Dr. Tim Ball: The Disastrous Economic Impact Of CO2 Reduction Policies
DR. TIM BALL
Ontario, a Province in Canada, a country with almost unlimited energy resources and the same population as California, has exorbitantly high electricity bills. So high that people march in protest. How did this happen? It is hard to believe, but it is primarily the result of deliberate energy policies recommended by the UN to world leaders.
A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is true of socialism. It fails every time, but socialists never stop trying. Global warming uses pseudoscience to achieve a socialist political agenda. It was chosen because it was a global threat that required global governance. It was created through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), sponsored and organized by Maurice Strong. It is the originator of what is broadly called the Green Agenda, an economy based on eliminating CO2 and shifting to alternate energies through Agenda 21. It failed everywhere it was tried, with Germany being the largest and latest to scramble for their energy and economic lives.
The sad part is we need environmentalism; it is foolish to soil your own nest. What we don’t need are people using environmental issues for political agendas.
Many countries and regions have experimented with green agendas, especially energy policies, but there is one that is more instructive than all the others. In the Province of Ontario, the energy policy was put in place and controlled by Maurice Strong who created the deception that human CO2 was causing global warming. He practiced what he preached, and it is an unmitigated disaster from which all should learn. He found welcome political ground in Ontario exemplified by Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart who said, “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral benefits…Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
As a member of the Club of Rome (COR) Strong took their neo-Malthusian view set out in their report Limits to Growth that Wikipedia defines as, “a 1972 report on the computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources,” and translated it into organization and bureaucracy. Elaine Dewar, a former investigative reporter for the Hamilton Spectator, wrote in Cloak of Green that Maurice Strong’s objective, based on Limits to Growth, was to get rid of the industrialized nations because they were using resources at an unsustainable rate. He told her he would achieve his goal through the UN where, “He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda.” After five days with him, Dewar concluded, “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.”
How do you cause industries to collapse? Simple, fossil fuels drive the industrial economies, and CO2 is a byproduct. Show that it’s causing irreparable life-threatening global warming and you can demand alternative energy replacements that don’t provide adequate replacement and close industries producing excessive amounts of CO2. Strong did it through the IPCC using the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The IPCC produced the science by deliberately restricting the definition of climate change in Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to only human causes. Of course, it is impossible to know that if you don’t know how much it changes naturally. Strong controlled who participated in the IPCC through the bureaucracy of the WMO. As MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen explained, “IPCC’s emphasis, however, isn’t on getting qualified scientists, but on getting representatives from over 100 countries”. Using national Weather Departments gave bureaucrats ascendancy over politicians. Witness the activities of the US Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) under Obama that fulfills Mary McCarthy’s warning that “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”
Strong formalized all these actions, agencies, and agendas at the UNEP 1992 Rio Conference. In the keynote speech at the Conference he organized, he said: “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” There is no evidence that any of these are causing any problem, and there is no empirical evidence that human CO2 is causing any temperature change. In fact, atmospheric CO2 levels at 400 ppm are approximately one-third the optimum required for plant growth as commercial greenhouses demonstrate by raising levels to 1200 ppm for increased yields.
In the same year, 1992, that he chaired the Rio Conference, Strong was appointed Chairman of Ontario Hydro. This is what Canadians call a Crown Corporation to pretend it is not government controlled, but regardless, it acts like a socialist government because it controls all power in the Province.
Strong began Ontario Hydro’s problems when appointed Chairman by NDP Premier Bob Rae’s socialist government. A 1997 article titled “Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future” says, “Maurice Strong has demonstrated an uncanny ability to manipulate people, institutions, governments, and events to achieve the outcome he desires.” It concludes, “The fox has been given the assignment, and all the tools necessary, to repair the henhouse to his liking.” This applied to his UN role, but also applied to his Ontario Hydro job.
One report says, with biased optimism, that “Within no time of his arrival, he firmly redirected and re-structured Ontario Hydro. At the time, Ontario Hydro was hell-bent on building many more nuclear reactors, despite dropping demand and rising prices. Maurice Strong grabbed the Corporation by the scruff of the neck, reduced the workforce by one third, stopped the nuclear expansion plans, cut capital expenditures, froze the price of electricity, pushed for sustainable development, made business units more accountable.” Sounded good, but it was a path to inadequate supply, soaring costs and economic disaster.
Strong created the mechanisms and false science to eliminate fossil fuels and bring about reduction and destruction of western economies, at the UN. Now he applied them in total to the Province of Ontario. Thomas Jefferson said:
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
CO2 is not causing warming or climate change. There is no scientific need to replace fossil fuels. Replacing them with alternative energies compounds the problems. A major problem is no proper comprehensive cost/benefit analysis of alternate power exists. It is undoubtedly avoided because they would not do very well. For example, A US Senate report notes,
“Comparisons of wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas and coal sources of power coming on line by 2015 show that solar power will be 173% more expensive per unit of energy delivered than traditional coal power, 140% more than nuclear power and natural gas and 92% more expensive than wind power. Wind power is 42% more expensive than nuclear and natural gas power… Wind and solar’s’“capacity factor’ or availability to supply power is around 33%, which means 67% of the time wind and solar cannot supply power and must be supplemented by a traditional energy source such as nuclear, natural gas or coal.”
In Ontario, Strong canceled nuclear projects and installed wind power. Wind turbulence restricts the number of turbines to 5 to 8 turbines per 2.6 square kilometers. With average wind speeds of 24 kph, it needs 8,500 turbines covering 2,590 square kilometers to produce the power of a 1000 MW conventional station. To put this in perspective, Ontario closed two 1000MW plants in 2011 – the Lambton and the Nanticoke coal-fired plants. Besides the land, you still need coal-fired plants running at almost 100 percent for what is called “spinning generation” in case the wind stops blowing.
The full impact of what Strong did in Ontario is currently being masked by another Canadian socialist strategy. Canada has a federal process called “equalization payments.” Formalized in 1957, it initially planned to give residents of each province the same per capita revenue as those in the two wealthiest provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, using personal, corporate, and inheritance taxes. Provinces are designated ”have” or “have not” based on their ability to generate tax revenue.
It changed significantly in 2009-2010 because Ontario, the only “have” province from the start, became a “have not” province as Strong’s policies took hold. In contrast, Newfoundland and Labrador, a “have not” province from the start, became a “have” province because of the oil discoveries on the Grand Banks (Hibernia). The Federal government takes money from the “haves” and gives it to the “have nots.” Some claim that Canada now has the most expansive and generous redistribution-of-wealth system in the world. It does what all such equalizations schemes do: it masks the real problem thus precluding any demand to fix it. This occurs despite people in Ontario paying unnecessarily high prices for energy. And they will be paying for the bad policies for decades. Policies that took one of the most dynamic, powerful and wealthy economies in Canada to one of the weakest. The Province is providing one benefit to the world, namely, what happens if you adopt the energy and environment policies based on the ‘science’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Promoting energy policies based on falsified science and alternative energies fail. No better example is Ontario, Canada that had the architect of the entire global warming deception. It is incredible anyone would continue to promote them. If you think the green agenda policies evolved from the UN Climate program will work, just look at Ontario where the architect of the plan has already proved they don’t.
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Original article
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