Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives and many of our industry leaders are unwittingly among Premier Wynne’s greatest allies in her imposition of ‘carbon pricing.’ While their complaints about massive costs and job losses are correct, they undermine their own position and help that of Wynne by accepting, even promoting, the foundation of the Liberals’ plans: the premise that we can control Earth’s climate merely by adjusting our CO2 emissions.
To appreciate why the approach of interim PC Leader Jim Wilson and his team has, and will continue to fail, consider the following analogy.
Imagine astronomers discover that an asteroid will collide with the Earth in 2030. The only way to prevent catastrophe, they say, is to deflect the asteroid well before impact. Opinion leaders proclaim, “We have 15 years to save the planet!”
In response to public panic, NASA proposes to launch space-based lasers that would, over years of operation, push the asteroid into a safe trajectory.
Governments accept NASA’s plan and what is viewed as humanity’s most important project ever begins. To demonstrate their sincerity to solving the crisis, politicians pledge vast sums to the United Nations’ newly created Bureau of Asteroid Deflection (BAD). Even though consequent tax increases are forecast, public, academic, and media support is overwhelming and aerospace company stocks soar as multibillion-dollar contracts are let.
Shaky science behind climate alarm
Meanwhile, other astronomers recalculate the asteroid’s path and find mistakes in the original work. They conclude that the chances of an impact any time in the foreseeable future is minute. By this time, however, the ‘stop asteroid impact’ movement is popular, BAD is fully funded, and money is pouring into science and engineering research establishments. The trajectory corrections are ignored.
As the costs of the program start to hit home, opposition parties and corporations that would not benefit from BAD projects start to object. “We can’t afford it,” they say. “The tax increases will force companies to lay off workers.”
Most people not directly affected by the layoffs consider such arguments petty in comparison with ‘saving the planet.’ It would only be by demonstrating that the impact threat was false that anti-BAD advocates would have any chance of winning the debate. But they dare not bring it up. BAD supporters would be furious if the rug was pulled out from under their pet project.
The climate change debate is unfolding in the same way.
Because they oppose Wynne’s cap and trade plans while accepting the overarching reason for them—fears of dangerous anthropogenic climate change—Ontario’s PCs and industry leaders are regarded by many as opportunistic and misguided. This is especially true of those who see it as the developed world’s responsibility to lead the world to solve important global problems.
The only way to defeat this position is to demonstrate the futility of trying to control Earth’s climate. Accusations that the Liberals want to ruin the economy or destroy jobs have little traction, since most opinion leaders do not believe these charges. The majority of those who recognize the enormous costs of the Wynne’s plans regard these sacrifices as necessary in order to be responsible environmental stewards.
Since Wilson and most of his allies are too frightened to highlight the shaky science backing the government’s plans, rank and file conservatives must do so through letters to the editor, call-ins to radio talk shows, and simply telling everyone they meet that the whole things is based on nonsense. They have to also make it clear to PC MPPs that, if they continue to support the climate scare, not only will they no longer donate to the party or campaign for them, but they will look for other candidates to vote for.
In other words, grass roots conservatives need to demand that the Ontario PCs get a backbone and fight Wynne’s cap and trade plans with a strategy that can win. We need them to cite documents such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change which list thousands of peer-reviewed science papers that reveal the problems with Wynne’s climate plans. They must demand that the government immediately convene open, unbiased hearings into the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Ontario. If the general public come to understand the uncertainty in the science, then Wynne’s moral authority to ‘price carbon’ vanishes. This is why activists become enraged when the science is questioned.
World War II Lancaster bomber pilot “Sandy” Mutch, now 95 and living in Ottawa, makes an interesting analogy, “On bombing raids over Europe, we could tell we were closing in on the target when we started to get the most flak.” Mutch, who hold a Masters of Science degree from the University of Toronto (1951), concludes that taking flak from climate extremists is similarly unavoidable, if they are to be defeated.
“Anyone who wants to kill the dangerous and unfounded climate scare should focus on exposing the shaky science behind climate alarm," said Mutch. "That is the Achilles heel of the whole movement. Shoot it down and you win the war!”
