BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following is in response to 'LETTER: Apply windfall profits tax to fossil fuel industry,' published Nov. 9.
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The UN will soon hold another chin wag with hundreds of private cars, and jets creating a massive carbon footprint so they can devise ways to make life less affordable for the middle class in developed nations.
I guess the people who tell us there is a climate change emergency have never heard of Zoom.
What Mr. Ball fails to grasp is that no leader in the world has made the people who elected him sacrificial lambs at the altar of climate change the way Justin Trudeau has, cancelling pipelines, bills C-48 and C-69, the annually increasing carbon sales tax, the so-called clean fuels standard, banning all thermal coal exports by 2030, and phasing out coal-fired electricity within Canada by 2030. Phasing out coal for electricity would have a massive impact on the Atlantic provinces since coal supplies 50 per cent of their electricity. The cost of replacing coal with other technologies would cost between $16.8 billion and $33.7 billion per year, a tremendous sacrifice in our poorest region that would have no effect on the climate.
Fossil fuels have actually made us far safer from climate change by providing low-cost energy for the amazing machines that protect us against storms, protect us against extreme temperatures, and alleviate drought. Climate disaster deaths have decreased 98 per cent over the last century.
On the other hand, wind and solar cannot compete with fossils. Wind and solar are old technologies and will never be anything more than expensive virtue signalling. Natural gas, for example, has a much smaller environmental footprint per kilowatt hour than diffuse energy sources like wind and solar. There simply aren’t anywhere near enough rare earth metals in the world to have a completely global fleet of electric cars. Not to mention wind, solar and electric cars would turn our planet into a giant toxic tailings pond with most of the destruction being felt in the developing world.
What the war in Ukraine should have taught us is the insanity of blocking fossil fuel production. We are in an energy crisis and raising taxes and more interference in cheap energy production is exacerbating the problem. Besides, why does the Trudeau regime need more revenue? More $6,000-per-night hotel stays for the PM. Rather than a windfall tax that we, the consumers, will pay on everything we purchase, let’s end ESG investing, let’s reverse the laws that have cost Canada 200,000 mortgage-paying jobs and $120 billion in revenue from energy investments that have left this country for better places to invest. I don’t recall anybody suggesting lowering taxes on energy producers when companies like Suncor lost $4.3 billion in 2020.
The International Energy Agency says fossil fuel demand will continue to rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global temperatures caused by human activity will continue to rise. Forcing Canadians to choose between heating their homes and filling their tanks will not stop coal-fired power plants being built in China. Blocking fossil fuel production in Canada will not stop an emerging middle class in India from travelling abroad in planes. Raising the price of everything for Canadians with the carbon tax will not stop consumers in Southeast Asia from buying more internal combustion engine cars.
We have to accept that the approach Canada is taking to “fight” climate change is not only naive, but it’s having the opposite effect on global emissions. We should be encouraging investment to get our superior LNG and crude oil to markets in Asia and Europe, supplanting less green producers like Russia and OPEC.
Steven Guilbeault and Justin Trudeau are out-of-touch, narcissistic elites who do not care that their climate and energy policies are having a deleterious impact on middle-class Canadians. They will go ahead with the carbon tax increase in 2023. They will continue to try and block domestic fossil fuel production that employs one million Canadians directly and indirectly. They don’t care they are making you poorer and they don’t care it will never move the climate needle one iota. Sadly, it seems Gordon Ball doesn’t care, either.
Tim Szukalski
Edmonton
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