2 top climate advisers quit saying Carney government is ignoring its experts : r/canada - "I love how the same people who think we should be more like Norway don't think it's possible to have both modern oil and gas infrastructure and a pristine west coast."
"They say they want Norway but when they talk policy they describe Venezuela"
"Basically. They just want the Government to run everything including their lives. It's mind boggling to think they the Government has created most of our issues but they're somehow the best ones to fix things."
"This right here. And why we have the Liberals back in power."
2 top climate advisers quit saying Carney government is ignoring its experts : r/canada - "They want humans to go extinct so the environment can flourish 😂"
Peter Clack on X - "They told us China was cheating. Turns out they were just building while we were preaching. While the West was busy dismantling coal plants, paying people not to boil kettles and covering farmland with solar panels that don’t work when it’s dark, China did the obvious: They kept the lights on and built everything. The result? China now makes 80% of the world’s solar panels, 70% of the batteries, 60% of the wind turbine parts and 55% of global steel (more than the next 15 countries combined). And they’re still commissioning two state-of-the-art coal plants a week – the cleanest coal plants ever built, because reliable power beats ideology every single time. In 2000 China’s manufacturing output was smaller than Italy’s. Today it’s larger than America + Europe + Japan + South Korea combined. We outsourced the actual hardware of the 'green revolution' to our main rival, then acted surprised when they became the workshop of the world and the richest industrial power in history. The miracle isn’t mysterious. It’s embarrassingly simple: Abundant energy. No net-zero cults. A government that sees steel mills and giga-factories as strategic assets, not sins. The biggest transfer of wealth and power in human history didn’t happen with guns or treaties. It happened because one side built things and the other side wrote strongly worded letters and paid influencers to shame anyone who pointed it out. China installed more solar in 2024 than the entire world had installed cumulatively by 2017. From 2005–2023 China added ~1,100 GW of coal capacity while the West lost ~200 GW. That gap is the story of the century. The West ran a 20-year experiment in whether you can deindustrialize your own civilization, hand the manufacturing base to a strategic rival, subsidise that rival with your own climate policies, yet still win the century. Result so far: China’s manufacturing share of global GDP went from ~6% in 2000 to ~30% today. America’s went from ~22% to ~15%. Europe’s collapsed from ~25% to ~14%. China didn’t beat us. We decommissioned ourselves. Ready to discuss?"
Budget officer demands answers on ballooning EV subsidies - "Canada’s budget watchdog is pressing Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne for updated figures on the true cost of Ottawa’s electric vehicle battery subsidies, warning taxpayers are being kept in the dark as the industry falters. Budget Officer Yves Giroux wrote to the Department of Finance on August 14 asking for revised forecasts on both construction support and ongoing production subsidies. Blacklock's Reporter says his office previously pegged the total bill at up to $50 billion, far higher than the government has admitted... A Department of Finance briefing note last fall quietly admitted the government’s electric auto strategy “may be adjusted” due to delays and shortfalls, but Champagne still insists the subsidies are a “game changer for the nation.” He has claimed Canadians would see a five-year payback on the billions spent, calling it a “pretty good deal.” Giroux flatly rejected those claims, accusing the Liberals of peddling “wildly optimistic” projections. “We think our approach is reasonable, much more so than the government’s,” he testified, adding that his only interest is protecting taxpayers. The Budget Office warned the payback timeline touted by Champagne is unrealistic, especially given market troubles and the collapse of a company Ottawa had already backed with more than a billion dollars. Giroux said transparency is critical: “I work for parliamentarians. I work for the benefit of taxpayers and Canadians. I don’t have a vested interest.”"
Ottawa, the age of wishful climate thinking is over - "We’re entering what has become an annual fall ritual: the rush of national governments to shape the promises they’ll carry to the UN’s COP (Conference of the Parties) climate summit, being held this year in Brazil in mid-November. For Canada, this ritual has taken on a strangely self-defeating quality. Year after year, Ottawa bureaucrats produce the policies most ardently demanded by the climate lobby. Whether these measures actually reduce emissions is beside the point. The ceremony is about pledging allegiance to “net zero” — a term that grows vaguer and less credible with every passing year. There is much nervous pacing as the big-emitting industries wonder who will be in the spotlight this sacrifice season. But the real question this year is not what clever new restriction Ottawa will announce, but whether our leaders are willing to read the room: Away from the theatre of climate summits, the world is confronting energy realities that can’t be wished away. Consider the United States. From 2005 to 2023 its per capita energy-related CO₂ emissions fell nearly a third. The driver wasn’t lofty pledges but the replacement of coal with natural gas, supplemented by renewables. In Maryland, for instance, coal plunged from more than half the power mix to just five per cent, while gas surged. The result was lower emissions but still-reliable electricity. Canada should take note. We enjoy hydro and nuclear advantages in some regions but electricity demand is rising quickly. Population growth and the explosion of artificial intelligence computing are stretching supply. In Britain, Nvidia’s CEO warned that the country’s AI ambitions will require gas turbines alongside nuclear and renewables. Green aspiration won’t power data centres. The International Energy Agency underscores another reality: oil and gas companies spend about half a trillion dollars annually simply to maintain output. Without this investment, U.S. shale production would fall more than a third in a single year. These fuels aren’t fading out. They remain the backbone of the global system. For Canada, that should spell opportunity. Geopolitics drive the point home. J.P. Morgan calls this moment the “new energy security age.” Europe is accelerating its exit from Russian liquefied natural gas. Japan is boosting its LNG tanker fleet by 50 per cent. Mexico is signing billion-dollar LNG supply deals. Each move reflects a basic calculation: energy security is national security. Canada’s allies are asking us to contribute. Our federal energy minister now concedes the obvious: for the next few years, at least, natural gas is the most economic and reliable fuel for baseload. Meeting the demand for it would mean high-paying jobs at home and stronger alliances abroad. The consequences of suppressing it are on display in California, where climate absolutism has driven out refineries, leaving policy-makers scrambling to stave off fuel shortages. Affordability, not ideals, sets the limits of public tolerance. Globally, too, peak climate enthusiasm has given way to pragmatism. The United States is now the world’s largest exporter of refined oil and LNG. Nations have dropped “climate solidarity” in favour of self-interest. Even progressives salt their speeches with words like “realism” and “pragmatism.” The age of wishful climate thinking is over. British Columbia sits atop the Montney gas basin, possesses the shortest route to Asia and is home to Indigenous nations pursuing equity stakes in LNG projects. These projects embody reconciliation, create prosperity and displace coal abroad — cutting emissions more effectively than many of Ottawa’s more headline-grabbing gestures... nearly 100 Canadian oil and gas CEOs have sent an open letter — twice already — to the new PM, explaining why the emissions cap will keep at bay the very investors he says he wants to attract."
Climate change hysteria is about virtue signalling
Goldman: Oil and gas stocks should be bedrock of sustainable investing - "Just as many mission-driven fund managers have reconsidered their defense policy in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an analyst at Goldman Sachs says it is now time for sustainable investors to re-evaluate their approach to oil and gas companies. It comes at a time when European energy majors have slashed renewable spending and doubled down on fossil fuels in an effort to boost near-term shareholder returns. Investments focused on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors tend to favor companies that score highly on certain criteria, such as climate change, human rights or corporate transparency. Tobacco giants, fossil fuel companies and weapons makers have typically been among those to have been screened out or excluded from sustainable portfolios... Goldman’s Della Vigna outlined three reasons to back-up his view on why ESG investors should bring oil and gas stocks in from the cold. “Let’s be clear, this energy transition will be much longer than expected. We are going to have, we think, peak oil demand in the mid-2030s [and] peak gas demand in the 2050s,” Della Vigna said. “And we clearly show that we need greenfield oil and gas development well into the 2040s. So, if we need new oil and gas development, why wouldn’t we own these companies?”... Della Vigna’s second point was that oil and gas companies represent some of the biggest investors in low-carbon energy worldwide, adding that a failure to both engage with, and finance oil and gas stocks would ultimately serve as a barrier to the energy transition. In addition, Della Vigna said that unlike utilities, which he described as infrastructure builders, oil and gas companies are “market makers” and “risk-takers.”... “Otherwise, we will not have affordable energy, especially for emerging markets, and we will have energy poverty, which I don’t think is acceptable in any ESG framework,” he continued."
Fossil fuel demand to peak by 2030, we're told. Or maybe not - "The annual World Energy Outlook released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency, the global collective of nations dedicated to spinning climate change policy, claims that the global energy transition is underway. In the outlook for oil and gas, the IEA claims that “Clean energy momentum remains strong enough to bring a peak in demand for each of the fossil fuels by 2030.” While that outcome cannot be ruled out, energy investment indicators have been trending in a different direction. The S&P global clean energy select index, which measures the stock performance of companies in clean energy sectors, has lost more than 10 per cent so far this year, bringing the total loss since 2021 to more than 60 per cent. In Canada, the S&P/TSX renewable energy and clean technology index has also lost more than 60 per cent of its value since 2020. As the graph below indicates, the decline in investment support for clean energy is another illustration of the growing policy and investment gap that faces the global effort to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by 2050. While markets have failed to give green investments a big green light, the value of the S&P/TSX oil and gas index has doubled from $110 in 2020 to $325 this week... Such IEA-style optimism has been a constant in the push for a green energy transition. In Canada, a 2021 paper in Energy Regulation Quarterly hailed the arrival in 2020 of a new era in Canadian energy policy. Governments had created “a signature year in terms of the shift in rhetoric and investment dollars away from conventional fuels and technologies to emerging ones.” In terms of energy law and policy, argued the authors, “the year 2020 ended with a bang” when Ottawa enacted legislation to increase the carbon tax from $50 in 2022 to $170 per ton in 2030. Also in 2020, an electric vehicle “revolution” had been launched, pipelines had been cancelled, and new subsidies and tax credits announced. Alas, the investment story since 2020 shows that the big bang never happened, not in Canada and not in most of the world. Yet despite the obvious failure of the green energy revolution to bring on the great transition away from fossil fuels, environmental and social governance (ESG) initiatives remain high on the strategic models pursued by some investment communities. According to a report from Canada’s Corporate Knights organization, global government pension funds remain ready to drive the green energy revolution. Michael Cohen, chief operating investment officer at California’s CalPERS pension giant, told a Toronto conference last week that his organization is poised for action. “We have fully bought into the thesis that we can generate outperformance by leaning into the climate revolution.” Canada’s Mark Carney promised at the same conference that investment dollars will flow to green energy when the command and control policies are in place. “When society sets a clear goal, such as net-zero, it becomes profitable to be part of the solution and costly to remain part of the problem.” So far, not so."
When pushing the left wing agenda is more important than earning money
Thread by @mr_james_c on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This chart might look like a chart of CO2 emissions but it's not. It's a Rorschach Test.
*Annual CO2 emissions - China soaring into the stratosphere while the UK is plummeting*
For some reason, otherwise intelligent Brits will look at it and conclude that:
- China is doing an amazing job building renewables
- the UK is a unique villain because of "historic emissions"
- China's emissions are set to decline... next year
The reactions are utterly bizarre, it's a cult.
Let's look at the farcical "historical emissions" claim. Another way of saying "historical" is "cumulative". China's cumulative emissions overtook the UK nearly 30 years ago. And then look what happened? Activists use the term "historical" rather than cumulative because they want to imply that the UK is somehow uniquely culpable. By doing this they're being China's useful idiots.
Next let's look at emissions per capita. You often hear "well Chinese people don't emit that much, in the UK we're far more wasteful etc". In reality Chinese EPC overtook the UK a decade ago. Today the average Chinese person emits nearly 2x the average UK person. The only reason the myth persists is because of the ignorance of activists in the UK who cannot conceive of a nation of over a billion avid consumers in a thriving economy. In their heads China is still full of peasant farmers.
Ultimately I don't really have a beef with China. They have made a determination that economic prosperity and opportunity is the most important thing and you can only tackle emissions from a position of economic strength. Contrast this with the UK which has taken the opposite approach - focusing on emissions in a way that causes severe economic damage making everyone poorer. The only way this ridiculous situation survives is that emissions reductions and climate are treated like a religion. But the zealots that emerge from this have illogical positions: they attack anyone who might criticise China's approach while constantly flogging the UK for not doing enough. Spectacularly unhealthy.
Because the hard of thinking have started to pick up on this thread, let's address the "well we're just exporting our emissions to China" (along with manufacturing jobs). It is true that many Developed economies export emissions, and just China's total emissions are more than its domestic ones. But as these charts show, the overwhelming majority of China's emissions are "local" - ie. Unsurprisingly 1bn or so avid consumers create a lot of emissions for themselves. While the UK mostly offshored industry and jobs with its emissions. The continued ignorance around China's level of local emissions comes back to the point around ignorance I made in an earlier post - China is no longer the peasant farmer population of Western imagination."
Left wingers just hate the West
Feds want to open 1/10th of Utah for solar energy development. The state and environmentalists aren’t so sure.
When broader environmentalism stands in the way of climate change hysteria
Feds' backtracking on climate action is 'fuelling' Quebec separatism, ex-minister Guilbeault says - "Guilbeault argued that the federal government has tried to appease Alberta in the past, namely by purchasing and completing the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline — but he argued that failed to quell western alienation or support for Alberta's separation."
Apparently you need to destroy the country to keep it together. And of course you have the revisionist history over the pipeline
The same people who screech about how Albertan separatists are traitors and must be crushed favour endless concessions to Quebec to pacify them
Kelly McParland: Climate warriors failed. We need to think outside the box - "McKenna is a climate change warrior, and each of her assertions may be entirely accurate. What’s up for grabs is her conclusion: that now, more than ever, the world needs to forge ahead with the same battles, along the same lines, using the same tactics that have been followed for decades now. If the situation is getting worse every day, countries aren’t keeping their promises, emissions continue to rise and wildfires are chasing Canadians from their homes in record numbers, does it make sense to claim that current climate policies are working? Or does the sad state of the record indicate it’s time to try something different? Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney are trying something new and novel with the agreement signed last week to consternation on several fronts. The deal is nothing if not a sharp change from the antagonistic approach that’s characteristic of the nine years of Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership, which ended with the two sides barely on speaking terms... Carney’s climate credentials aren’t seriously open to question. Even McKenna concedes that “Mark Carney knows more about climate than almost anyone.” The agreement suggests Carney doesn’t see the pact as a betrayal of climate orthodoxy so much as an understanding that years of environmental summits and anti-industrial policy haven’t achieved their desired goals, and that continuing to make the economy pay heavily in productivity, growth and investment isn’t the best way to get better results. Climate activists have no one but themselves to blame for the changed approach. For years, they’ve built a crusade on forecasts of doom. Their favoured terminology has elevated the situation from a challenge to a crisis to an emergency to an “existential threat.” Cold winters result from a “polar vortex.” Hot summer days are a heat emergency. Heavy rain comes from “atmospheric rivers.” Scare tactics can be effective at times but tend to fade with repetition. A 2024 report from the non-profit Environics Institute found that over a five-year period from 2019, climate fears slid down the ranks of top concerns expressed by Canadians. “Few Canadians — just one in 20 — identify climate change or the environment top-of-mind as the single most important problem facing the country today, with most focused on economic concerns associated with the rising cost of living and housing affordability,” it reported. The shift crosses “all parties and regions except the North,” it said. At the same time, Environics noted, fewer Canadians profess faith in either the federal or provincial governments’ handling of the issue. Since declaring climate change a major global priority in the wake of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, Ottawa has failed to meet any of its major targets and isn’t likely to in the near term. The Canadian Climate Institute projects that, despite some progress in reducing emissions, Canada won’t meet its 2030 targets. The institute called a Parliamentary Budget Office forecast that Ottawa could miss its target by 6.5 per cent “optimistic.” A PBO report on the economic impact of oil and gas production restrictions predicted that Trudeau-era policies could cost 40,000 jobs and reduce gross domestic product by $20.5 billion by 2032. A turning point in public attitude could be traced to the Trudeau government’s decision to exempt heating oil from its signature carbon tax, which was largely seen as a partisan move aimed at enhancing Liberal fortunes in the Atlantic provinces. Carney’s pledge to kill the tax was a key element in his campaign to succeed Trudeau and coincided with a sharp revival of Liberal fortunes. Meanwhile, hopes for an emissions-reducing revolution in electric vehicles has largely stalled. Only China has managed to mass produce affordable EVs, but it has been blocked from western markets by steep tariffs. Major EV-related investments in Ontario and Quebec have been delayed or cancelled due to market uncertainties, despite hefty subsidies... climate leaders had 30 years to follow their approach while success got pushed ever farther into the future. A crisis that lasts that long and keeps getting worse cries for fresh thinking"
Time to double down and demonise "climate change deniers" even more!
Activists who blockaded German airport must pay more than €400,000 - "Ten activists from the climate action group Last Generation must pay more than €400,000 ($463,208) to the airline Eurowings due to a blockade of Hamburg Airport... If the defendants block an airport again, they can be detained for up to six months"
Meme Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield: ""And in our next King's Speech, we will be introducing legislation to repeal the First Law of Thermodynamics.""
Department for Energy Security and Net... @energyg....: "Did you know a heat pump is more efficient than a gas boiler? Meaning it generates 3 times more energy than it consumes. Check if a heat pump could be suitable for your home"
Meme - Michael Arouet @MichaelAArouet: "Can someone please explain why green socialists are so against nuclear power, but push the degrowth nonsense narratives instead? Wouldn't it make more sense to stay prosperous, avoid blackouts and save the planet?"
"France. GDP and CO2, per person
1980 Nuclear expansion +43 nuclear reactors *GDP per person continues to rise, while CO2 per person plummets*"
Greta Thunberg is banned from Venice after dumping green dye in canal and is angrily accused of being 'more interested in self-promotion than the environment' - "Greta Thunberg has been banned from Venice after she and Extinction Rebellion activists dumped green dye in the Grand Canal. The 22-year-old climate campaigner was issued with a €150 (£130) fine and a 48-hour restriction on entering the northeastern Italian city after multiple protests over the weekend. Some 35 other activists were handed the same fine and ban... Luca Zaia, the governor of Veneto, condemned the stunt as 'a disrespectful gesture for our city, its history, and its fragility'. 'I am even more surprised to see Greta Thunberg among the authors of this useless protest, who clearly aim - more than raising awareness about the environment - to give visibility to themselves,' he added. Extinction Rebellion activists also targetted rivers, canals and fountains in other Italian cities including Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Padua, Palermo, Parma, Trieste, Turin and Taranto, to raise awareness about the 'massive effects of climate collapse'."
Peter Clack on X - "They sold you a greenhouse that doesn’t exist
The misnamed 'greenhouse effect' is not a lid trapping heat but a modest radiative delay dominated by water vapor, not CO₂. The 19th-century discoverers of the effect never imagined their work would be used to justify dismantling reliable energy before replacements exist. Spending trillions to make electricity simultaneously more expensive and less reliable — while the world’s largest emitter keeps building coal plants unchecked — is not climate policy. It is unilateral economic self-harm based on a 150-year-old analogy that was always imperfect and has now become actively deceptive. Western societies are betting trillions and deindustrializing based on on the idea that weather-dependent energy can replace baseload power tomorrow — a bet no competent engineer would take. No competent engineer believes we can run a modern industrial economy on wind and solar without continent-scale grids and many terawatt-hours of long-duration storage. Those technologies do not exist at scale or acceptable cost. The 'greenhouse' analogy itself is misleading and should have been abandoned decades ago. Actual greenhouses work by suppressing convection; the atmosphere is an open, convecting, water-vapor dominated system. A far more accurate description is 'infrared opacity' or 'radiative delay.' The early scientists (Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius) all identified water vapor as providing 75–85% of the natural warming effect — and they regarded that ~33°C of warming as a good thing. None of them saw CO₂ as the primary climate 'control knob' and Arrhenius explicitly thought anthropogenic warming would be beneficial. Even the IPCC’s own numbers show water vapor plus clouds account for ~80% of the total effect, with CO₂ contributing only 10–20%. The entire projected amplification in today’s models comes from assumed strong positive water-vapor feedback — the single largest uncertainty in climate science. Even if we accept the IPCC’s central 3°C estimate for doubling CO₂, the optimal policy response is modest mitigation over decades — not immediate forced deindustrialization. Under the most rigorous recent physics (Happer, van Wijngaarden, Lindzen, Lewis, Curry etc), the net effect of doubling CO₂ is likely 1–1.5°C and probably beneficial overall. Yet we have already spent trillions, driven energy prices to crippling levels (Germany, California, UK), and repeatedly flirted with blackouts — all while global emissions continue to rise. That is not science-based policy. It is ideology dressed up as science, built on a misleading analogy that was never fit for purpose."
