Hot air in New York
Trudeau and other world leaders sign another creepy and meaningless climate deal
Here’s the truth about the signing of the Paris climate agreement at the United Nations on Friday by world leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Appropriately, they scheduled it for Earth Day, driving home the symbolism of what they would call the latest, greatest attempt to save the planet from man-made global warming.
Except it’s nonsense.
The UN has been staging these events for more than two decades.
High flyers fly in from all over the world, hypocritically emitting enough greenhouse gases (GHG) to choke an elephant, proclaiming their intention to dramatically reduce industrial GHG emissions linked to climate change.
There was “The Rio Earth Summit” in 1992; “The Berlin Mandate” in 1995; “The Kyoto Protocol” in 1997; “The Buenos Aires Plan of Action” in 1998; “The Montreal Action Plan” in 2005; “The Bali Action Plan” in 2007; “The Doha Climate Gateway” in 2012 and, now, “The Paris Agreement” in December 2015.
Each time the public was greeted with hyperbolic rhetoric about what these agreements meant.
Elizabeth May, then executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, called the 2005 Montreal Action Plan, “a set of agreements that may well save the planet”.
Here’s the reality.
Throughout all these UN meetings, the only thing that has ever significantly lowered industrial GHG emissions, and only temporarily, was the 2008 global recession, sparked by the subprime mortgage derivative scandal.
That’s right. A pack of financial fraudsters, by setting off a global economic crisis, inadvertently cut emissions because in a recession people have less money to buy the goods and services which fossil fuel energy creates.
Indeed, it would have been more honest had Friday’s signing of the Paris Agreement been held on Wall St., where the subprime fraud began, rather than at the UN.
The Paris agreement is voluntary and non-binding. Only its mechanism for reporting emissions is compulsory, but there’s no penalty for not reporting.
It doesn’t contain the one thing we’ve been told by many of these same politicians that an effective treaty must contain: a binding commitment from every country to lower emissions on a timetable, subject to sanctions if it doesn’t.
Friday’s signing ceremony didn’t even bring the Paris Agreement into legal effect — it still must be ratified by a majority of countries.
Finally, even if every nation on Earth was to hit its non-binding emission targets — and most, including Canada, won’t — all it would do, according to climate scientists, is lock the Earth into catastrophic global warming almost double the “safe” level of 1.5C.
Instead of lowered emissions, we’re going to get a lower standard of living as national and sub-national governments inflict carbon pricing schemes on us that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
Friday’s signing ceremony in New York won’t save the planet, nor will carbon pricing be revenue neutral to the public, the only way it can actually work (and which only the Green Party supports federally in Canada).
Instead, it’s just the prelude to another government cash grab.
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