Dear Editor:
RE: Questionable Claims, June 17.
I don’t understand why anyone would praise China for pledging to reduce emissions after 2030. Canada could have played the same game and not had a useless carbon tax. This was the laughable agreement between President Obama and China in order to support the Paris Accord. China was given the blessing to build hundreds of coal fired plants with no limits until 2030. And only then would they (wink, wink) start reducing their emissions.
Ron Moore believes “Canadians should clean up our own act before pointing the finger at China”. Canada represents a mere 1.6% of the world’s emissions, while China is at 27%. Moore rather likes to point at Canadians by using a statistical 19.4 tons of CO2 emissions per Canadian versus Norway of only 8.2 tons per person. He also compares us to the same size, much warmer, 10 times more populated, U.S. at 15 tonnes per person for a total of 17% of the world’s emissions, while we are at 1.6%. Really? We should hang our head low? No way.
We can’t compare Canada to Norway. Canada is one of the largest, coldest countries in the world. The vastness of Canada requires transportation, which generates 27% of our emissions, with the greatest use of fossil fuels in Canada for agriculture. Norway is rich because of its petroleum exports and has one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. Canada gets 59.6% of its electricity from hydro power while Norway gets 98% from hydro. This translates into more emissions for Canada which is forced to ship a lot of its oil by rail, about 173,000 barrels of oil per day. Norway does not have this problem with it’s off shore oil.
To point a finger at bad Canadians for their emissions is disheartening without understanding the complexities of each country. And by the way, science has yet to prove that the .04% of CO2 in our atmosphere is our climate driver. The 48 smog days Toronto experienced in 2005 is a distant memory. Our air has never been cleaner due to pollution controls on cars and switching from coal to natural gas.
Peter Mandic,
Fergus