Why should Canada fight climate change?
Finally, someone proclaimed an obvious truth that few dare to utter publicly. According to Moody’s Analytics, Canada will benefit from climate change. Although it will shock many, this forecast should surprise no one.
Canada is a very large, cold country, with 90 percent of its population huddled within 100 miles of its southern border and an enormous agricultural potential if the land warms up.
There will also be new opportunities for oil, gas and mineral development in the Arctic. And let’s not ignore the greater personal comfort of living in a more hospitable climate.
According to a CBC story about Moody’s study, “when all the changes to things like tourism demand, crop yields and the growing season are factored in, there’s a slight net positive.”
Assuming a one-degree Celsius temperature rise, Moody’s calculates that our economy would be unaffected in 2048.
A rise of 2.4 degrees would increase GDP by 0.1 percent and four degrees would boost it by 0.3 percent. Not much, but still positive, and certainly not the terrifying calamity we are warned to expect.
The impact on farming, however, would be dramatic.
In the three Prairie provinces alone, an area more than twice the size of France, arable land could increase between 26 and 40 percent by 2040, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
With improvements in farm technology, drought-resistant crops and new harvesting methods, Canada would have a wonderful opportunity to help feed a hungry world.
And not a moment too soon: according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the agricultural output needs to increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years to keep pace with world population growth.
Paradoxically, Canada is imposing burdensome costs and regulations to try to prevent what for us would be beneficial warming.
But let’s not be so selfish. Other countries will be hurt by climate change, so we need to do our part as good global citizens.
Unfortunately, at only 1.6 percent of global GHG emissions, Canada cannot achieve a measurable impact on global temperatures, even if it met the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change target, which would devastate our economy.
OK, we cannot make a practical difference, but surely we have to try, if only as a symbol of our determination to help the world counter an existential threat. Mind you, that is tantamount to elevating a meaningless gesture to a moral imperative.
Moreover, once you get past all the doomsday prophesying and virtue-signaling, other countries’ commitments are honored mainly in the breach, as global emissions continue to rise.
In a last-gasp rationale for sacrifice to the climate gods, we are urged to serve as a shining example of rectitude, presumably to inspire or shame others into action for their own good.
Now we have truly arrived in fantasyland. Does anyone seriously imagine Canada can convince the four biggest carbon emitters, China, the U.S., India, and Russia, who together are responsible for 57 percent of global emissions, to follow our example of sequestered resources and undermined prosperity?
The prime minister’s hectoring has zero influence on his counterparts. Two benefits from our inability to export energy overseas. Three barely tolerate his presence. And the fourth, Donald Trump, has abandoned the Paris accord.
Meanwhile, we are not doing what we can to address extreme weather, which directly and severely harms our economy and endangers Canadians.
According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, insured damages for extreme weather events amounted to $1.9 billion last year, with an estimated triple that for damage to public infrastructure.
Our focus needs to be on adaptation, reduction, and protection, as well as on building resilience and increasing survivability.
Initiatives could include: new land-use plans and building codes; incentives for moving homes and businesses away from high-risk areas, especially coasts; constructing flood defenses and raising the levels of dikes; developing drought-tolerant crops; making forests less vulnerable to storms and fires and setting aside land corridors that permit species migration.
Other collaborative strategies are early warning systems, co-ordinated emergency preparedness and public education about insurance protection and flood- and fire-prevention best practices.
Right now our overall approach is piecemeal. Canada badly needs competent leadership rather than dead-end ideological obsessions, rent-seeking and bureaucratic empire-building.
We have witnessed the current government’s ineffective reaction to this pressing environmental challenge. Leading into the election, the other party leaders, and especially Andrew Scheer, head of a government-in-waiting, should tell Canadians how they would take it on differently, possibly with a federal-provincial-municipal action plan.
Instead, the House of Commons declares a “National Climate Emergency,” the emperor struts around with invisible policy clothes and the official climate jeremiad simultaneously scares our children and encourages progressives to seek an ever-larger role for an all-knowing government.
Things will go very poorly for both the economy and the environment if we stubbornly continue to work against the national interest, pursue unachievable objectives, posture to unimpressed foreigners and inadequately prepare for extreme weather.
Alas, the disconnect between belief and reality seems destined to endure for some time.
Read more at Financial Post
In the pretend game of human controlled climate change who gets to set the earth’s temperature ? Of course Canada would benefit from any warming and others may not . Wars would ensue if some group of humans had the temperature control knob . Christ you can’t even set the office temperature without hurt feelings .
Hey dung burners we are going to jack the temperature up so get the F over it . We have nukes and u don’t Any questions . Why ?…. Because we can .
$ Trillions of dollars blown on a complete fraud . Who said humans were smart ?
Inter generation child abuse is what the global warming fear industry is all about . First kids get brain washed then they are going to expected to pick up the tab after the criminal rent seekers have ripped off tax payers with $Trillions in new debt .
What is truly amazing is these young people haven’t quite figured out how absolutely screwed they got by “save the F!@#ing planet con men and severely retarded politicians Just wait for when they wake up .
Notwithstanding climate Barbie (Minister of the environment McKenna) says Canada is ‘warming’ quicker than the rest of the planet – what? huh? WTF – how can that geophyscially happen?
From the very beginning the global warming theory has stated that the poles will warm faster than the rest of the earth. Consider Canada’s location that would have an impact. Now, why are the poles supposed to warm faster? In the thousands of articles I have read over the years about global warming/climate change, I have never encountered an explanation.
According to Joe Oliver, in the first paragraph, Moody’s Analytics is the first “somebody” to point out the obvious. That Canada would benefit from higher temperatures was obvious, except the lobotomized. Ottawa and the liberal media has been censoring that fact.
For some reason, Oliver goes in the ditch, advising preparation for the imminent climate calamities.
Joe, quit while you’re ahead.
First of all, the warming will be minimal and therefore any benefit small. The earth has been naturally warming since the end of the mini ice age and the warming predicted by the typical IPCC climate model isn’t going to happen.
The article implies that there will be an increase in natural disasters as a result of climate change. This clearly has not happened even though the media and politicians are making false claim that it is. However, adaption measures are always a good idea. These take money. One source of the money should be the utilization of the abundant fossil fuels that the federal government has put severe limits on.
With increase in growing seasons isn’t Canada well endowed with plenty of water. Even if most of the snow melts away permanently do they not have water to dam up and use?
I see a time of wealth in food for them Just like in Europe and UK in the medieval warm period. Chest high wheat and barley crops and all workers resting in the shade in mid-day sun.
It’s almost impossible to build a dam or a pipeline in Canada. All that fresh water flowing to the oceans, only to become brine.
The Canadian Prairie is prone to drought, always was. Prevailing wind from the north west brings little moisture. Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico rarely makes it that far north.
The Americans won’t mind those water pipelines from Canada when California runs out .