By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun
The prime minister knows cap-and-trade is wrong for Canada and bad for Canadians. He should say it Prime Minister Stephen Harper is too clever by half on global warming. Politically, he’s taken the smart position — Canada will match whatever U.S. President Barack Obama does. That’s not only clever, but true. We have to match what the U.S. does because it’s our major trading partner. The problem is with the centrepiece of Obama’s plan — creating a U.S. cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions into which Canada will be sucked, along with the rest of the world. This is the wrong policy for a resource-rich, energy-exporting country, like Canada. Cap-and-trade will cost Canadians jobs. It will make Canadians poorer. It will slow our recovery. It will hike not just the cost of electricity far beyond what governments are already doing under the guise of “going green,” but the cost of everything. It will give speculators and giant energy corporations undeserved profits. It will create the potential for destabilizing financial bubbles, because the price of a “carbon credit,” the stock on which cap-and-trade is built, is vulnerable to corruption and fraud. Finally, cap-and-trade will do nothing for the environment. This isn’t speculation. It’s the reality of Europe’s five-year-old cap-and-trade system. Harper knows all this. Back when he was opposition leader, he correctly denounced the Kyoto accord, the political deal that is driving cap-and-trade, as a socialist, money-sucking, wealth-redistribution scheme. He should be warning Canadians about that now and urging Obama, since he won’t abandon cap-and-trade, to at least proceed with extreme caution. LIP SERVICE But Conservatives have convinced themselves if they talk honestly about this folly it will cost them at the polls, leaving them vulnerable to charges from the left they don’t care about the planet. Sadly, many Conservative voters have bought into this logic — arguing Harper has to pay lip service to what he doesn’t believe in to win a majority government — and then try to minimize the economic damage. But while Harper and the Tories refuse to get off a bandwagon they know is a sham, ordinary citizens are increasingly realizing everything they needed to know about global warming they didn’t learn from Al Gore’s doomsday rhetoric in An Inconvenient Truth. The “scientific consensus” Gore and the UN have been peddling — that we know precisely what causes so-called “unnatural” global warming (us), when we must act (now — in a panic) and what we must do (pay ever more punishing prices for energy) is unravelling. People are realizing our understanding of climate — a new science — is limited and that many natural factors, like ocean currents, have a profound influence on climate. Even scientists who believe in anthropogenic climate change are now theorizing, as more becomes known, that there may be a decades-long pause in global warming, unforeseen by early computer models. Media that led the global hysteria, like the BBC, are beginning to acknowledge there has been no global warming for a decade despite carbon dioxide concentrations continuing to rise and that there are legitimate, competing theories about warming, not a “consensus” with which, unless you agree, you’re a “denier.” Climate-monitoring agencies like the British Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre that fuelled early climate alarmism are now cautioning scientists to stop linking every extreme weather event to global warming. Today marks the release of Not Evil, Just Wrong — the True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria — by filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, which, ironically, uses the “documentary” propaganda techniques perfected by Michael Moore, to attack Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.
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