UN Alarming Gap Report Nonsense on Stilts

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Nov 2017

RE: Paris agreement targets leave “alarming gap”: UN report

The Paris agreement on cutting carbon dioxide emissions was fatally compromised by the withdrawal of the United States from the deal.  Never mind that China and India (emitters #1 and #4) had no obligations under the deal.  Nevertheless, zombie members of the agreement, such and Canada and the UN, persist in trying to reduce their emissions while thumping their chests in moral posturing.

A UN report was released recently criticizing, among others, Canada for failing to raise its targets for cutting emissions, saying Canada is one of the biggest laggards; that not only are Canada's existing targets are too low, but that Canada does not yet have in place policies for meeting those. (Has the UN ever even heard of laissez-faire capitalism?)  Canada's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna engaged in orbiter dicta when asked about it, and that left her exposed to attacks from the enviro-wacko left - in the person of Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada (where do they get their money to operate?).  Abreu kindly offered to sacrifice Canada's oil and natural gas production to meet goals, and said that the Canadian government needed to intervene with an Industrial policy for which it has no legal or moral authority, short of wartime.  No wonder even progressive Liberals blanch at taking action to meet their moral posturing.

The UN report is filled with nonsense on stilts, and its assumptions fly in the face of millennia of human experience.  Its basic complaint is that western politicians are not overpromising enough to meet the false goals of the compromised Paris agreement.

Apparently, the lesson King Canute gave the world about mankind’s power over the forces of nature has been forgotten.  The Paris agreement was intended to halt the rise in global temperatures by some 2°C by the end of the century entirely through the actions of man.  The payoff for today’s pain is 83 years from now.  Of this rise, Canada’s contribution will be less than 0.02°C.

Those inclined to believe the promises of politicians won’t be alive to see those promises falsified, nor will those who made those promises be alive to suffer condign humiliation for having made them.  Hence, Canadians have to suffer economically for something they will never see, something trivial, and something easily overtaken by other natural events in the intervening century.

Surprisingly, even this political freebie - making promises having never to be fulfilled - is being looked at suspiciously by Liberal politicians, precisely because the pain is inflicted today.  That pain is the despoliation of the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan, producers of most of Canada’s oil and natural gas.

But that was the whole point of climate change alarmism going back to the Kyoto Accord: to cripple the successful western economies. And the call was made by people who wouldn’t personally suffer the pain.  Leaving most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground is going to cripple the world’s economy.  And that “really tricky conversation about what economic transition looks like for the country” will be tricky because the Canadian government has no authority to direct the economy thusly in peacetime, and because there is no one on the other side of the conversation.

The wealth required to pay for the new knowledge and the new technologies by which mankind can tackle the problems of the future will go unmade by crippling the world’s economy.

But those who call for such action are those who personally will not suffer in consequence of their policy recommendations.  Other people will.

The American withdrawal from the Paris agreement has fatally compromised it, and so there is nothing but moral posturing left in it.  And that moral posturing will be made by people who won’t be personally harmed by the doing of what they call for.

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