To actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Canada needs readily available alternatives to high carbon consumer products and practices
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On Tuesday morning, B.C. NDP MP Bonita Zarrillo tweeted, “Is indoor skating ice even a necessity anymore? Can every ice sport be done without ice and different equipment?…just pondering the climate impact of human-made indoor ice.”
The response to MP Zarrillo’s tweet was universally unenthusiastic, to put it mildly. She deleted the tweet Thursday.
Earlier this year the Liberal government announced that it would ban the sale of diesel and gasoline powered trucks in the relatively near future. And in recent years, the Liberals have also passed multiple pieces of legislation that have been designed to stop investment in Canada’s energy sector. They have also imposed a general carbon tax.
The Liberals announced a plan to ban new gasoline and diesel trucks without a plan to address the impact and cost to the millions of Canadians who live away from paved roads or who work farms and construction job sites. There are serious problems with the existence, availability, cost, and infrastructure needed to operate the non-carbon powered vehicles that would be needed to replace Canada’s current fleet. And yet, the left stands by this ban. As opposed to backing down from it, anyone who has raised concerns risks being labelled a heartless redneck who loves their pickup more than mother Earth.
The left responds the same way to anyone who constructively points out that shuttering Canada’s energy sector, while the world is still largely dependent on carbon energy, has the net negative effect of making it more dependent on carbon energy produced in countries with lower environmental and human rights standards than Canada. The same goes for people who point out that a carbon tax probably won’t actually reduce reliance on carbon energy, given there are currently not enough low cost, readily available substitute goods for how we heat our homes during our brutal winters and how we transport ourselves across the sprawling expanse of our nation.
So why do Zarrillo and her ilk back these measures, but are unwilling to go after Leafs fans?
I surmise that Zarrillo’s Port Moody—Coquitlam voters in their relatively warm, urban, west coast riding with a well developed public transit system likely don’t have the same need for trucks as a farmer on the Prairies, the same concerns about the cost of home heating or transport as a single mom in rural Alberta, or the concerns about job safety as a geotechnical engineer in north-central Calgary. It’s politically more viable for Zarrillo to back away from a war on Virtue and Moir’s home turf and take the battle to the workplaces and homes of these others who have little to do with her reelection.
And that’s what leftists really mean when they say that Conservative politicians don’t have so-called “credible climate change policy”: we refuse to divide Canadians with a strategy for emissions reductions that doesn’t consider its overall social and economic cost against actual reductions that are achieved over a set period of time. This is in contrast to the left, which reaps political gain leaning into policy which has made the world more dependent on Russian oil, and the Canadian economy more vulnerable to high energy costs, all while seeing emissions actually grow.
The rest at the above link.
torontosun.com
