Excuse me if I have to take a break every now and then while I write this to you.  I keep getting a taste of last night’s dinner and I can assure you it doesn’t taste as good coming up as it did going down.  What’s the matter you ask?  Thanks for asking.  It’s not like I feel sick or anything.  It’s just that every time I think about what is happening in Canada I get this automatic gag reflex.

Have you noticed what’s happening lately?  Elections all over the western world are swinging away from the dolts who’ve held power almost everywhere for a decade or longer.  I call them dolts because its WAY more polite than what they deserve and I am a polite Canadian.

Now the dolts are managing to hold on by a thread in some countries and by trickery in others, but in the most important country of all they’ve been exposed as the people who still believe their emotional genders matter more than their biological gender, and what does it matter anyway? because they also still believe the world is going to melt from underneath their electric vehicles. In short, the US has left behind climate alarmism and woke progressivism. In fact the US is running away from the rest of us with increasing velocity.

While China (we’ll come back to China because we can’t talk about Canadian politics without mentioning our Chinese benefactors) adds a couple more coal fired power plants a week, the new/old US President has once again thrown the Paris Accords to the historical trash heap where this time he’s promising to leave it so far behind that even the most frightened climate doomsayer will not be able to see it in the rearview mirror.  Instead the US will produce as much energy as possible by most any means possible.

Now as the lambs sleeping next to the lions, let’s get a few things straight about that President. Because I’m a polite Canadian, FORMERLY I was never be able to mention him without first saying what an a-hole he is.  But now my preamble is this.. nothing.  It matters not at all what I or you or the CPP think of the President.  All that matters is what the President is doing. What’s he doing?  He’s charging ahead at a speed no one has ever seen before.  Everyday he makes the US a bit leaner, faster and more resilient.  Everyday he rips off the Band-Aids of bureaucracy by the hundreds or by the thousands.  While we watch and scorn and deride and forestall the inevitable, he’s showing us the new path that we will inevitably have to follow if we want to live in a first world country called Canada.

But not so fast you say!  In Canada we will do things our own way.  We will be stronger by imagining we can change the weather by paying more for groceries.  When that doesn’t work we will offer to pay more for everything else too.  We may even change THE WAY we pay more for everything.  We just might bring in Mark Carnival to operate the PMO / WEF / CPP / Ottawa thing where we keep sending more money.  It should be easy enough as long as we can convince Mr Carnival to live in Canada long enough to vote here legally.  And being a self proclaimed World Progressive Elitist (or Dolt), Mark Carnival will save the world by changing the consumer facing carbon tax into a corporate facing carbon tax.  That will surely move the higher prices around and in all the confusion we’ll suddenly cool the world off and live happily ever after. Please don’t ask me to explain how that will work.

You know it’s funny how the people taking the shots for Team Canada keep reminding us that the new/old President is more dangerous than anything else we’ve faced since they invented/discovered global warming /climate change. When we look back from this as Americans in a few years from now, some will wonder if perhaps we could have saved the finest country in the world.  Maybe if we wouldn’t have taught our children that early settlers and early educators were racist murderers and instead taught about those who left everything and everyone behind to risk their lives and battle incredible difficulties to build one of the best nations in history.  Maybe if we would have focused on building our economy and recognized that affordable energy (hello Chinese coal plants) is the foundational building block of modern society instead of finding ways to move carbon taxes from one sector to another. Maybe, just maybe we could have saved Canada.

One day all us Yanks will look back and remember how our first unelected Prime Minister, Mark Carnival promised to fight climate change and bash the new/old President instead of cutting bureaucratic costs and taxes and deficits and debt.  Some will realize that was actually a clown show, a distraction. Maybe we could have saved Canada if we would only have focused on reality. But then again, the clown show did appear like a serious thing, until it wasn’t.

In hockey, you take care of the front of your net first.  If you lose focus there you could lose everything.  Just ask a certain American Maple Leaf who momentarily took his eye off what was most important to follow something that caught his eye.  In the real world when we pay attention to the Carnival and pretend the clown show is what it really important we leave the front of the net to pursue climate change, and genders, and everything that doesn’t really matter. Meanwhile the US waits for the pass alone in front of the net. When we pay attention to the clown show and they score the inevitable go ahead goal, we better hope the game isn’t in overtime.

Excuse me. I need a stiff drink of something. I’ve got a brutal taste in my mouth.

From the Fraser Institute

APPEARED IN THE FINANCIAL POST

By: Bjørn Lomborg

Canada’s chattering classes claim that climate change is one of the country’s pre-eminent threats. This is extraordinary. Canada is experiencing a productivity slowdown, the worst decline in living standards in 40 years, and growth rates that lag most developed economies. Geopolitical threats loom, the healthcare system is under stress and education is faltering. Yet the federal government has spent or committed more than $160 billion on climate initiatives since 2015, and is funneling $5.3 billion to help poor countries respond to climate change.

Like most nations, Canada faces tough decisions in coming decades. Resources spent on climate will not be not available for health, education, security or boosting prosperity.

Global warming is a real problem. Science has shown quite clearly that more CO₂, mostly from fossil fuel use, increases global temperatures. Climate economics has shown how this brings both problems and benefits (for instance, more deaths caused by heat, fewer by cold) but, overall, more problems than benefits. More CO₂ means higher social costs, so reducing CO₂ does have real benefits.

But climate policies also have costs. They force families and businesses to use more expensive energy, which slows economic growth. You might have heard otherwise but if the new ways really were cheaper, no regulations or mandates would be needed.

If climate change were treated like any other political issue, we would openly recognize these trade-offs and try to balance them to get the most climate benefits for the least cost, recognizing that climate policies need to compete against many other worthy policies.

But in two important ways the climate conversation has gone off the rails.

First, people say — wrongly — that global warming is an existential challenge, risking the end of mankind. Of course, if the world is about to end, it follows that any spending is justified. After all, if a world-obliterating meteor is hurtling towards us, we don’t ask about the costs of avoiding it.

Second, it is also often claimed — somewhat contradictorily — that the green transition will make energy cheaper, societies safer and everyone richer. In this “rainbows and unicorns” scenario, there are no trade-offs and we can afford climate policy and everything else.

Both claims are repeated ad nauseam by Canadian politicians and activists and spread by media hooked on selling climate catastrophes and green utopias. But both are quite untrue.

That is why I’m writing this series. I will outline how many of the most sensationalist, scary climate stories are misleading or wrong and ignore the best climate science. Being data-driven, I will show you this with the best peer-reviewed data and numbers.

So: Is climate change the world’s all-encompassing problem today? One way to test this is to look at extreme weather, which we constantly hear is having an ever-larger impact on our societies. But the data paint a very different picture (see chart).

We have good evidence for the number of people killed in climate-related disasters, i.e., floods, storms, droughts, and fires. (We’ll look at temperature deaths next week.) A century ago, such disasters routinely killed hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in a single disaster. On average, about half a million people a year died in such disasters. Since then, the death toll has declined precipitously. The last decade saw an average of fewer than 10,000 deaths per year, a decline of more than 97 per cent.

Of course, over the past century the world’s population has quadrupled, which means the risk per person has dropped even more, and is now down by more than 99 per cent. Why this great success story? Because richer, more resilient societies with better technology and forecasting are much better able to protect their citizens. That doesn’t mean there is no climate signal at all, but rather that technology and adaptation entirely swamp its impact.

In the same way, climate’s impact on overall human welfare is also quite small. In proportion to the total economy, the cost of climate-related disasters has been declining since 1990. Looking to the future, the best estimates of the total economic impact of climate change come from two major meta-studies by two of the most respected climate economists. Each shows that end-of-century GDP, instead of being 350 per cent higher, will only be 335 per cent higher.

“Only” becoming 335 per cent richer is a problem, to be sure, but not an existential threat. Despite that, as this series will show, many of the most draconian climate policy proposals so casually tossed around these days will do little to fix climate but could dramatically lower future growth and the opportunities of future generations.

We need to get smart on climate. This series will map out how.

Bjørn Lomborg