Energy Probe was one of Canada’s first environmental organizations – in the late 1980s — to warn the public about the potential dangers of man-made global warming. Our foundation was among those at the Rio Conference of 1992, organized by Canada’s Maurice Strong and Al Gore, that led to the Kyoto Protocol.
Because of the enormous amount of research that has since been conducted into climate change – a sum estimated in the tens of billions of dollars – much more is now known about these risks, and much more needs to be known. One of the greatest impediments to this knowledge, however, lies in the mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which limits itself to man-made causes and thus excludes a needed inquiry into natural causes of climate change. To make matters worse, the many thousands of scientists who question the IPCC’s approach are being demonized as “deniers.”
To further free scientific inquiry into climate change, Energy Probe has published the dissents of many scientists in Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers series in the National Post, and in a bestselling book of that name. Energy Probe has also highlighted the social and environmental costs of the Kyoto treaty, which too often receive short shrift. Meanwhile, our sister organization, Probe International, has been working with citizens groups in the Third World who fear for the loss of their livelihoods and their environments as a result of ill-advised climate change policies from the IPCC and other western organizations.
While Energy Probe opposes the Kyoto Protocol, and views its targets for carbon dioxide reduction to be unattainable through the mechanisms that the IPCC espouses, Energy Probe believes that fossil fuels are overused due to the many direct and indirect subsidies available to energy production and consumption. By simply eliminating these subsidies, Energy Probe believes, Kyoto’s targets for carbon dioxide would be met.
Energy Probe 