What is this man thinking? Let us totally forget this attempt to juggle with levy as not a tax. It is a tax and that’s all there is to it. Secondly the notion that should he win government he will put the money from the “levy” into a special customer account and then dictate what you’re allowed to spend it on — solar panels are good, bread is off the list — is a special kind of madness.
Update: Lorne Gunter concurs.
Giddy as a school girl.
Conservatives launched their major campaign pitch today. It’s one thing to read the dingbat details but it’s a whole other thing to watch the leader try to sell them. I’ll apologize in advance but you need to see this. (There’s 15 minutes of music and pretty pictures before anything is said.)
#BREAKING: Conservatives launch comprehensive plan to fight climate change and protect Canada's natural environment https://t.co/gP6la33W3Q
— Conservative Party (@CPC_HQ) April 15, 2021
Update: David Akin @erinotoole says: “This is not a tax. Not a cent goes to Ottawa.” Consumer: I’m paying more at the pump no matter what. CPC: But u get credits you can spend on stuff. Consumer: Can I use it to buy anything I want? CPC: No. Only on items from a govt approved shopping list.
The federal Conservatives revealed their climate plan on Thursday and proposing a $20-per-tonne carbon price — lower than the Liberals’.
The plan is a major shift in policy, as the party has previously threatened to scrap the program introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole announced the climate policy Thursday morning, saying “Canadians cannot afford Trudeau’s carbon tax.”
Tar. Feathers. Some assembly required.
Western MPs I spoke to this morning tell me that they learned about it all in the news. O’Toole never had the approval from his caucus – let alone his party – for such a flip-flop.
Blacklocks (paywalled) – Arctic sea ice grew 27 percent last year, the Department of Environment reported yesterday. The figures contradicted claims by then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna that the Arctic “is literally melting”…
h/t Ontario John
h/t PaulHarveyPage2
Germans scale back on wind energy
The German government loves to talk about the importance of green energies, but when it comes to their expansion, it is in fact doing the opposite: Old wind turbines are being removed without being replaced by new generation turbines.
Perhaps it’s beginning dawn on the German government that especially wind and solar energy just aren’t working out, and so they have massively scaled back subsidies with the aim of scaling them back. […]
The NDR [German public television] reports that in the coming years, 16 GW of wind power will be removed from the subsidy system. Almost two-thirds of this may not be replaced by new, more powerful ones.
As far as Altenstedt goes, where the three featured turbines are being dismantled, the NDR reports: “No more wind turbines may be built in Altenstedt, there are no more planning permits. The energy transition is now history here.
The remaining infrastructure: transmission lines, access roads, transformers etc. are available and are now no longer being used. In Altenstedt they will probably become the first relics of a past idea that went sour.
h/t PaulHarveyPg2
If it doesn’t work that probably means it’s not a good theory.
From nzherald
James Cameron’s plans to convert his Wairarapa properties into organic veggie farms appear to have fallen short – with hundreds of cows now understood to be grazing in his paddocks.
The Avatar film director owns more than 1500ha of land in South Wairarapa, and has been outspoken about the need for New Zealand to move away from agriculture to curb carbon emissions.
Locals say he’s not walking the talk – with plans for crop farming giving way to more lucrative dairy grazing.
Their website proudly states that ‘Cameron Family Farms are dedicatedly leading the next generations of eco-warriors and farmers towards large scale animal-free organic eco-agriculture’.
At least he used his own money to fund his own ideas. This time anyways.
While the CD Howe Institute is right about ditching Freeland’s $100 billion stimulus package, they go completely off the rails with the rest of the prescription.
The C.D. Howe as a result proposes a hike in GST from its current rate of five per cent up to seven per cent, reversing the previous Conservative government’s two per cent cut in 2006.
As if fearing that morale would not improve without further beatings, the report seems to believe that Canada’s carbon tax regime could use some additional help:
[The report] also proposes hiking GST on transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel by 10 per cent, which would “give consumers a strong price signal to discourage CO2 emissions,” it says.
You see it’s all about the “climate”.😉
CityNews Reporter: "In order for us to tackle climate change as a nation we're gonna [sic] have to reckon with our colonial and capitalistic racist past as a country…" pic.twitter.com/Zc6BaFE4CW
— Greg Renouf (@grenouf) March 30, 2021
The Liberal media propaganda fund in action.
From The Australian
I have personally been on the receiving end of this climate alarmism enforcement for years. Last week, I was scheduled to give a public lecture at Duke University in the US when a group of climate-politicised professors – some who write for the UN Climate Panel – publicly asked Duke to cancel my appearance.
The political forces looking to spend the climate trillions and the academia segment supplying the fear want to scrub the climate debate of anything but the scariest scenarios. They want an unwavering allegiance to vigorous spending on climate policy, no matter its effectiveness.
They insist on treating this issue as a moral binary choice instead of a realistic balancing of costs and effectiveness which would allow for our many other challenges to be heard as well.
Certainly, the professors at Duke didn’t want anyone to hear dissenting facts.
Read the rest.
Here it is on Fox hopefully not paywalled.
Here’s the lecture they wanted canceled.
Take a look at a couple of sentences about climate change that appeared Thursday concerning the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the carbon tax.
Here’s one: “It is a threat of the highest order to the country, and indeed to the world.” And here’s another: “The undisputed existence of a threat to the future of humanity cannot be ignored.”
Who do you think produced these lines: Did they come from Greta Thunberg’s Twitter account? Or maybe they’re excerpts of a Greenpeace Canada press release? A statement from a Green Party MP, perhaps?
Nope. These theatrical flourishes were from the SCOC ruling itself. Right there in the text of the majority decision that ruled the federal government does indeed have the right to run roughshod over provincial jurisdiction and impose a carbon tax on provinces against their will. […]
Yet here we are seeing that language used by the highest court in the land in the text of a major ruling. And they’re not using this language as an aside. They’re using it as the crux of why they’re siding with the feds and doing what they acknowledge is the rare occurrence of rolling out the Peace, Order and Good Government clause as their legal justification.
We need a new country.
Erin O’Toole has hitched his “conservative” wagon to this burning issue.
What if two cabinet ministers and two guests hosted a zoom news conference and nobody showed up? Subject: carpooling for #climatechange. From March 29 transcript. 1/3 #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/twPjCTPFtT
— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) March 30, 2021
Follow the tweet down for the entire 30 second conversation.
There’s a tweet you missed!
A True North fact check found Catherine McKenna’s claim to be untruthful on several fronts – particularly with regard to the support of farmers, Indigenous groups, cities and economists.@cosminDZS reports. #cdnpoli https://t.co/AzrPh1T0VM
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) March 26, 2021
I’m shocked, Shocked!
Western Canadian politicians are still deaf, dumb and blind to the fact that what came for oil and gas is coming for agriculture;
A push on the perceived urgency to deal with climate change is being promoted by John F. Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, in an interview with “CBS This Morning,” February 19, 2021. He said “the scientists told us three years ago that we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left.”
With climate change being the 800-pound gorilla in the room, one of the drum beats is to reduce animal agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gases (GHG) by reducing the numbers of beef cattle. The Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit environmental conservation group founded in 1993, is an advocate for a reduction in beef consumption in our diets. The reduced beef consumption would require fewer acres of land devoted to producing food and fiber for beef cattle. However, much of the land devoted to grazing is utilizing a resource that humans cannot consume (grasses).
It’s why the eco-Marxist Trudeau Liberals seem impervious to arguments that the escalating carbon tax will destroy western Canadian grain and beef production — it’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
@ConceptualJames — One of the harder things to do with the doctrine coming from the left right now is to stop thinking of it as “insane” and start realizing it is meant to be strategic toward a terrible purpose.
OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada has found the Liberal government’s federal carbon tax law to be constitutional, dealing a blow to the governments of Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan who had been fighting the law in court.
In a 6-3 split decision released Thursday morning, a majority of justices found the law is constitutional because reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a matter of national concern, and the law is focused on that narrow purpose while still giving provinces the ability to come up with their own solutions.
So are there champagne corks being popped here? 🍾 🥂 Or are they working on their pronouns?
The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?
O’Toole goes full McKenna. You should never go full McKenna.
We will have a plan to address climate change. It will be comprehensive. And it will be serious. But make no mistake, we can’t have a green future without jobs and growth. pic.twitter.com/PWPi1VawSR
— Erin O'Toole (@erinotoole) March 23, 2021
From his recent speech.
“We have now fought and lost two elections against a carbon tax because voters did not think we were serious about addressing climate change,” O’Toole said in his speech to delegates.
“And I will not allow 338 candidates to defend against the lie from the Liberals that we are a party of climate change deniers.”
If that is honestly what he thinks then his political instincts and ability to read the room are so low they can’t even be charted.
With everything that’s been going on in the country are the boomer cons really going to run with an election strategy of blue pilling their own people on climate change? 🤦♂️
There’s an update in the never ending Mark Steyn, Michael Mann, global warming/free speech lawsuit. Mann has lost another one but the suit continues.
For some reason every time I hear the name Michael Mann I think of a Motley Crue song and substitute “Dr. Fraudpants” for Dr. Feelgood. 🤔
Perhaps there’s still hope for the Conservative Party. The grassroots are showing some muscle. It remains to be seen whether O’Toole acts on this message or continues down the Liberal Lite path.
“Efforts to get official Conservative policy to recognize that climate change is real have failed.”
It may seem like a minor point, but it’s worth noting how the tone of the story would change if the writer had framed things this way: “Efforts to get official Conservative policy to recognize the damaging effect that climate change measures have on the economy have succeeded”.
The standard narrative sees Conservatives embracing failure. Change a few words, and they are embracing success. It’s all about the narrative.