Concentrate on climate change facts, not fallacies, urges new study

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OTTAWA — Climate facts over alarmist fallacies.

That’s the topic of a new report released this week by the Fraser Institute, investigating what is says are pervasive myths about climate change that, thanks to ideologically-charged activism, are now generally accepted as true.

“It’s best if we talk about climate change in terms of verifiable facts and logic, and not get caught up in politically-driven or self-interested … portrayals of what a good good answer is to climate change,” said study author and institute Senior Fellow Kenneth Green.

“Climate change is real, greenhouse gases are real … but we need to do better thinking about these things in terms of pragmatic realities than getting onto boats to go cruise in protest against capitalism.”

The study, entitled Four Climate Fallacies, dissects four popular so-called falsehoods about climate change — beginning with the assertion, one oft-repeated by activists like Greta Thunberg, that capitalism causes climate change.

“Capitalism actually leads to cleaner manufacturing activities and productive activities faster than alternative economic organization forums such as socialism or communism,” Green said.

“Economically free countries, highly capitalist countries, realize their environmental problems early in their development and address them with unbelievable speed.”

From the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970, Green said, developed countries jumped to action — leading to substantial reductions in air pollution.

“Capitalism frees people to look around themselves and say the air is too dirty — then through their choices in the marketplaces and politics of economic democracies, it frees them to be able to afford to say ‘clean this stuff up ASAP, get it done now,'” he said.

“And that’s what happens.”

The opposite, he said, is true in less-developed, less-economically free nations, either unwilling or unable to afford to make these changes.

Another suggested fallacy is that all nations, no matter how little they emit, can make a difference in global emissions levels.

“Canada, even though it’s only 1.5% of global emissions, is supposed to be working hard to mitigate its emissions — even though there would be no impact on the trajectory of the global climate were Canada to shut down completely,” he said.

Canada currently ranks 11th as the world’s top CO2 emitters, 583 Mt as of 2022.

China, 32% of world emissions, released 12.6 Gt of CO2 in 2022, followed by the United States with 4.9 Gt, India with 2.7 Gt, Russia with 1.9 Gt, and Japan at 1.0 Gt.

Electrification of passenger vehicles is the third fallacy mentioned, as the cleanliness of using electric vehicles rests entirely on how clean the generated power is, while carbon capture was the fourth.

“In oil fields it makes sense to capture as much as they can from their emissions and then re-inject it to get even more oil and gas out — and that’s how most carbon capture and storage is working in the world now for enhanced oil recovery,” Green said.

“But in bigger terms of capturing CO2 across the economy, from electricity generation, transport, buildings — compressing it and transporting it to some safe destination and burying it underground — those physical barriers are very large.”

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
X: @bryanpassifiume

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