How soon, and for how long, do you want you, your children and grandchildren to be poor and cold?   While not saving the planet from anything?  Keep supporting the political goal of net zero by 2050 (NZ50) and you and your children and grandchildren will soon get there.  

A country  can go from comfort to poverty a lot faster than from poverty to comfort.  Europe and much of Asia saw that after WW 2.  If we destroy our affordable and reliable energy infrastructure, and the industries that rely on it, it will take decades of poverty to rebuild it.  Let’s not do that to ourselves.

Over the next decade the political goal of NZ50 will make you and your children poorer than your parents’ generation, without measurably impacting climate change or planetary CO2 levels.  As already seen in the UK, Germany and other EU countries, green transition “leadership”, prioritizing weather dependent electricity generation (solar and wind), combined with other NZ50 policies, is disastrous. It will hike food prices, make transportation of goods and people much more expensive, and escalate your heating and lighting bills.

In our cold, northern country, even middle class Canadians will soon have to choose between heating their homes and feeding their families.  As in Europe, those at the lower end of the income spectrum will need massive social assistance payments (which are unsustainable when the economy free falls) or suffer mass poverty.

Green Energy Isn’t Reliable When the Wind Doesn’t Blow and the Sun Doesn’t Shine

While climate advocacy groups and their lawyers champion so-called green energy, their proposals exclude and discourage nuclear generation, which is the only available non-emitting reliable energy source.  They do not propose any alternative.  Should we chop down our forests for solar farms and “biomass” (i.e., burning trees processed into wood pellets)?  Germany, after shutting its nuclear stations and going “green”, recently had to destroy a 12,000 year old forest to expand a coal mine.  Should we continue to follow its path until we have to rebuild coal generation? 

The rationale for NZ50 policies is that they are essential if we are to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, caused solely by burning fossil fuels.  Thus, NZ50 was seen as a noble cause for the West to pursue, passionately advocated by large and well-financed climate change NGOs.  This, in turn, has affected the political outcomes of elections.  Political parties wanting to win the next election, to be achieved by frightening voters with the “global warming climate crisis”, have prevailed over considerations of the disastrous longer-term impacts of NZ50 policies. 

9-10 Times More Deaths from Cold than Heat

For every death linked to heat 9 or 10 are linked to cold.  A bit more warmth in Canada over the next century should actually save lives.  We should ask our politicians how many low income Canadians should freeze to death in Canada’s futile attempt to reach NS50?  How many children should go hungry and cold in winter?  Many northern First Nations communities survive cold winters thanks to their diesel generators. How many of these communities should now be abandoned to achieve NZ50?

Canada represents only 1.6 percent of global CO2 emissions.  Canada can’t fight global climate change by eliminating local CO2 emissions.  Why?  Around 80 percent of global energy still comes from fossil fuels, even after 2 decades of fighting climate change.  Yet approximately two thirds of the world’s population, that’s 5.4 billion out of 8 billion people living in the developing countries, is rapidly increasing their use of coal and natural gas for energy, emitting CO2 at levels that quickly swamp the trivial reductions Canada can achieve, even at massive cost to your standard of living. 

Why Become Poorer Only to Make China and India Wealthier?

Canada’s panic driven climate policies will merely transfer your personal living standards, and maybe also your job, to China, India (and some other developing countries), so that you and your children will be as poor in the future as China and India were in the past.

Change NZ50 Sooner Rather Than Later

Sooner rather than later the destructiveness of our current climate policy will have to be reduced. This change has already started in Europe, and will be starting here. The only question is how much poverty NZ50 will cause before Canadians realize and accept that NZ50 can’t continue.  We have only a decade at most to save many of us from the destruction to be created by these policies, while the elites remain unaffected.  And the climate continues to do what it always does: change.