GOLDSTEIN: We’re paying money for nothing to “fight” climate change.

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Here’s the thing.

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Making people in Atlantic Canada pay more to heat their homes is not going to stop wildfires in Alberta, nor in Atlantic Canada.

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Subsidizing Ontario electric vehicle battery factories won’t stop British Columbia’s flooding

This is the logical fallacy underlying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his administration when they link their carbon pricing and massive subsidies for so-called clean technologies to fighting climate change.

There is no link. The Emperor has no clothes.

Canada could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero tomorrow and that would have no impact on Canada’s weather.

This is rarely mentioned.

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If so, Liberals are outraged, as they did when House Budget Commissioner Yves Giroux, in his recent report on the cost to Canadians of the federal government’s clean fuel regulations, observed: “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to significantly affect climate change.” .”

According to the federal government’s own data, Canada’s emissions in 2019 totaled 724 million tons – 1.5% of global emissions, down from 1.8% in 2005 – while global emissions fell by 23.6% over the same period. from 38,669 million tons to 48,117 million tons.

The country with the highest emissions in 2019, according to the same data, was China with 12,705 million tons, or 26.4% of global emissions, a 74.8% increase from 2005.

As Kenneth Green noted in a recent Fraser Institute report, which estimated that the federal emissions cap will cost the Canadian economy more than $44 billion in 2030, even if Canada absorbs all expected emissions from the oil and gas sector in the By 2030, “the reduction would be equal to four-tenths of 1% of global emissions.”

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Environment Canada, always ready to make Canadians feel guilty about climate change, reported that “In 2019, Canada was the country with the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions of the top ten emitting countries, at 19.6 tonnes of CO2-eq .”

This put Canada ahead of the US, Russia, Iran, Japan, China, the European Union (27 countries), Brazil, Indonesia and India in descending order.

However, comparing Canada to other countries based on selective emissions per capita is highly misleading as Canada is the second largest and second coldest country on earth with a relatively small population.

Conversely, when emissions are measured per square kilometer, Canada falls to 140th place among the 215 countries and regions of the world identified by the United Nations when it reported the 2007 global data.

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When environmental consultancy Sustainable Business Consulting examined the same metric in 2019 using 2017 data, Canada was the 129th largest emitter out of 184 countries and had lower emissions per square kilometer than any of the top 10 emitters in the world except Brazil.

What you get depends on what you measure.

The largest single contributor to global emissions is the use of coal to generate electricity.

According to our federal government, Canada gets 6% of its electricity from coal, down 55% since 2011.

In contrast, China gets almost 60% of its electricity from coal. India gets 70% of its electricity from coal.

The Trudeau administration’s carbon pricing system and climate change policies, which aggravate Canadians’ financial woes during tough economic times, are based on the logic that we have to do something, so this is something.

What this fails to recognize is that, to be effective, the solution to reducing emissions must be global.

Without that, Canadians will be paying money for nothing to “fight” climate change for years to come.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com