Net Zero by 2050 Policy Will Soon Make Canadians Poor and Cold

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault speaks during the Canada 2020 Net Zero Leadership Summit in Ottawa on April 19, 2023. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Commentary

A country can go from comfort to poverty a lot faster than from poverty to comfort.  Europe and much of Asia saw that after World War II. If we destroy our affordable and reliable energy infrastructure, and the industries that rely on it, it will take decades of poverty to rebuild it.

An escalating carbon tax on gasoline and diesel fuel is, effectively, an extra tax on energy (in addition to existing fuel taxes at the pump). Canada’s annual carbon tax rebate only gives us back a small percentage of the inflationary price increases that we are paying—now and in the future.

Over the next decade the political goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will make Canadian adults and their children poorer than their parents’ generation, without measurably impacting climate change or planetary CO2 levels. As already seen in the UK, as well as in Germany and other EU countries, green transition “leadership” prioritizing weather-dependent electricity generation (solar and wind) combined with other net zero policies has been disastrous. It will hike food prices, make transportation of goods and people much more expensive, and escalate our heating and lighting bills.

In our cold, northern country, even middle-class Canadians will soon have to choose between heating their homes and feeding their families. As in Europe, those at the lower end of the income spectrum will need massive social assistance payments (which are unsustainable when the economy free falls) or suffer mass poverty.

Green Energy Isn’t Reliable

While climate advocacy groups and their lawyers champion so-called green energy, their proposals exclude and discourage nuclear generation, which is the only available non-emitting reliable energy source. They do not propose any alternative.  Should we chop down our forests for solar farms and “biomass” (i.e., burning trees processed into wood pellets)? Germany, after shutting its nuclear stations and going “green,” recently had to destroy a 12,000-year-old forest to expand a coal mine. Will we continue to follow Germany’s path until we have to rebuild coal generation? Let’s hope not!

The rationale for net zero by 2050 policies is that they are essential if we are to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, caused solely by burning fossil fuels.  Thus, achieving net zero was seen as a noble cause for the West to pursue, passionately advocated by large and well-financed climate change NGOs. This, in turn, has affected the political outcomes of elections. Political parties wanting to win the next election, to be achieved by frightening voters with the “global warming climate crisis,” have prevailed over considerations of the disastrous longer-term impacts of net zero policies.

More Deaths from Cold Than Heat

For every death linked to heat, nine or 10 are linked to cold. A bit more warmth in Canada over the next century would actually save lives. We should ask our politicians how many low-income Canadians should freeze to death in Canada’s futile attempt to reach net zero? How many children should go hungry and cold in winter? Many northern First Nations communities survive cold winters thanks to their diesel generators. How many of these communities should now be abandoned to achieve net zero?

Canada represents only 1.6 percent of global CO2 emissions. Canada can’t fight global climate change by eliminating local CO2 emissions. Why? Around 80 percent of global energy still comes from fossil fuels, even after two decades of fighting climate change. Yet approximately two-thirds of the world’s population—that’s 5.4 billion out of 8 billion people living in the developing countries—is rapidly increasing their use of coal and natural gas for energy, emitting CO2 at levels that quickly swamp the trivial reductions Canada can achieve, even at massive cost to our standard of living.

On top of that, Canada’s panic-driven climate policies will merely transfer our personal living standards, and maybe also our jobs, to China, India (and some other developing countries), meaning our children will be as poor in the future as children in China and India were in the past.

End Net Zero Sooner Rather Than Later

Sooner rather than later the destructiveness of our current climate policy will have to be reduced. This change has already started in Europe, and will be starting here. The only question is how much poverty the push for net zero will cause before Canadians realize and accept that it can’t continue.

We have only a decade at most to save many of us from the destruction to be created by these policies, while the elites remain unaffected. And the climate continues to do what it always does: change.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.