Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a dramatic working paper. Its conclusion: when US home heating costs fell, fewer people died.
In the authors’ words, we’ve known for decades that “mortality peaks in winter and that cold weather is associated with higher mortality.” When home heating gets expensive, many people – especially the poorest members of our community – turn down the thermostat.
But lower indoor temperatures are associated with an uptick in fatal strokes, heart attacks, and infections.
After collecting reams of data, and performing careful calculations, the researchers conclude that US heating bills declined noticeably between 2005 and 2010 “due to the boom in shale production of natural gas.”
That price decline, they write, “caused a 1.6% decrease in the winter mortality rate for households using natural gas for heating.”
Only 58% of American households heat with natural gas, so the drop in the death rate for the US population as a whole over a full calendar year works out to about half a percentage point. The bottom line: lower energy prices saved 11,000 lives annually.
Which brings us to the carbon tax recently imposed on all sources of home heating here in more northerly Canada. Enbridge, the company which supplies natural gas to Ontario homes, says it needs to raise the price it charges households by 11% just to pay for this carbon tax.
If deaths drop when heating costs decline, they’ll surely increase when heating costs spike. So let’s not beat around the bush: Canada’s carbon tax is going to kill people.
Extrapolating from those US numbers, 1,100 Canadians will die unnecessarily next winter. And the winter after that. And the one after that. As the size of the carbon tax increases, the number of annual victims may well rise in tandem.
Certain categories of people are at higher risk of death-by-carbon-tax. People whose health is already compromised. People who are already struggling to pay their bills. (Seniors, of course, are over-represented amongst both groups.)
There’s nothing heroic about a policy that consigns old people to shivering in the dark. That’s an attack on our most vulnerable. That’s a betrayal.
When people die from opioid overdoses, our Prime Minister rightly calls it a ‘crisis.’ He calls it “devastating. Families ripped apart. Communities forever altered. Loved ones lost too soon.”
Yet his carbon tax has set into motion a wave of similar tragedy and sorrow.
Where global carbon dioxide emissions are concerned, Canada’s 1.6% contribution is so trivial that nothing we do can possibly make a difference. We’re a rounding error, simply irrelevant to the big picture.
Which means that Canada’s carbon-tax-induced deaths won’t just be premature, they’ll be utterly meaningless.
Read more at BigPicNews
Is it a stretch to think that our government would prefer we die at home, rather than in our crowded, under – funded hospitals?
Since many Eco-Freaks beleive this Population Bomb nonsense of Paul Ehrlich they think their way too many people on the earth and too few Spider Monkeys so they support Abotion.Euthinasia and Manditory birth control
The climate change movement often makes claims that climate change will cause a lot of deaths. This article illustrates how it is the climate change movement that is doing exactly what they are accusing others of doing.
There are many examples of this. One article in the news today said that climate change would cause property values to fall. Yet, this does not stand up to reason. As the climate change movement pushes the cost of energy to higher and higher levels, there is less money for people to invest in buying homes. If the climate change movement gets its way the cost of food be much, much higher due to the impact of fossil fuels used in agriculture, so less money for buy homes or even paying existing mortgages. The high cost of energy will force some companies to lay people off and others to close completely. The victims will be selling their homes cheap or just walking away from the mortgages.
It is not climate change, but the climate change movement that is a serious threat to the well being of humanity and our economy.
Many who preach climate change and its solutions don’t believe in property at all.
Some Eco-Wackos are into this Gaia nonsense they real’y beleive that the earth is a living thing and were wounding the Earth Mother when we dig or drill this is a big time Pagan idea so next time you see someone in a parking lot with a THE EARTH IS YOUR MOTHER bumper sticker just roll down your window spit on the ground and tell them I’M SPITTING ON YOUR MOTHER
Mr. Dress up needs to stick around and be held to account for the premature deaths the carbon tax will cause . Thousands of deaths per year in the UK attributed to fuel poverty. Forget the “who knew ” fossil fuel litigation , the Canadian government knows carbon taxes will kill thousands of sick , elderly and poor people yet they impose them under the guise of saving the planet .
Good thing in Mr. Dress Up’s world budgets just magically balance themselves cause the carbon tax genocide plan is going to cost dearly .