Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, proposed a $454 billion plan with cash vouchers to shift a quarter of the US car fleet to electric. Small beer compared to Elizabeth Warren’s 100 per cent Clean Energy plan which she optimistically costs at a little over twice that.
Fancy dress couturier, Justin Trudeau, lost the Canadian election but voters elected an even greater number of carbonistas and Trudeau promises that the new government will travel further along the path of carbon taxes and regulations against fossil fuels.
Chileans are in open revolt against carbon tax-generated price rises. The catalyst was Santiago Metro fares increases, introduced despite falling oil and gasoline prices, because its energy sources were largely switched from conventional power to wind and solar power. The Chilean government also hit the portion of conventional power that remains with new carbon dioxide taxes. It has now backed out of hosting the next international climate conference (called COP 25) that was scheduled for December.
New Zealand’s government under green Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern has better survival instincts. It has excused farmers, responsible for half of the nation’s emissions, from any cuts until at least 2025.
Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak remind us that eco-catastrophians are not new. As agricultural economist Dennis Avery, said soil erosion ‘has been threatening since man scratched the first seedbed with a stick’ and in 1948, ecologist William Vogt published his Road to Survival, the biggest-selling environmentalist book until Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Vogt argued that, with rare exceptions, man had ‘taken the bounty of the earth and made little or no return’. Then came the Club of Rome and subsequent fixation on climate change, now the mainstream view, its proponents having marched through the government, educational and business institutions.
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