholes allowing China to bypass U.S. tariffs through “transshipment”, i.e., locating assembly plants in Mexico or Canada. Shown at top, Chinese company setting up facility in northern Mexico; at bottom, transshipment occurring in Texas. (Sources of photos: (top) Kosuke Shimizu/Nikkei; (bottom) T. Hammonds MSW, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In addition to tariffs, Trump’s critical policies in restoring American manufacturing competitiveness will be reducing taxes, lifting the regulatory burden and, as his campaign platform puts it, ensuring the flow of “Reliable and Abundant Low Cost Energy”. By “energy” one should mainly read “crude oil and natural gas” – something Trump describes over and over as “liquid gold”. (Ending the demonization of coal is also a part; as well there is likely to be a modest revival in nuclear power.) In addition to supporting American industry, cheap energy is intended to help ease inflation and improve the lot of hard-pressed consumers, homeowners and wage-earners.

Among the associated promises and policies Trump has mentioned are to cancel the Biden Administration’s planned pro-electric vehicle policies (similar in effect to Canada’s outright mandate) and its moratorium on new LNG export facilities, end permitting of offshore wind turbines, reopen offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, unlock Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, reopen federal lands to drilling and hydraulic fracturing, pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord (for the second time, in Trump’s case) and otherwise end the Biden-era’s “Green New Deal”, which Trump derides as a “green new scam”.

During his election-night acceptance speech, Trump pointedly told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his pick to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and formerly a vocal anti-oil activist, to keep his nose completely out of energy issues. Chris Wright, his recently announced nominee to be Secretary of Energy, has written a 180-page paper which contends that “Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a better goal than Net Zero 2050.”

Trump’s energy policy includes cancelling President Joe Biden’s moratorium on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, reopening offshore areas to oil and gas drilling and unlocking Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. Shown at left, Trump visits the Cameron LNG liquefaction terminal in Hackberry, Louisiana, 2019; at middle, an oil drilling platform at Green Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico; at right, the National Petroleum Reserve. (Source of right photo: mypubliclands, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Trump’s energy policy, in short, is “drill, baby, drill” – often written in all-caps. Where might Canadian-produced oil and natural gas fit into this picture? Right in the middle, as it turns out – figuratively and literally.

It cannot be said often or loudly enough: inexpensive, reliable and plentiful energy is essential to economic competitiveness, national prosperity and modern civilization. But many Western governments – Canada’s among them – act as if it is optional. Right now, industries in authoritarian China use low-cost coal-fired electricity to produce the pricey solar panels and wind turbines that are exported to Western countries where they produce exorbitantly expensive electricity that in turn renders their domestic industries uncompetitive. Industrial users in Great Britain, for example, currently pay five-and-a-half times as much for electricity as those in the U.S., while German industry pays more than three times as much. Both countries are seeing their industrial base evaporate before their eyes. If Canada remains on its current policy path, it will be next.

Oil and natural gas are critical inputs that make American manufacturers more competitive, reduce the operating costs of nearly any business and allow American consumers to pay less to fuel their vehicles and heat/cool their homes. Canadian oil and natural gas not only do not undermine Trump’s economic and trade policies, they strengthen and advance them.

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Trump is unshakeably determined to avoid that for his country – and this is where Canadian energy enters the picture. Crucially, Canadian fossil fuels are not manufactured goods except in the narrowest technical sense. Unlike cars, smartphones, toys, shoes or furniture, they are commodities rather than finished products. They aren’t produced with unfair subsidies. They don’t contain secret chips enabling the Chinese to spy on U.S. military bases. They don’t threaten to displace or bankrupt age-old American companies, throw thousands of employees out of work or transform once-thriving cities into ghostly husks.

They are the very opposite: critical inputs that, by being priced competitively, make American manufacturers more competitive, reduce the operating costs of nearly any business and allow American consumers to pay less to fuel their vehicles and heat/cool their homes. Canadian oil and natural gas not only do not undermine Trump’s economic and trade policies, they strengthen and advance them.

Integrated system: Western Canada’s producing region supplies the U.S. heartland with crude oil and natural gas, where it can be refined and distributed, meeting the Trump test of (as his campaign platform puts it) “Reliable and Abundant Low Cost Energy”. Shown at top, an oil refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota. (Sources: (photo) Pexels; (map) CAPP)

This beneficial role is accentuated by some geographical quirks. Although North America’s vast interlinked system of energy pipelines is a near-miracle of technology, operating efficiency and reliability, it is not perfect or seamless. Major consuming regions tend to get most of their oil, natural gas and liquids from the nearest producing region; why ship the stuff farther than you must? Consequently, the U.S. Midwest and portions of the “near South” and northeast are heavily supplied from Canada.

If this supply were to be curtailed or disrupted by tariffs or other measures, manufacturers in these dependant regions would suffer immediately as wholesale and consumer prices jumped substantially. Regional oil refineries, gas/liquids facilities and petrochemical plants would pay more for their feedstock, face shortages as Canadian producers “shut in” no-longer-profitable production, and/or would operate below capacity or inefficiently as they sourced sub-optimal feedstock from elsewhere.

Even a 10 percent tariff would raise the average retail gasoline price across the U.S. by 5 percent, according to commodity pricing analysts at Montreal-based BCA Research. But the regional effects would be much greater. Regional prices not only for gasoline and heating fuel, but on any goods related to oil and natural gas, would rise far more than is implied by a mere 10-20 percent import tariff. And keep in mind, much of this region is MAGA country. Over time, some pipelines that currently ship product out of the Midwest might need to be “reversed”, no longer exporting to the Gulf of Mexico and Northeast regions but drawing energy from them. The U.S. might even need to increase imports from geopolitical adversaries like Venezuela or dodgy and corrupt African states.

All of this would be damaging not only to American consumers, business and manufacturing industries, but to U.S. foreign policy and even to the U.S. energy industry itself, the ostensible “competitor” that one might intuitively think stands to benefit from import tariffs. It hardly needs to be said that this would run counter to the new Administration’s objectives.

Despite being dubbed “dirty oil”, “unsustainable” and a “sunset industry”, the energy sector has led America’s productivity gains over the last decade while providing well-paying jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans – including Hispanics, Blacks and American Indians. (Source of bottom photo: Sahara Group)

In addition to its roles in supporting manufacturing and consumers, America’s oil and gas industry is seen by Trump and key members of his nascent Administration as a competitive advantage for the economy as a whole, as a major source of wealth-creation in its own right and as a geopolitical weapon. For this to make sense, one needs to know a few things about this industry. In contrast to its image as “dirty oil”, “unsustainable” or a “sunset industry”, oil and natural gas is among the most technologically advanced, innovative, entrepreneurial and dynamic industries in the economy. This sector led the entire American economy in productivity gains over the previous decade, as the accompanying graph indicates.

The million or more jobs it provides across the continent are by turns technically intricate, dangerous, physically hard, intellectually stimulating – and very lucrative. Just as more and more Canadian First Nations are becoming proponents of natural resource development because they recognize the benefits to themselves, the U.S. industry provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of Hispanics, Blacks and American Indians – an impressive number of whom just voted for Trump.

This is all thanks to one of the most remarkable industrial turnarounds in history: America’s transformation from an insatiable importer of oil and natural gas, its domestic production sagging by the year towards apparent oblivion, its producing sector increasingly demoralized and decrepit, into a country that’s not only energy self-sufficient but has leapfrogged to a net exporter. All in the dizzying time-frame of barely a dozen years, starting in 2008, the year U.S. crude oil production reached its nadir of a mere 5 million barrels per day. (Not long after, just as U.S. oil production was showing sparks of revival, President Barack Obama contemptuously declared that, “Anybody who tells you that we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or just isn’t telling you the truth.”)

By last year the average rate had soared to 12.9 million barrels per day which, the U.S. Energy Information Administration recently pointed out, represented “more crude oil than any country, ever.” U.S. production isn’t just higher than Saudi Arabia and Russia’s – it’s nearly 30 percent higher. How this came about is its own story. But suffice it to say that Canadian visionaries and companies played an important role. So, interestingly, did prospective energy secretary Wright and his company, Liberty Energy, which helped pioneer the development of formerly inaccessible shale reservoirs by using horizontally drilled wells completed with multiple hydraulic fractures. In short, this transformation has fundamentally changed the energy game for the U.S., domestically and internationally.

Since its nadir at 5 million barrels per day (mmbpd) in 2008, U.S. crude oil production has soared to an average of 12.9 mmbpd in 2023 – more than any other country in history and trumping Saudi Arabia and Russia. Concurrently, exports of liquefied natural gas have zoomed from zero a decade ago to 12 billion cubic feet per day. (Sources of graphics: (top) eia.gov; (bottom) S&P Global, retrieved from The New York Times)

Here again, imported Canadian energy is neither a competitive threat nor a hindrance – but a source of economic value. The quirks of geography combined with the refusal of successive Canadian governments to ensure that Canada’s oil and natural gas could access global markets have created what amounts to a gargantuan, continent-spanning arbitrage mechanism that enriches American companies, investors and governments. In brief, cheap Canadian crude oil, natural gas and liquids are drawn into the U.S. from the north, enabling domestically produced crude oil, natural gas, liquids, refined fuels and petrochemicals to be exported from the vast Gulf of Mexico energy complex to hungry global markets, where they access premium international prices.

This has become a multi-hundred-billion-dollar opportunity that American entrepreneurs and financiers have exploited with alacrity. Vast investments in LNG export facilities have taken the U.S. from zero LNG as recently as 2014 to approximately 12 billion cubic feet per day this year, a figure forecast to zoom to 20 billion cubic feet per day within two years (the U.S. will thus be exporting more gas than Canada produces in its entirety). U.S. net exports of refined fuels (much more valuable than crude oil) are generating more than US$60 billion annually. The associated processing and export facilities themselves employ thousands.

Trump’s ‘liquid gold’ will soothe American consumers, grease the skids of American manufacturing, fill the financial tanks of American investors and set economic bonfires upon America’s enemies.

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Clearly, the more Canadian oil and natural gas can be imported from the north, the more American energy – including value-added refined/processed products – can flow from the Gulf of Mexico outward to the world. Indeed, Trump himself has said he would like to reinstate the federal permit for the much-fought-over, 800,000-barrel-per-day Keystone XL pipeline, which he approved early in his first term but was then cancelled by Biden.

The stunning U.S. energy turnaround in barely 15 years plus the current prospect of enormous further growth enable Trump and his policymakers to credibly talk about elevating the U.S. to global “energy dominance”. That is to say, an America liberated from dependency on imported oil not only can act unconstrained by the need to placate oil-producing nations that don’t share U.S. interests, but can use its own energy exports to enrich itself and support allied countries. It can also stare down oil-producing adversaries like Iran and Russia, leaving them weaker, contained and less able to fund wars, terrorism and other foreign mischief. Trump’s stated policy to curtail oil production misused by dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela also implies that Canadian energy exports will be more highly sought-after than ever. More Canadian energy strengthens U.S. energy dominance and weakens its enemies by helping to hold down international commodity prices.

Golden opportunity: The Trump Administration’s stated goal of global “energy dominance” appears achievable, weakening its oil-producing adversaries while holding open the door to Canada – if Canada’s political leadership is intelligent enough to seize the moment. Shown, Trump shakes hands with UFC Champion Jon Jones at Madison Square Garden, New York, 11 days after his election victory. (Source of photo: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The U.S. is already the world’s energy giant. Its goal of “energy dominance” is therefore serious and realistic. Standing atop it all will be Trump, the energy dominator: his “liquid gold” will soothe American consumers, grease the skids of American manufacturing, fill the financial tanks of American investors and set economic bonfires upon America’s enemies. That simply does not sound like an Administration about to place tariffs on the very imports that will help it make this happen. Far more likely, the 47^th President’s energy policy will offer Canada a golden opportunity to play a supportive role as a neighbour, friend, trading partner and ally – and to profit greatly from doing so.

George Koch is Editor-in-Chief of C2C Journal.

Source of main image: heritage.org.

C2C Journal

Net Gain: A Common-Sense Climate Change Policy for Canada

Published on November 16, 2024

Todayville

From the C2C Journal

By Robert Lyman

Most Canadians have come to agree that the federal carbon tax needs to go. But while the rallying cry “Axe the Tax!” has been a deadly partisan tool for Pierre Poilievre, it does not constitute a credible election campaign platform, let alone a coherent environmental policy for a new government. The Conservative Party needs to develop both, writes Robert Lyman. The election this past week of Donald Trump as U.S. President creates an urgency to remake Canada’s climate policy on more realistic, sensible grounds. Drawing upon the pragmatic, economics-driven approach of the Copenhagen Consensus, Lyman proposes a middle path that discards the uncompromising, self-destructive ideology of the Justin Trudeau government while recognizing that most Canadians won’t accept doing nothing.

The Justin Trudeau government has made reducing greenhouse gas emissions the pre-eminent goal of public policy. In 2021 it passed the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, binding present and future governments to a process intended to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to set incremental five-year emission reduction targets and plans towards that end. Net zero essentially means eliminating almost all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the consumption of hydrocarbons – crude oil, natural gas and coal – in the Canadian economy, and doing so within 29 years of the new law’s passage.

This presents an immense challenge and is effectively impossible in the intended timeframe. Canadians currently rely on fossil fuels to meet about 73 per cent of their energy needs. These energy sources provide services essential to Canadians’ incomes and wellbeing: secure, reliable and affordable heat, lighting and motive power to move people and goods, as well as the food, medicine and other critical services to sustain them. Without these energy sources, Canadians would all be far poorer, colder, less mobile and less able to compete in the global economy.

Impossible dream: With fossil fuels currently meeting 73 percent of Canada’s overall energy requirements and fulfilling critical needs from heating to medical services, getting to “net zero” emissions anytime soon seems delusional. (Sources of photos: (top two) Pexels; (bottom two) Unsplash)

At least four trends are coming together to make the present policy course untenable:

The Canadian public is becoming far more aware of the financial costs of the emission reduction measures, including especially the impact of “carbon” taxes (technically, taxes on fossil fuel-related emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂)) and higher electricity rates from switching away from lowest-cost generating options. Federal climate-related spending, by the government’s own admission (see page 125 of the pdf version of the linked document), is now in the range of $20 billion per year, while the economic cost of working towards net zero has been credibly estimated at $60 billion per year.
The public – notably young people and seniors – are becoming more aware of the effects of climate-related regulations and taxes on the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, and on employment opportunities.
There is a wide and growing disparity between the promises of politicians to reduce emissions and what is actually happening; no national emissions “target” has ever been met or is likely to be met.
Rapidly growing emissions in many developing countries (especially China and India), which now collectively generate 68 percent of the world’s total, demonstrate that net zero will not be achieved globally. Furthermore, reductions achieved regardless of cost in Canada (which produces approximately 1.5 percent of global emissions) will yield negligible global benefits in terms of temperature or weather.

The Temptation of a Different Kind of “Net Zero” Policy

Based on these trends, it might be argued that Canada should perform an immediate policy U-turn and cancel all federal measures founded upon any claim of impending climate catastrophe. This would give new meaning to the term “Net Zero Policy”: a government whose climate change policy is to have no policy. Enthusiasm for such an approach must, however, be tempered by the recognition that it runs counter to the position held by all the main political actors in Canada, including notably the mainstream media. Policy, like politics, best evolves in the realm of compromise and consensus.

“Axe the Tax” has its limits: Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre (top) has pledged to get rid of the hated consumer carbon tax and eliminate comprehensive electric vehicle mandates, but he’s expected to maintain the pricey “producer” carbon tax on industrial emitters. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Paul Daly; (middle) WSDOT, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom) Shutterstock)

Thus, one should consider where might lie a “middle ground” that could garner the support not only of those strongly opposed to all elements of current policy – which can loosely be described as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s core base – but also of moderates, i.e., people who do not doubt the general notion of climate change but who shy away from radical or ruinous policies to deal with it. This disparate category likely includes much of the business community, what used to be called “Red Tories”, some centrist Liberals disaffected with Trudeau and some working-class NDP voters suspicious of that party’s current direction.

Politics at its most basic will require that the Conservatives have something to put in their campaign platform entitled “climate change”, “emissions” or, more broadly, “the environment”. So far, Poilievre has been cobbling together policy ideas seemingly ad hoc. As practically every Canadian knows, he pledges to get rid of the consumer carbon tax – the one everyone pays at the gas pump or on their natural gas heating bill.

Less understood, however, is that Poilievre is widely believed to intend to maintain the “producer” carbon tax on industrial emitters – an equally steep, equally escalating levy that is burdening industry with billions of dollars in additional taxation. Additionally, Poilievre has promised to get rid of some major Liberal-imposed regulations – like the mandate to transition to entirely electric vehicle production by 2035 – but would rely even more heavily on other technocratic regulations at the industrial level.

Some of these policies make sense on their face; some might not make sense at all. What is clear, though, is that the Conservatives do not have a complete climate change and/or environmental policy – at least not one they have shared with the public. Eliminating the consumer carbon tax as an unfairly imposed cost and needless drag on the economy as well as a symbol of climate policy over-reach would be an important and politically popular way to demonstrate a more common-sense approach.

It is not enough, however, and it would leave a new government vulnerable to the accusation that it lacked a coherent and well-considered approach. Attempting to govern without a clearly articulated overall policy on climate would politically damage even a solid majority government; in a minority situation, it could be enough to destabilize the government altogether and prompt an early election.

A Better Way

There is a better way – a middle way between the current ideological approach and a no-policy-policy. It is inspired by the work of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. This ongoing project seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare in a range of areas, from battling diseases like malaria to advancing national economic development to addressing climate change, through methodologies based on welfare economics, which centres on cost-benefit analysis.* The Copenhagen Consensus was conceived and launched in the early 2000s by Bjorn Lomborg, the famous Danish environmentalist. In each policy area examined, subject matter experts present potential policy solutions, which are evaluated and ranked by a panel of economists, thus emphasizing rational prioritization through economic analysis.

Of 15 possible policy measures to respond to climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus panel ranked carbon taxes the very worst – something that’s of obvious relevance to Canada. Also of interest in the Canadian context was the experts’ strong endorsement of research into carbon storage.

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In 2009 the Copenhagen Consensus assembled an expert panel to consider the best responses to climate change and rank them as priorities. The panel was asked to answer the question: “If the global community wants to spend up to, say $250 billion per year over the next 10 years to diminish the adverse effects of climate changes, and to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?”

In the resulting report, the top priorities generally focused on investments in scientific research and technology development and commercialization, while measures to reduce CO₂ emissions using currently available technologies were ranked lower, because these were found to incur high costs in relation to the expected environmental benefits. Of 15 possible policy measures to respond to climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus panel ranked carbon taxes the very worst – something of obvious relevance to Canada. Also of interest in the Canadian context was the experts’ strong endorsement of research into carbon storage (something that Alberta and Saskatchewan are very enthusiastic about), planning for adaptation and the expansion and protection of forests.

A better way: Founded by Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, the Copenhagen Consensus Center uses rational economic analysis to advance global welfare in areas from battling disease to addressing climate change. (Source of left photo: TED Conference, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Copenhagen Consensus approach to climate policy presumes that human-induced climate change is occurring and that it probably will have adverse effects, but it contends that other social and environmental issues are more serious threats to humanity and should be addressed as higher priorities. Its careful analyses came to recognize the limitations of currently available technologies in achieving a cost-effective transformation of the global energy system. This is why it advocates prioritizing a significant increase in funding of basic science to accelerate the discovery and commercialization of new emission-reducing technologies. It also places priority on measures taken to adapt to (rather than seek to prevent) potential climate changes and to enhance the overall resiliency of the energy system.

Climate Change Policy Implications for Canada

The Copenhagen Consensus’ cost-benefit-based prioritization of climate change policies is applicable to Canadian policy-making and governance approaches in several important and broad areas, at not only the national but international and inter-provincial levels. What follows is a brief, simplified discussion of the most important aspects, keeping in mind that some of these are large issues in themselves and not resolvable overnight.

Remove the Pressure of Overly Ambitious and Arbitrary Targets

Canada has never met any of the targets set at the international or national levels regarding either the magnitude of emission reductions or the arbitrary dates by which these would be reached. The use of such arbitrary and unrealistic targets should be reduced or avoided. A first step in applying the Copenhagen Consensus’ recognition of the immense difficulty and complexity of achieving an energy transition, along with the need for new technologies whose development does not occur according to a government-controlled timetable, would be for Canada to postpone the “Net-Zero by 2050 goal” to at least 2070 if not 2100.

Adopt a Multi-Goal Framework

Canadian climate policy would henceforth be developed within a multi-goal public policy framework. Rather than making emission reduction the preeminent goal, the federal government would seek to optimize climate policy alongside multiple other public policy objectives including economic prosperity (growth, employment, investment and trade), social harmony, environmental quality, financial responsibility, energy security, defence and promotion of good federal-provincial and international relations, among others.

“Arbitrary targets”: Applying Copenhagen Consensus rational analysis would mean abandoning or postponing Canada’s “Net-Zero by 2050” goal and focusing instead on practical environmental improvement projects. Shown at bottom, the Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Plant in Edmonton, Alberta. (Sources of photos: (top) JessicaGirvan/Shutterstock; (bottom) Urban Edmonton)

Prioritize the Real Environmental Problems

Despite what one reads and hears in the mainstream media, Canada has very high environmental quality and the areas that need improvement are relatively few. These include solid waste management, sanitation/wastewater treatment and sulphur dioxide emissions per unit of GDP. Most of these are provincial and/or municipal responsibilities, but the federal government can play a role in funding capital investments. Where the federal government has jurisdiction and must regulate, regulatory efforts should focus on addressing tangible environmental problems with practical, cost-beneficial, affordable solutions to further clean up the air, water and soil, and the results should be measured and tracked by comprehensible and publicly available metrics.

Adhere to Technological Realism

A common-sense approach would recognize that energy transitions take a long time. The pace of transition away from fossil fuels must, accordingly, be guided by the rate at which new scientific discoveries can be applied to the development of new products and services and then commercialized to the point of true economic viability. A common-sense policy approach in Canada would abandon the presumption that governments can and should attempt to hasten the technology commercialization process by “picking winners”, granting large subsidies to favoured firms or otherwise trying to centrally plan the changes in the energy economy. Instead, the new approach would entail higher levels of government funding for basic research and development.

The federal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan could add about $55,000 to the average cost of a new home built in Canada. A new Canadian climate policy would abandon this plan and leave the establishment of building codes, zoning and construction approvals in the hands of provincial and municipal governments.

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Promote Energy Security and Reliability

A new Canadian climate policy would repeal or substantially amend the Clean Electricity Regulations that mandate the elimination of hydrocarbon-based electricity generation by 2035, a goal that this recent study concludes is completely unfeasible. It would also require that future federal or provincial regulation of GHG emissions be based upon a systematic review of the potential impacts on the viability and competitiveness of Canadian industry. Finally, it would eliminate the impending federal cap on oil and natural gas industry emissions (which was unveiled on November 4 and imposes a 35-percent rollback in GHG emissions by 2030) and take other measures to ensure that Canada, which has the world’s third-largest crude oil reserves as well as world-scale natural gas reserves, can continue to increase energy production to meet the needs of domestic and export markets.

The steep cost of compliance: The Justin Trudeau government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan will add an estimated $55,000 to the average price of a new home, pointing to the need to eliminate costly and pointless regulation. (Source of photo: pnwra, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Reduce Housing Costs

According to the Fraser Institute, the federal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan could add about $55,000 to the average cost of a new home built in Canada. Even more stringent and costly regulations would undoubtedly follow after 2030 to meet the net zero target. A new Canadian climate policy would abandon this plan and leave the establishment of building codes, zoning and construction approvals in the hands of provincial and municipal governments. This would contribute meaningfully to addressing Canada’s housing affordability crisis.

Legislate Wisely

A new policy would include amending or repealing the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. The entire law is a litigation “trigger” because it gives climate activist organizations weapons that they can use to engage in “lawfare” – the strategic use of legal proceedings to hinder, intimidate or delay an opponent.

Depoliticize the Regulation of Energy Infrastructure Projects

A new policy would return the regulation of energy infrastructure and rate-making to one that takes place at arm’s length from government political and policy direction. This would require changes to the federal minister’s control of the Canadian Energy Regulator. It would also be highly desirable to reform the system of environmental assessment and review by placing strict time limits on the duration of infrastructure project reviews. Today, regulatory reviews of major energy projects often take five years or longer to complete, and some have taken over 10 years.

The federal Impact Assessment Act (having last year been found largely unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada) would be substantially amended so that the resulting federal law returns to being a review of the national environmental impacts (and any local impacts as these pertain to areas of clearly federal jurisdiction) rather than an exercise in jurisdictional duplication and an assessment of consequences for the entire planet.

A common-sense climate change policy would also streamline, limit the scope of and quicken the currently often 10-year-long environmental assessment process. Shown, the LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C. under construction, January 2024. (Source of screenshot: Northcoast Drone/YouTube)

The principle of “whoever hears the evidence should decide” would be brought back into the law, with an appeal to the courts on a question of law only and an appeal to the federal Cabinet on a question of policy. This is how the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has worked for several decades.

The arbitrary and harmful bans on oil tanker traffic on the Pacific Coast and on new hydrocarbon exploration and development in Canada’s Far North would be removed.

Promote Federal-Provincial Harmony

In the pre-2000 period, federal climate policy explicitly recognized that measures should not entail undue costs and burdens on any region or province. This went out the window in the Trudeau era and became a leading cause of federal-provincial discord. A new policy would re-institute this as a cardinal principle. Among other things, it would also be essential to ensure that there was ample coordination and consultation with all affected provinces before any new international commitments were made.

Focus on harmony: To promote more efficient cross-border trade, Canada’s regulatory standards should align with those of the U.S. The incoming Donald Trump Administration is likely to discard electric vehicle mandates and “clean” fuel standards, policy shifts that will affect Canada. (Sources of photos: (top) AP Photo/Evan Vucc; (bottom) Sundry Photography/Shutterstock)

Harmonize Canadian and United States Regulatory Regimes

It would be recognized that to facilitate more seamless cross-border trade with Canada’s largest trading partner, the United States requires that regulatory standards and codes developed in Canada, especially involving the regulation of fuel efficiency/emissions intensity of vehicles and appliances, be closely aligned with U.S. federal standards. It is widely expected that the incoming Trump Administration will discard electric vehicle mandates and “clean” fuel standards, policy shifts that clearly will affect Canada. Although this is not to suggest that Canada allow its policies to be dictated by the U.S., close attention should be paid.

Facilitate Truly Responsible Investing

Canada has committed to adopting the new Sustainability Disclosure Standard under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), which imposes mandatory sustainability-related disclosure and climate-related financial disclosure. These and similar regulatory initiatives are increasing the burden on Canadian firms to report not only their own estimates of GHG emissions but also to try to guess those of their suppliers and customers. This is absurd on its face and creates another trigger for endless litigation when such guesses turn out wrong, prompting accusations of fraud. A new Canadian climate policy would severely restrict the use of such accounting measures.

Fairly soon, the current Official Opposition is likely to take on the responsibility of actually governing. To respond effectively to the economic and political threats posed by climate catastrophism, advocates of policy change must go beyond merely targeting individual policies for cancellation based on complaints about the harm they do.

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Build Adaptation and Resilience

A new Canadian climate policy would place greatly increased, perhaps primary, emphasis on measures to increase the resilience of Canadian infrastructure and economy to future climate changes. Adaptation measures can avoid or reduce adverse future impacts by, for example, changing human behaviour in advance, such as land use rules that prohibit construction of buildings in flood-prone areas, or by taking actions to protect valued resources, communities and landscapes. Many adaptation measures also increase resilience towards climatic variability such as droughts and storms, making them potentially attractive policies even in the absence of long-term human-induced changes. They can pay dividends to society even if all the concerns about climate change turn out to be greatly exaggerated.

A new climate change policy should include measures to increase the resilience of Canadian infrastructure and the economy to future climate changes. Shown, (at top) a storm in coastal Nova Scotia; (at bottom) flooding in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan; (bottom) The Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward)

Who Might Implement the Copenhagen Consensus in Canada?

It is clear that the Trudeau government is incapable of such a significant policy reform as summarized above. It is at least conceivable that, were Trudeau to be replaced before the next election, his successor might consider some of these measures; conceivable, but not likely. Most probably, the task of implementing such broad policy changes would fall to a new Conservative federal government. The party’s promises to “Axe the Tax” correctly address the mounting public concern about the impact of carbon taxes on the cost of living and competitiveness of Canadian business, as well as the unfairness with which they have been applied.

Fairly soon, however, the current Official Opposition is likely to take on the responsibility of actually governing. To respond effectively to the economic and political threats posed by climate catastrophism, advocates of policy change must go beyond merely targeting individual policies for cancellation based on complaints about the harm they do. They must think through what a realistic, credible, politically palatable – and cost-effective – climate policy framework would look like. The time to start is now.

*Cost-benefit analysis is a tool economists use to compare the estimated costs and benefits (or opportunities) associated with a proposed undertaking. It involves tallying up all the current and projected long-term costs and benefits, estimating the financial equivalent of those for which dollar equivalents are not available, and converting everything into present-value terms using discount rates. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then the decision-makers should rethink whether to proceed.

Robert Lyman is a retired energy economist who served for 25 years as a policy advisor and manager on energy, environment and transportation policy in the Government of Canada.

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