Western Politicians Are Fossil Fools

[Anonymous]

Lorrie Goldstein hits the nail on the head as he usually does.

TORONTO - The never ending debate about global warming is irrelevant to the far more significant issue of its impact on global energy policy.



We've pretty much figured out that yes, humanity's burning of fossil fuels is having a warming effect on the climate.



But that it's not as dramatic as we were initially led to believe by alarmists like Al Gore.



That it's one of several environmental problems we face, but that it doesn't pose an existential threat to the planet.



It's also obvious that despite their often foolish and uninformed political rhetoric, national governments no longer believe global warming poses an existential threat.



United Nations-led efforts to draft a global treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions are going nowhere fast.



The next one is in New York later this month, but many key political leaders aren't even coming.



The problem is governments around the world, in order to be seen as doing something about global warming, are making foolish decisions that undermine the economic interests of their own citizens.



A prime example is the Liberal government in Ontario, first under Dalton McGuinty and now Kathleen Wynne.



Ontario has wasted billions of public dollars pretending to eliminate its use of coal to produce electricity by creating a multi-billion-dollar wind and solar power boondoggle that will only last as long as the massive public subsidies and inflated hydro bills needed to sustain it do.



In reality, both wind and solar power supply an insignificant and unneeded amount of unreliable power to Ontario's electricity grid.



The real way Ontario eliminated its reliance on coal was through the increased use of nuclear and natural gas-fired electricity, nuclear power being greenhouse gas emissions free and gas-fired power emitting greenhouse gases at half the rate of coal when burned.



The final idiocy of what the Liberals did is that their new natural gas plants will do double duty backing up wind and solar power, since they have to be supported by fossil fuel energy because they're so unreliable.



Ontario's stupidity is being mirrored around the world.



In Europe, the European Union's so-called Emissions Trading Scheme — essentially a fraud-ridden stock market in which the currency is the right to emit greenhouse gases — has raised electricity prices to the point where millions of households have been forced into fuel poverty, with no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions.



In the U.S., President Barack Obama has wasted billions of public dollars subsidizing wind and solar power.



In a laughable example of irony, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are dropping, but mainly because of the increasing use of fracking to free up vast underground reserves of domestic natural gas, which the U.S. is using to replace some of its coal-fired electricity.



In other words, the very technology environmentalists rail against in Canada, is a major reason U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are down.



Meanwhile, in economically struggling Nova Scotia, the provincial government — borrowing a page from Ontario's stupidity — has just announced a ban on high-volume fracking, thereby cutting itself off from a major potential source of economic growth.



Similar hysteria is seen in the opposition of the Justin Trudeau Liberals and Tom Mulcair New Democrats to the Northern Gateway pipeline, yet another example of politicians supporting actions that will undercut the Canadian economy by slowing the development of the oil sands, an insignificant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions at just over 0.14%.



The only grown-ups on Parliament Hill these days when it comes to the energy file are Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives.



They are the only party that seems to understand their job is to protect the economic interests of Canadians, not showboat at never-ending UN climate conferences making uninformed promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions everyone knows will never be kept.



That was the policy the federal Liberals pursued under former prime minister Jean Chretien, committing Canada to unrealistic and punitive greenhouse gas emission targets they have since admitted (in the person of Chretien's former top political aide Eddie Goldenberg) they knew they couldn't achieve when they made them.



The last bright idea the Liberals and NDP had under previous leaders in the 2011 election was to create a cap-and-trade market in Canada (similar to Europe's fraud-ridden Emissions Trading Scheme), regardless of the fact the United States doesn't have one, thereby deliberately putting yet another anchor on our economy.



It leaves one afraid to imagine what they'll think of next.

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/06/politicians-are-fossil-fools">http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/06/po ... ssil-fools">http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/06/politicians-are-fossil-fools

[Anonymous]

I can't believe we gave the Liberal disaster another mandate.

Ontario has wasted billions of public dollars pretending to eliminate its use of coal to produce electricity by creating a multi-billion-dollar wind and solar power boondoggle that will only last as long as the massive public subsidies and inflated hydro bills needed to sustain it do.



In reality, both wind and solar power supply an insignificant and unneeded amount of unreliable power to Ontario's electricity grid.



The real way Ontario eliminated its reliance on coal was through the increased use of nuclear and natural gas-fired electricity, nuclear power being greenhouse gas emissions free and gas-fired power emitting greenhouse gases at half the rate of coal when burned.



The final idiocy of what the Liberals did is that their new natural gas plants will do double duty backing up wind and solar power, since they have to be supported by fossil fuel energy because they're so unreliable.

[Shen Li]

The city I have lived in since I came to Canada, Edmonton bought 90 electric buses. Presently, 77 are not running at all.

The company the city bought them from. Proterra promised city politicians and bureaucrats their buses would for sure go 328 kilometres on a single charge, 265 kilometres in the coldest winters. According to the city's lawsuit, the buses never went more than 200 kilometres on warm days and 125 kilometres or less on cold ones.

Edmonton Transit cannot rely on the Proterra buses for an entire shift. They have to be brought back to the garage midday and older diesel buses sent out as backup.

And here is where it gets super funny--the largest Edmonton Transit garage where the vast majority of the usless electric buses are kept, has 2 massive diesel generators to provide charging for them.

[DKG]

The U.S. Olympic team will join a handful of other athlete delegations in bringing portable air conditioning units to Paris for the 2024 Olympics in spite of the city's efforts to provide cool hotel rooms at the cost of lower carbon emissions.

Europeans are famous for their disdain for air conditioning, as well as their lack of awareness that most of the rest of the world lives significantly closer to the equator, as well as farther away from cooling coastlines, than they do. By way of reference, Rome, Italy, is one of the southernmost major cities in Europe, and it is actually north of New York City. It is estimated that fewer than one in 10 homes in Paris has air conditioning.

Nonetheless, the United States delegation will not be the only delegation to reject France's contention that cool floors will be sufficient to maintain peak athletic performance. Germany, Australia, Italy, Canada, and Britain also plan to bring portable units to Paris.