Energy
‘Anti-human’: Tucker Carlson, Michael Shellenberger blast John Kerry’s COP28 speech
From LifeSiteNews
‘I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult,’ Shellenberger told Carlson.
American conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson and journalist Michael Shellenberger recently blasted Democratic climate czar John Kerry for giving an “anti-human” speech at this year’s United Nations COP28 “climate change” conference.
Making the strong statements during the Monday edition of his X (formerly Twitter) show, Carlson played a clip of Kerry, who serves as U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, explaining at the COP28 conference in Expo City, Dubai on Sunday that he sees the global elimination of coal-fired power plants as an essential measure in tackling so-called “climate change.”
Ep. 44 Another half-demented 80-year-old yelling about things he doesn’t understand. These are our leaders. They don’t care about our future because they don’t have one of their own. pic.twitter.com/iylpXALJjZ
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 4, 2023
Calling Kerry and many in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration “half-demented 80-year-olds,” Carlson pointed out that despite the pleas of Kerry and others like him, other nations are moving full-stream ahead with the burning of coal as a means of powering their countries, and thereby sustaining their populations and economies.
“China, for example, burns more coal each year than the rest of the world combined… this year, the Chinese have generated 14 percent more electricity from coal than they did last year; same thing in India,” Carlson said, adding that other large nations such as Indonesia have also ramped up their use of coal.
Carlson argued that this presents a hypocrisy among the Biden administration, which often talks about “climate change” and the purported role of the West in the creation of the so-called crisis while ignoring the behavior of China, India and other nations.
Continuing his show, Carlson interviewed journalist Michael Shellenberger about the behavior of Kerry and other members of the political establishment, inquiring what he sees as the true motivation behind the climate “religion.”
Shellenberger replied by accusing the global “elite” of having an outright hatred for humanity, pointing to the fact that politicians, including the British prime minister, took private jets to the recent U.N. conference in Dubai, all the while increasing energy costs for ordinary citizens and harping on the need for their citizens to reduce energy consumption.
“I think that what’s so different now is that the elites are just openly and blatantly expressing their hatred of humankind, particularly the hatred of working people, of poor people,” Shellenberger told Carlson “the obvious alternative to coal is natural gas… if this was actually about ‘climate change’ you would just produce more natural gas because it produces half the carbon emissions of coal.”
“But John Kerry and other climate activists are against natural gas,” Shellenberger continued. “And they have been stifling the production of natural gas… it’s so obviously hypocritical but even worse than that I think it’s really anti-human… it really is about being against humankind, about being against humanity.”
Pointing to the fact that cheap and reliable energy is one of the main factors that keeps the masses out of poverty, particularly in places like India and China, Shellenberger characterized the West’s plans as akin to a “death cult,” in which Western leaders use “apocalyptic” language about the climate in an attempt to stop or limit the production of cheap energy, regardless of its human consequences.
“I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult.”
Carlson replied in agreement, telling Shellenberger that far from being motivated by the health of the environment, the true goal is “tyranny.”
Kerry, under former President Barack Obama, was on the team that negotiated the Paris Accords, which demanded that successful, wealthy countries drastically cut back emissions. It was never voted on in the U.S. Senate as an official treaty. President Donald Trump pulled the country out of the accords, but the U.S. has rejoined the agreement under the Biden administration.
“A global transition away from oil, gas, and coal would not only harm U.S. economic development but also afflict harm on the poorest nations,” according to Alex Epstein, an energy policy commentator. “Fossil fuels are so uniquely good at providing low-cost, reliable energy for developing nations that even nations with little/no fossil fuel resources have used fossil fuels to develop and prosper. E.g. South Korea (83% FF), Japan (85% FF), Singapore (99% FF),” Epstein wrote recently on X.
The net-zero movement led by COP is particularly dangerous to Africa and other poor regions.
Consider: ⅓ of the world uses wood/animal dung for heating/cooking. 3B use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator.
Only FFs can provide the energy they need to develop. pic.twitter.com/u2f3uZpvPc
— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) November 29, 2023
“Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels,” he wrote. “No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive FF use. The reason is that development requires energy, and FFs are a uniquely cost-effective, including scalable, source of energy.”
LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac, who has researched this topic for decades, says “implementing Kerry’s policies would result in hundreds of millions more deaths than they would save. That is the real intention,” he says, “world depopulation on a massive scale.”
Alberta
REPORT: Alberta municipalities hit with $37 million carbon tax tab in 2023
Grande Prairie. Getty Images photo
From the Canadian Energy Centre
Federal cash grab driving costs for local governments, driving up property taxes
New data shows the painful economic impact of the federal carbon tax on municipalities.
Municipalities in Alberta paid out more than $37 million in federal carbon taxes in 2023, based on a recent survey commissioned by Alberta Municipal Affairs, with data provided to the Canadian Energy Centre.
About $760,000 of that came from the City of Grande Prairie. In a statement, Mayor Jackie Clayton said “if the carbon tax were removed, City property taxes could be reduced by 0.6 per cent, providing direct financial relief to residents and businesses in Grande Prairie.”
Conducted in October, the survey asked municipal districts, towns and cities in Alberta to disclose the amount of carbon tax paid out for the heating and electrifying of municipal assets and fuel for fleet vehicles.
With these funds, Alberta municipalities could have hired 7,789 high school students at $15 per hour last year with the amount paid to Ottawa.
The cost on municipalities includes:
Lloydminster: $422,248
Calgary: $1,230,300 (estimate)
Medicine Hat: $876,237
Lethbridge: $1,398,000 (estimate)
Grande Prairie: $757,562
Crowsnest Pass: $71,100
Red Deer: $1,495,945
Bonnyville: $19,484
Hinton: $66,829
Several municipalities also noted substantial indirect costs from the carbon tax, including higher rates from vendors that serve the municipality – like gravel truck drivers and road repair providers – passing increased fuel prices onto local governments.
The rising price for materials and goods like traffic lights, steel, lumber and cement, due to higher transportation costs are also hitting the bottom line for local governments.
The City of Grande Prairie paid out $89 million in goods and services in 2023, and the indirect costs of the carbon tax “have had an inflationary impact on those expenses” in addition to the direct costs of the tax.
In her press conference announcing Alberta’s challenge to the federal carbon tax on Oct. 29, 2024, Premier Danielle Smith addressed the pressures the carbon tax places on municipal bottom lines.
“In 2023 alone, the City of Calgary could have hired an additional 112 police officers or firefighters for the amount they sent to Ottawa for the carbon tax,” she said.
In a statement issued on Oct. 7, 2024, Ontario Conservative MP Ryan Williams, shadow minister for international trade, said this issue is nationwide.
“In Belleville, Ontario, the impact of the carbon tax is particularly notable. The city faces an extra $410,000 annually in costs – a burden that directly translates to an increase of 0.37 per cent on residents’ property tax bills.”
There is no rebate yet provided on retail carbon pricing for towns, cities and counties.
In October, the council in Belleville passed a motion asking the federal government to return in full all carbon taxes paid by municipalities in Canada.
The unaltered reproduction of this content is free of charge with attribution to the Canadian Energy Centre.
Energy
Global fossil fuel use rising despite UN proclamations
From the Fraser Institute
By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari
Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades… the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).
At the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, last week called for a global net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, which requires a “fossil fuel phase-out” and “deep decarbonization across the entire value chain.”
Yet despite the trillions of dollars already spent globally pursuing this target—and the additional trillions projected as necessary to “end the era of fossil fuels”—the world’s dependence on fossil fuels has remained largely unchanged.
So, how realistic is a “net-zero” emissions world—which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting carbon emissions with activities such as planting trees—by 2050?
The journey began in 1995 when the UN hosted the first COP conference in Berlin, launching a global effort to drive energy transition and decarbonization. That year, global investment in renewable energy reached US$7 billion, according to some estimates. Since then, an extraordinary amount of money and resources have been allocated to the transition away from fossil fuels.
According to the International Energy Agency, between 2015 and 2023 alone, governments and industry worldwide spent US$12.3 trillion (inflation-adjusted) on clean energy. For context, that’s over six times the value of the entire Canadian economy in 2023.
Despite this spending, between 1995 and 2023, global fossil fuel consumption increased by 62 per cent, with oil consumption rising by 38 per cent, coal by 66 per cent and natural gas by 90 per cent.
And during that same 28-year period, despite the trillions spent on energy alternatives, the share of global energy provided by fossil fuels declined by only four percentage points, from 85.6 per cent to 81.5 per cent.
This should come as no surprise. Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades. According to a recent study by renowned scholar Vaclav Smil, the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).
Moreover, coal only surpassed wood as the main energy source worldwide around 1900. It took more than 150 years from oil’s first commercial extraction for oil to reach 25 per cent of all fossil fuels consumed worldwide. Natural gas didn’t reach this threshold until the end of the 20th century, after 130 years of industry development.
Now, consider the current push by governments to force an energy transition via regulation and spending. In Canada, the Trudeau government has set a target to fully decarbonize electricity generation by 2035 so all electricity is derived from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. But merely replacing Canada’s existing fossil fuel-based electricity with clean energy sources within the next decade would require building the equivalent of 23 major hydro projects (like British Columbia’s Site C) or 2.3 large-scale nuclear power plants (like Ontario’s Bruce Power). The planning and construction of significant electricity generation infrastructure in Canada is a complex and time-consuming process, often plagued by delays, regulatory hurdles and substantial cost overruns.
The Site C project took around 43 years from initial feasibility studies in 1971 to securing environmental certification in 2014. Construction began on the Peace River in northern B.C. in 2015, with completion expected in 2025 at a cost of at least $16 billion. Similarly, Ontario’s Bruce Power plant took nearly two decades to complete, with billions in cost overruns. Given these immense practical, financial and regulatory challenges, achieving the government’s 2035 target is highly improbable.
As politicians gather at high-profile conferences and set ambitious targets for a swift energy transition, global reliance on fossil fuels has continued to increase. As things stand, achieving net-zero by 2050 appears neither realistic nor feasible.
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