They need a PLAN!

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Feb 20

The Saltpork & Rind editorialized today that the CPC leadership canadidates should all embrace Trudeau's carbon tax as their party's answer to Climate Change.  The tenor of the CPC membership is skepticism towards Climate Change and hostility towards the carbon tax.  The editorial was pig-ignorant in respect of its asserverated facts and disregard for other facts.


It is touching that the worshippers of Baal, the god of environmentalism, should be so concerned for the future of the Conservative Party of Canada.  They suggest that the Tories can make right with Baal if they just burnt some incense upon the altar of the carbon tax.

But there are aspects of the argument that seem lacking in probity - and seriousness.

The first sign of a lack of seriousness is a failure to understand the oft repeated statistic of 1.5 percent versus 98.5 percent.  Canada represents the 1.5 figure, and it means that there is nothing Canada can do about to affect the outcome determined by the 98.5.  A moral argument is sometimes floated, to the effect that Canada should be a moral example to the 98.5.

Canada could fall off the face of a flat earth and the effect on CO2 emissions would be negligible, because China and India are building coal-fired power plants so rapidly.  The Chinese communists and Hindu nationalists are lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through electrification.  If the Chinese and the Indians even paid attention to Canada’s ‘moral example,’ they would point to the superior morality of poverty relief.

Consequently, gestures of Baal worship by Canada are entirely symbolic and can have no practical effect on the world.

Now to probity.  Baal worshippers say that Canadians realize that the planet is rapidly overheating.  This is hard to realize because the planet isn’t.  It is the worshippers of Baal who are overheated, in their rhetoric.  The poetry-readers think they understand science better than actual scientist do.  But the world isn’t going to hit a point of no return in 2030, or even 2100.  The Book of IPCC states that the earth’s temperature will rise by 1.5℃ by 2100 if current trends continue.  In the first place, no one would notice anything over the course of their normal lives with a temperature rise of 1.5℃; and in the second, there is no reason to believe that present trends will continue for the next eighty years.  The 1930s, when CO2 was low, were hotter and drier than the present period.  Global temperatures fell from 1940 through to 1979, and climate gurus believed and proclaimed that an Ice Age cometh.  Then, the globe warmed until about 1998.  When things leveled off, the Baal worshippers became frantic to explain the pause in global warming.  Hence the coining of the expression, “climate change” in place of “global warming.”

It may well be that poetry-readers and guys looking for their next research grant say that frequent and intense heat waves, storms floods, etc. are getting worse.  Except that the inconvenient historical records going back to the 1920s say otherwise, and the claims about disasters are qualified with expressions like “low-confidence.”

It would be useful if the Baal worshippers actually named the conservative economists who think that fixating on carbon taxes are just the ticket.  Ross McKitrick of U of G is highly qualified in his acceptance of a carbon tax as the cure-all.  The carbon tax in B.C. is failing, as CO2 emissions continue to rise, and so the benighted hippies are raising the tax from $35 to $40 a tonne in the hope that harder and faster overcomes Einstein’s observation about doing the same thing again and expecting different results.

All in all, the Baal worshippers seem to be hedging their bets.  Sir Justin of the Carbon Tax is clearly wounded and failing, and he may fall at the next election.  Better to have the likely successors on board with Baal than risk losing everything.  However, that is what democracy is about – the offering of clear and distinct choices for the people to decide.  If the only difference between clown cars is color, then there is no real choice at all, which is why America has Trump.

One cannot blame the Baal worshippers trying to gain converts from among the pagans, but for the health of the body politic the Conservative party ought to remain robustly pagan, or at least conscious enough to be able to understand the significance of the figure ‘1.5.’
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