We can do better at reducing emissions in Canada
By Letter to the Editor on March 31, 2021.
Editor:
We can do better at reducing carbon emissions. We must continue to try to.
Canada has emissions standards for vehicles. Many countries do not, such as Brazil, China, India.
Alberta has (had?) five coal-fired electric generating plants. China has thousands. India has hundreds. China and India are building more.
Our cities have a minor air pollution problem. Beijing can have days of thick, choking smog.
We do not have to be ashamed of how we are doing.
Why should Canada knock itself out of competitive standing against countries that are doing nothing to even strive for the standards we’ve had for decades?
Trudeau is being utterly lame-brained – or Canada-destroying – to further handicap our industries and our workers by putting on carbon punishments (“levies”) that suck money out of our pockets and pad the bank accounts of government employees who haven’t lost their incomes in the last 12 months, including MPs and MLAs and MOHs.
In the 2019 election, Trudeau’s campaign used a second aircraft to carry their physical platform and posters around, and apologized by paying money to polluting nations for “carbon credits”. In other words, the big-wigs in government pay with our money to keep on polluting on the “pollution allowances” of other nations that aren’t producing enough pollution of their own!
If there is to be any legitimacy to a carbon tax, it must be applied to wasteful, discretionary activities, not to the essentials that we have to engage in.
We need to travel to work, we need trucks to move product to market, we need to heat our homes in this non-equatorial nation.
We do not need to motor around the wilderness, we do not need to idle cars while chatting with people or waiting for someone, we do not need the hotel on Mayor Magrath Drive to burn torches, we do not need to buy gas-hog vehicles instead of a high-efficiency vehicle, we do not need to have auto races. It is these activities that should be hit with carbon levies; cosmetic uses, like those torches, could be prohibited altogether.
We could re-legalize incandescent light bulbs for the non-polluting heat that they generate.
Let’s kick out Trudeau and his cadre and elect people who realize Canada has nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to carbon emissions. We need to start lecturing the laggards like India, China and the oil-rich nations.
Geoffrey Capp
Lethbridge AB
-1
Great letter Geoffrey! We don’t have to shut Canada down because we produce less than 1% of the planets green-house gases. We can do better at cutting-down carbon emissions within our Country without grinding our economy to a halt. Sadly radical groups have hi-jacked our media and governments to the point that nobody dare speak-out against them less they be shamed.
Always good to here a point of common-sense as opposed to the fear-mongering BS that’s put-out on a daily basis that Canadians gorge on!
‘Radical groups’ like scientists and economists (even neoliberal ones) who understand the ecological and societal crises that we can expect in a warming world.
Yes a warming world! That has warmed and cooled long before life even started here. The “sky is falling” mindset serves no purpose other than to scare the masses!
In a later reply, J57 on 1st April, refers to a legacy for his and others grandchildren regarding “debt”.
Given his clear skepticism toward climate change , he would do well to considers his grandchildren’s legacy dealing with an ever warming world.
Do not justify your skepticism by quoting an outdated mantra of the earth’s well known warming and cooling with the unnatural warming trends correlated since the industrial revolution and CO2 in the atmosphere.
The “sky may not be falling” – YET.
The old adage of ‘someone jumping in the river just because someone else does it,’ comes to mind, and, ‘more than one wrong doesn’t make a right.’ We need to keep ‘our own doorstep clean’ by reducing emissions.
I would like buy a few of those magical light bulbs that provide ‘non-polluting heat’ winter and summer long.
Incandescent light bulbs don’t pollute, it’s the electricity generation that does. They also do provide heat but very inefficiently.
Yep.
Spatially inefficient by mainly providing some heat to the ceiling only, and about 5x less financially efficient when compared to heating with natural gas.
I’d like to buy some as well. They’re expensive though. They’re called vacuum insulated windows 🙂
https://www.affordableenergy.ca/an_in_depth_study_of_trudeau_s_second_carbon_tax?fbclid=IwAR0G02sbWZYbSmlQBTnijdDGaG0CVlMJ5aAma5qA-1ltJRuFXLB4uBZih7E
The full assessment is in the link.
The Canadian Carbon taxes. Doing little to nothing to stop pollution, lines the pockets of the elites, and throws countless more of us peasant Canadians into poverty.
And here is a thoughtful discussion from an Indigenous perspective:
https://www.indigenousclimateaction.com/amplifying-voices
Because money talks, the correlation on the negative impact of economies by the negative, expensive effect of a climate changing, warming world is nothing to sneeze at.