Canada's Climate Strategy: A Costly Failure After Decades of Alarmism
After almost four decades of climate alarmism, the so-called "fight" against climate change has failed. This conclusion emerges from a detailed analysis of global energy trends and Canada's own expensive, yet ineffective, environmental policies.
The Stubborn Reality of Fossil Fuel Dependence
In 1990, the base year for the now largely forgotten Kyoto climate accord, fossil fuels—comprising oil, coal, and natural gas—provided 87.38% of the world's energy. Fast forward to 2024, and this figure had barely budged to 81.26%. More critically, because the world now consumes far more fossil fuel energy than it did in 1990, global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have reached their highest level ever, projected at 38.1 billion tonnes last year.
This persistent reliance on fossil fuels underscores a fundamental failure of international climate agreements and national strategies alike.
Canada as a Case Study in Failed Policy
Canada serves as a particularly illuminating case study in the failed and ruinously expensive strategy to address what has been termed an "existential" threat. The first problem lies in false advertising. Climate change, while a significant environmental challenge, is not an existential threat that will wipe out humanity. Severe weather represents one of many ongoing environmental and geopolitical challenges that humanity faces.
Second, the terminology itself is misleading. "Fighting climate change" typically refers to efforts to reduce anthropogenic or human-induced climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion and certain land use practices, as opposed to natural climate variations that have occurred throughout Earth's history.
Government Credibility and Ineffective Spending
The third major issue is the lack of government credibility on this matter. Just as global efforts have consistently failed to meet unrealistic United Nations targets, Canadian federal governments have similarly failed to come close to achieving any of the more than a dozen targets they have set since 1988.
Prime Minister Mark Carney—who previously served as the world's leading corporate promoter of carbon taxes before scrapping Justin Trudeau's unpopular consumer carbon tax upon taking office—acknowledged last year that Canada was always destined to fall far short of Trudeau's 2030, 2035, and by extension 2050 emission reduction targets.
This failure occurred despite the federal government committing more than $200 billion of taxpayer money across 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments. When combined with 364 provincial programs (excluding municipal initiatives), the total projected cost to taxpayers exceeds $500 billion, or more than $12,000 per Canadian.
Audit Failures and Infrastructure Neglect
Remarkably, there has never been a comprehensive audit of the federal government's climate strategy. When oversight bodies like the auditor general, parliamentary budget officer, and federal environment commissioner examine samples of these programs, they consistently find widespread examples of incompetence, mismanagement, and conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, governments frequently attribute damage from natural disasters to "climate change," when in reality, the culprit is often decades of government negligence in maintaining public infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, sewers, and dikes. Additional factors include failures to update fire suppression strategies and building codes, along with permitting massive developments in floodplains, coastal areas, and forests prone to wildfires.
The Psychology of Climate Alarmism
The public has been bombarded with decades of doomsday predictions—a phenomenon termed "climate porn" by the United Kingdom's Institute for Public Policy and Research in 2006. This progressive think tank coined the phrase after an extensive review of government and environmental websites and media coverage.
In their paper "Warm Words: How are we telling the climate change story and can we tell it better?" authors Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit observed that climate change is most commonly presented through alarmist rhetoric—as awesome, terrible, immense, and beyond human control. This approach employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, along with language of acceleration and irreversibility.
The fundamental problem with this alarmist approach is that it implicitly suggests the problem is too large for individuals to address, potentially fostering despair rather than constructive action.
A More Sensible Path Forward
There exist sensible approaches to reducing global emissions. The most effective strategy involves replacing coal-fired electricity with non-emitting nuclear power and natural gas, which burns at half the carbon dioxide intensity of coal. However, environmental activists often oppose even these measures, instead placing faith in wind turbines and solar panels that cannot provide base load power to electricity grids on demand, along with electric vehicles primarily designed to benefit the auto industry rather than save the planet.
People are not unreasonable. Provide them with goods and services that genuinely lower emissions without bankrupting them or relying on massive government subsidies funded by their own taxes, and consumers will respond positively. The alternative—decades of climate hysteria—has demonstrably failed to achieve its intended goals.
