Our Blessed Minister of Climate Change

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Apr 2019

It would be pointless to argue with our Minister of Climate Change Catherine McKenna.  She is simply another Arts major confidently regurgitating the talking points given her by a bureaucrat-speechwriter.  I’m sure she believes every word she says, even if she is taking on faith the words being put into her mouth.

These talking points ultimately come from a certain cabal of climate scientists whose income depends upon government research grants.

Ms. McKenna urges the importance of a carbon tax to combat climate change.  Let’s unpack that.  In the first place, there is no such thing as an earthly global climate.   What the earth has is an atmosphere, and climate is something that exists in that.  This atmosphere is divided for analytical purposes latitudinally into so-called climatic zones, an equatorial zone, a temperate zone, and a polar region.  Each zone has a unifying principle.  You can sum up these parts and call that sum a climate, except there is nothing unifying the parts, other than they relate to the earth and exist in the earth’s atmosphere.

So, to proclaim on climate change is to say that something material is going to change in a mental abstraction.  Besides this, rising or falling temperatures merely move the boundaries of the three zones, moving up or down the latitudes which define the zones.  Expanding or contracting zone boundaries renders obscure what is meant by the substance of “climate change” since the climatic zones remain the same, just their location changes.

It is too much to expect an Arts major to understand this.  But Minister McKenna holds a Master’s degree in Economics, and so she should know something about tax policy.  Her position is that a carbon tax is good for us.  I assume she means on the net balance between higher costs and the disasters expected from climate change.  Here, she lets us down.  Raising taxes increases the power of government and decreases the purchasing wealth of the people.  With the increased power, the government plans to redistribute wealth from those who drive more to those who drive less.

To say that this increase in government power is good for us means that the economic effects of climate change are known and quantified.  The bad effects of the carbon tax will be less than the bad effects of climate change and that the two bad effects are in opposition to each other.  The worse the carbon tax, the less bad will be climate change.

Since the economic effects of climate change are unknown and cannot even be reliably estimated, it is sheer propaganda on the part of Minister McKenna to say that the carbon tax is good for us – the people whose economic freedom is being diminished by the carbon tax.  And being an economist, she should know this.

It is too much to expect an Arts major to really understand the debacle of “climate science”, but in areas of her expertise Minister McKenna engage in handwaving nonsense.

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