Its not worse than we thought.
Climate activists have been telling us for years that we are facing a climate emergency, that greenhouse gases (GHG) are surging and we have to take immediate action or we face burning up the planet and ending life as we know it.
Local government councils in Cowichan joined the bandwagon and passed a series of grim declarations about the emergency, including North Cowichan where they “acknowledged a climate emergency”. The vote was five to two.
Having decided a climate emergency exists, councils used this as cover to initiate all manner of virtue signalling measures to keep the planet from frying.
North Cowichan stepped up to the plate and started work on developing a Climate Action and Energy Plan (CAEP). Council formally received a report that outlined a CAEP proposed strategy for the next 30 years at their June 17, 2020 meeting.
The top, startling figures in the report stated that following business-as-usual strategies and policies in North Cowichan, energy use would increase by five percent by 2050, and that GHG emissions would increase by one per cent. That is not a misprint, energy use was forecast to increase by five per cent in 30 years and GHGs will increase by a whopping one per cent!
Does that sound like North Cowichan has a GHG problem?
Well, it seems a previous council decided, without any scientific support, to set an extreme GHG reduction target that would mean having to cut current GHG emissions by 83 per cent before 2050. The report’s recommended actions would reduce GHG emissions from 338,600 tCO2e per year to 61,000 tCO2e per year.
How are they proposing this be done?
The “5 Big Moves” would be:
- Electric vehicles (personal and commercial)
- Replace natural gas with renewable natural gas and hydrogen
- Increase industrial energy efficiency
- Increase carbon sequestration in forests
- Home energy efficiency retrofits (including heat pumps)
The consultant says this will produce 94 per cent of the desired GHG reductions.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it. But, North Cowichan has no authority to impose any of it, except maybe preventing the municipal forest from being logged.
No local government has the authority to do away with gasoline or diesel vehicles.
Fortis isn’t going to be forced by North Cowichan into filling its Vancouver Island pipeline with renewable natural gas and hydrogen.
No laws exist today that would allow local governments to impose energy efficiency in industrial or commercial applications.
North Cowichan could provide incentives for homeowners to do energy efficiencies retrofits but where’s the money to come from? Would North Cowichan “force” homeowners to do energy retrofits?
That only leaves leaving trees standing in the municipal forests.
Even if all of this could be done, how much would it cost taxpayers and homeowners? No one has any idea and the consultants say they will work on costing this whole thing during the consultation process.
The other ringer is that the consultants acknowledge that about 68,000 tCO2e of the desired reductions come from transportation and agricultural emissions and they are under the control of the federal and provincial governments.
Clearly, this whole process is going to cost someone a lot of money and staying where we are in terms of climate policies and strategies doesn’t seem to create any kind of threatening emergency. Increasing North Cowichan’s GHG emissions by one per cent over 30 years does not look like an emergency.
Would it be rude to suggest that North Cowichan council, or at least some of them, are engaging in virtue signalling?
Excellent article! Thank you!
“What climate emergency, indeed! The climate on our Earth has ALWAYS changed. A lot of people need to grow up. But others have found there’s money to be made by screaming “our planet is dying!”
Bravo Patrick! I’ve been saying this for the last 5 years to cries of “alt right conspiracy theorist” and “climate denier!” and so on…… started reading Schellenberger 3 years ago…who seemed to be an environmental heavy weight who was getting honest…and coming down to Earth. His article below was up on Forbes.com yesterday , but today, they seem to have bowed to pressure and the page no longer exists…..what cowards! “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Air pollution and carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for 50 years
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.
Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organization. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Follow him on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD.
Michael Shellenberger
President, Environmental Progress
2569 Telegraph Avenue,
Dr Tim Ball – Historical Climatologist
timothyball@shaw.ca http://www.drtimball.net
Book ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’.
Book “Human Caused Global Warming”, ‘The Biggest Deception in History’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO08Hhjes_0
https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/
BREAKING – Dr.Tim Ball wins against Dr Michael Mann lawsuit
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/22/breaking-dr-tim-ball-wins-michaelemann-lawsuit-mann-has-to-pay/
There is no political will to develop our oil and resources in Canada.
Good for you. To many people are jumping on band wagons for their own personal benefit. Right now we are in a serious situation with a lot of our business shut down or working at less than 100%.
If we had leadership at the federal level we would be building pipelines and refineries to make us self sufficient using our own oil and generating billions of $ to pay off the outstanding debts we have amassed. The world is changing and we had better start looking after ourselves. Remember when the carbon thing started… we in Canada thought we would do well because we have lots of trees to eat carbon…I guess trees don’t eat carbon anymore.