From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The federal Liberal government “committed over $160 billion… to support our green economy” from 2015 to 2024, and proposes to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, all on the premise that there’s a climate change crisis. And it’s spent many millions trying to convince Canadians there’s a climate emergency. But is that true?

A recent report (authored by John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer) and disseminated by the U.S. Department of Energy provides a very different view.

The report examined how carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions (as a result of human activity) have affected or will affect climate, extreme weather and other metrics of societal wellbeing. While the report examines the United States, other research suggests what most people intuitively know—because Canada’s climate is colder, global warming could produce higher benefits and lower costs for Canada than the U.S. For example, Canada’s agriculture and tourism industries would likely benefit from warmer temperatures.

So what does the report say? One observation is that “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” Moreover, “forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity.” The same could be said in Canada. There’s good evidence that bad government management of forests—rather than primarily climate change—is to blame for much of the recent wildfire activity.

The authors of the report further emphasize that claims of human activity causing climate disasters are shaky: “Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”

A separate article in Regulation Magazine by policy analyst David Kemp makes the same point. Kemp notes that according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even under an implausible worst-case climate change scenario, it would not be until 2050 to 2100 that heavy rain increases to a point where a real upward trend, beyond what would be considered natural statistical noise, would emerge. For droughts, cyclones, severe storms, river floods, landslides and fire weather, it would take until at least 2100.

The Department of Energy report also finds that “global climate models generally run ‘hot’ in their description of the climate of the past few decades—too much warming at the surface and too much amplification of warming in the lower- and mid-troposphere.” In general, therefore, many projections of future global warming and associated economic damages are “exaggerated.”

In the final chapter of their report, the authors conclude government actions in the U.S., including aggressive regulatory measures, “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”

In Canada, government policies would have only a fraction of the “undetectably small” impacts U.S. government policies could have on climate. As of 2022, Canada accounted for only 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from China (19.2 times higher) and the U.S. (8.4 times higher) much higher than emissions from Canada. That’s unsurprising given Canada’s much smaller population and economy.

When federal politicians or climate activists next claim there’s a climate crisis or climate emergency, or that the latest weather disaster was the result of climate change due to human activity, and that government must take significant and costly measures to reduce climate change, Canadians should be skeptical. The evidence simply does not support such claims.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

The United States Department of Energy recently published a report, which essentially summarizes the U.S. government’s rejection of the 30-year-old, United Nations-centric, climate-alarmed consensus worldview.

In short, the report rejects the idea that carbon dioxide (CO2)—manmade or otherwise—constitutes a traditional pollutant—that is, a substance which is out of its natural role/place in the environment, and is causing harm. Rather, according to the report, CO2 is more properly seen as a fertilizer: manmade CO2 additions to the atmosphere do take the “carbon” out of a natural reservoir and put it into the air, but the effect is not toxic nor harmful. Rather, additional CO2 stimulates plant growth around the world, causing a well-documented phenomenon of “global greening.”

The report also disputes predictions that human emissions of CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) will result in dangerous climate warming or other dangerous knock-on effects such as changes to extreme weather of various sorts (floods, droughts, storms, wildfires). Such claims, the report holds, are exaggerated.

The report also, not surprisingly, diverges from the UN-climate-alarmed consensus idea that the solution to climate change risk is global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission suppression. Rather, when it comes to policy, the report comes down firmly on the idea of adaptation to potential climate disruptions, regardless of cause: “Technological advances such as improved weather forecasting and early warning systems” have substantially reduced losses from extreme weather events. Better building codes, flood defences and disaster response mechanisms have lowered economic losses relative to GDP. Further, heat-related mortality risk has dropped substantially due to adaptive measures including the adoption of air conditioning (which relies on a robust economy) and the availability of affordable energy. “U.S. mortality risks… even under extreme warming scenarios are not projected to increase if people are able to undertake adaptive responses.”

What does this mean for Canada?

First, one must assume that it portends a continued U.S. movement away from GHG mitigation efforts and programs involving direct emission suppression from sources such as power plants, manufacturing facilities, vehicles, commercial and residential buildings, and so forth.

It will also likely mean less intrusive efforts to suppress GHG emissions indirectly with various energy efficiency standards, agricultural practices and the mandated replacement of GHG-emission power production with lower/less-GHG emitting wind and solar technologies. Oh, and once again, the much-ballyhooed transition from internal combustion transportation to electric vehicles is likely to take it in the neck, at least in the U.S. for the next four years.

Again, what does this mean for Canada? In a nutshell, it means the U.S. will cut a fairly large amount of spending on GHG suppression measures while Canada (Carney government, et al) plans to increase such spending. And the U.S. will also cut spending—and consumer costs—for electric vehicles while Canada will increase both. Because virtually all of the U.S. focus is about lowering the costs of energy and the technologies that use it—and energy is the foundational input of developed economies—all of that will likely make the U.S. more economically competitive, from the individual to the firm, compared to Canada.

The more Canada elbows up and doubles down on joining the UN’s GHG-suppression regime, the less competitive Canada will make itself compared to the U.S., which—Trump’s tariffs and current politics notwithstanding—remains the most relevant touchstone for whether or not Canadian policies are economically rational.

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute