(Nov. 2, 2009) Presentation to The Standing Committee on General Government
Re: Bill 185, Environmental Protection Amendment Act
(Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading), 2009
Queen’s Park, Ontario
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of this committee, for the opportunity to provide Energy Probe’s view on Bill 185.
I would first like to introduce my organization, for those of you who may not be familiar with us. We are one of Ontario’s oldest and largest environmental organizations, established at the University of Toronto in 1970 and entirely non-partisan. Many of the important reforms that we have seen in Ontario’s power sector over the decades have originated with us. The breakup of Ontario Hydro’s monopoly, for example, directly followed our recommendations. Initially these recommendations were endorsed by Bob Rae of the Ontario NDP and David Peterson of the Ontario Liberals. Our recommendations then became part of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution and, when the Tories came to power, Hydro was indeed broken up.
Ontarians spend more time with Energy Probe than with any other environmental organization. According to Amazon’s Alexa metric, Energy Probe’s website is Canada’s most popular environmental website. People spend more time on our site than on the sites of the David Suzuki Foundation and World Wildlife Canada combined. We also reach large numbers of Ontarians through our opeds in major papers and my weekly columns in the National Post, and through our books. Last year, my book on scientists who are sceptical on global warming, The Deniers, was the #1 environmental best seller in both Canada and the U.S.
I am here this afternoon to tell you that the government’s proposed greenhouse gas trading scheme would be a mistake, one that would harm the environment as well as the economy.
The premise behind Bill 185 is that a North American cap-and-trade plan could be in place as early as 2012. This was an unlikely expectation in May, when the government proposed the legislation, and it is even more unlikely today. The US public has turned decisively against the global warming scare. A majority of Americans – even a majority of Democrats – no longer believe Al Gore. Most Americans believe global warming is a natural phenomenon, not manmade.
Likewise, the public in the UK no longer believes that global warming is a serious concern. And the public in Australia. And the public in Canada. A new Climate Confidence Monitor survey released just this morning shows support for action on climate change is plummeting in Canada. Just 26% of Canadians consider global warming among their chief concerns, down from 34% last year.
Because the public around the world is no longer buying the hype over global warming, the meetings in Copenhagen next month will accomplish nothing of substance. And because Copenhagen will amount to nothing, the White House has already indicated that Barack Obama will not be attending, so as not to be tainted by its failure. The Washington Post yesterday said of the Senate’s climate change bill, “there is almost no hope for passage.”
On the global warming issue the public, once again, has been well ahead of the politicians. Some of you around this table may be surprised by the polling data and how quickly the politics can change. Some of you may think the science is settled on climate change. Let me tell you why you think the science is settled.
It all comes down to one number – 2500. That’s the number of scientists associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the number that the press reports has endorsed the Panel conclusions.
If you do a Google search on news articles that claim that the science is settled on climate change, you’ll see that the reporters almost always rely on this number.
“2500 scientists can’t be wrong,” they always say, explicitly or implicitly. If they didn’t have that number, they would have no basis for the claim that they repeat over and over again – the claim that there’s a consensus on climate change.
2500 is an impressive number of scientists. I wondered who, exactly, were these 2500 scientists associated with the UN. To find out, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. I intended to survey them and find out exactly what they thought.
The answer that came back from the secretariat was negative. I learned that the names were not public, so I couldn’t have them. And I learned that the 2500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers.
That group of scientists hadn’t endorsed anything. They were merely people who had reviewed some of the inputs that went into the bureaucratic maw. They did not review the final report or endorse it.
Their reviews weren’t even all favourable. I know that from many sources, including from among some of the scientists that I profiled — several of the deniers in my book are among those 2500. And those deniers, and others, generally consider the UN’s work a travesty.
So there is no endorsement by 2500 top UN scientists. The press has been taken. And so – until recently – a majority of the public has been taken.
The extent to which the public has been taken may surprise you. Not only is there no consensus, the scientists who are skeptics — the deniers — have extraordinary credentials. They are the Who’s Who of Science.
They include Antonino Zichichi, the president of the World Federation of Scientists and the discoverer of nuclear anti-matter. He is Italy’s best known scientist.
They include Claude Allegre, who is France’s best known scientist. And they include one of Germany’s best known scientists and Britain’s and America’s, Freeman Dyson, the physicist, the inventor of the TRIGA, the nuclear reactor used in hospitals and university labs around the world to create isotopes.
They include Syun Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Center, the discoverer of the causes of the storms of the aurora borealis.
They may, in fact, include the majority of the world’s top scientists. The majority of scientists not only believe that CO2 does not cause harm, most believe it to be a gas that benefits the global environment. Thanks to CO2, which is also known as Nature’s fertilizer, the planet now is greener than it has been in decades, since satellite measurements began recording the amount of biota on Earth.
In closing, let me tell you something else about my organization. Energy Probe has a large Third World wing called Probe International that works at the grass roots level. The citizens groups in the Third World are up in arms over attempts by western governments to comply with Kyoto. Kyoto, in fact, has emerged as the single greatest destroyer of the global environment precisely because of mechanism such as cap and trade that attempt to commodify carbon. What we purchase with a carbon credit or a carbon offset is often the environment of a community in the Third World – its river valley, its old growth forest, its farmland. Kyoto has made us the enemy among many in the Third World.
I’ll stop my prepared comments here. The package of materials before you elaborates on some of what I’ve just described. If any of you have any questions, I’ll be pleased to answer them.
Sources for this speech:
Bill 185, Environmental Protection Amendment Act (Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading), 2009
Moving Forward: A Greenhouse Gas Cap-and-Trade System for Ontario
Energy Probe 