May 3, 2019
From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight purported human-caused climate change.
Skepticism about whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in the United States than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and in other developed countries are much farther along the energy-rationing path that cutting carbon dioxide emissions requires than the United States is. Residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under as a result of ever-increasing taxes on fossil fuels and government mandates to use expensive renewable energy.
For instance, in France in late 2018, protesters donning yellow vests took to the streets—and have stayed there ever since—in large part to protest scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement. After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government cancelled his climate action plan.
Also in 2018, in part as a backlash against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premier in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.
In August 2018, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to resign over carbon dioxide restrictions he’d planned to impose to meet the country’s Paris climate commitments. His successor, Scott Morrison, announced reducing energy prices and improving reliability, not fighting climate change, would be the government’s primary energy goals going forward. Subsequently, Australia’s deputy prime minister and its environment minister announced the country would continue using coal for electricity and expand coal mining and exports.
The changes in 2018 were just a prelude for the political climate revolt of 2019.
In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections. FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate-change hysteria.”
On April 14 in Finland, where climate change policies became the dominant issue in the election, support for climate skepticism surged. Whereas all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit people’s energy use, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, gained the second-highest number of seats in the Parliament, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party’s 40. The second-place finish was a big win for the Finns Party and its skeptical stance: just two months before the election, polls showed its support was below 10 percent. After the Finns Party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared. The New York Times credited the Finns Party’s electoral surge, in large part, to its expressed climate skepticism.
In Alberta, Canada, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies took hold, voters on April 16 replaced Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party (NDP), which supports the federal climate policies, with the United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, who vowed to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan. Among the other climate policies Kenny said he will reverse in an effort to revive the economy are NDP’s plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants, and its plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions from the region’s oil sands. In addition, Kenny says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering Alberta’s critical oil and gas industry, including restrictions preventing pipeline construction imposed by NDP.
Even as daily headlines in the lamestream media become ever shriller, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the public, especially the voting public, is becoming increasingly weary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom. Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices which punish the most vulnerable people in society and do nothing to regulate climate change.
- H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: CBC; Global News; New York Times; New York Times; Climate Change Weekly
As @Greg pointed at above, the Gillet Jaunes are skeptical of the neo-lib economics of Paris, over decades, before CO2 war even a meme. The Heartland Inst. bases itself on exactly these neo-lib policies of Milton Friedman of the Mont Pelerin Society. See “The ugly truth about Milton Friedman”.
It is odd that “CO2 or NOX” is used to gas-light the polulation into accepting Mont Pelerin junk economics. Well it is not working in France.
There are green slush funds that have billions of dollars. Don’t underestimate the potential impact that can have when spent on lobbying.
Do you think that the people in California will become unwoke when gas hits $5/gal and actually use their brains on election day?
Everyone wants to “save the world” or “help the poor” when it’s free, but when they realise these things cost them something, they suddenly lose interest. They may still talk big because that today gives you a moral superiority, but their actions show that they don’t care.
Like greens who preach about flying destroying the world, but then fly like crazy themselves.
Will there be any sane politicians on the ballot? CA is virtually a one-party state.
And that’s what the Dems having been fighting tooth and toenail over the past several years to create in the whole country, a one party state.
That’s why they changed the primary system to ensure that the two candidates that survive the primary will always be Democrats.
Unfortunately, it’s only just kicking off here in Ireland. Over the past, maybe five or six years, it has been gaining momentum. With local and Euro. elections about to happen, virtually all parties and independents have attached themselves to the Climate change agenda. It’s nearly impossible to vote for someone, without giving a mandate for the lunacy.
However, on the news today, the reporter, who usually wets his pants with excitement when reporting on climate change, was getting excited instead about the impending doom of species extinction. He concluded his report by saying that it is even more serious than Climate change.
More to follow no doubt.
Eamon.
When talking about the strength, or lack thereof, of climate “skepticism”, my first thoughts go to California. I’m surprised this subject has not come up here.
My basic premise is that democracy is climatism’s greatest enemy. The ordinary voter has to be convinced that climate change will effect him or her negatively in a substantial way – otherwise climatism will lose in a democracy. So far, climatism as a movement has failed in the U.S.
California is conducting an fascinating experiment to determine if climatism will fly in a democracy. It has aggressive de-carbonizing programs that, along with a expanded welfare state, has proved and will prove very costly to the taxpayer. It is a state with vast natural resources, including fossil fuels, and the political climate is such that these resources have become much more expensive. Climatism is also a social phenomenon that aligns itself with modern liberalism, political thought that seems to control California.
If this success of climatism and liberalism in California continues, then there’s reason to believe that climate skepticism is not the strong force we think it is. In the simplest terms, this a battle between practical self-interest and altruism, and altruism has held its own, so far, in California. Yes, California is different because of its demography and a peculiar poltical coalition that aligns with altruism. But it’s very expensive.
How long will it last? To me this is the test of climatism in the U.S.
“How long will it last?” …. Until the Progressives are voted out in California ….. don’t hold your breath. But even in California there are cracks showing in the Progressive way of life. They now own 1/3 of America’s homeless due to a social justice attitude about “repressed” people and a willingness to support them and anyone “unwilling” to work. More people are complaining about wind mills and PV panels spoiling the countryside and their neighborhoods. Adding CC taxes to an already heavy tax and then using it to support welfare isn’t going unnoticed when the state is always one step away from bankruptcy due to a bloated state retirement system that is not sustainable. Electricity rates keep climbing to new heights. An open border and sanctuary cities are taxing the infrastructure, water and housing supplies, the school system, and health cost and delivery. California is as close as you can come to a Socialist/Marxist state and still call itself a Democracy….. that’s what will eventually end it like all Socialist/Marxist governments.
I agree with your characterization, but the fact is the majority of Californians have gone along with it, and have done so longer than I would have thought.
Prop 13, the first Calif. revolt that I remember, was passed in 1978, over 40 years ago. I don’t see signs that there’s been any followup to that sentiment.
While there might be a lot of bad information on the internet, overall it is providing an abundance of information to more populations in time to prevent major policy mistakes like the Climate Policy Crusades.
Preventing one major global policy mistake is worth trillions of dollars and millions of lives. What if the internet had been invented soon after Maxwell’s publication on EM instead of numerous delays from world wars and other policy wrong turns?
What if the internet had been invented soon after Maxwell’s publication on EM
Even in the best possible world we would not have had the internet in the 1800s (ie shortly after Maxwell’s 1864 publication). It takes time for theory to move to simple practical applications, and time to go from simple practical applications to more complex ones. At best you could have shaved a couple of decades off the developments that lead to the internet. But would the swinging sixties really have been ready for the world wide web? Imagine the chaos if the hippies had social media.
An excellent post from H. Sterling Burnett at the Heartland Institute!
What climate change. My family , cousins and friends have farms. Hard to find a profit when bumper harvests (proxy for the climate) around the world are keeping prices low.
Oh and the planet and deserts are greening from the extra CO2.
I agree. I want and ask people who believe in AGW ( how do you believe in science and data or in the case here lack of robustly collected and validated data) to show me where the climate, globally, has changed.
They often confuse environmental industrial damage as climate change. Not the same thing and we, as a species, are making amends. It’s the effort, coupled the mindset, coupled with the results.
Most people are sceptical that raising prices on fossil fuels will solve Climate Change.
We have had decades of rising fuel prices. Consumption has never been greater and we are told Climate Change is worse than ever.
Clearly raising prices have not worked. Yet this is the solution the government proposes.
Reminds me of mounted horsemen charging into battle against machine guns. Fighting the war using the wrong weapons.
Good observation. Fuel demand has little price elasticity. Avoiding fuel costs is difficult and if people succeed with that government will find another way to tax them.
‘Climate Change’ is not ‘The War’. It is a ’tilting windmills’ charade, just one front in the war being pressed by socialist globalism. The war is against socialist globalism. If you would win the war, you must identify and spotlight the true enemy. Is ‘Climate Change’ a fraud? Largely, yes! But it is just one of the fronts behind which the true enemy is pressing their attack…. and taking territory.
+1
Fill up your car with gasoline in Vancouver. You will quickly become skeptical the government has a clue.
Canada has one of the largest proven reserves of oil in the world. Yet we send hundreds of billions of hard earned money to foreign despot to import high priced foreign oil.
That money should stay in Canada to build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals.
Instead the government would cut off its nose to spite its face. The government in the east hates the idea of making the west rich bybusing domestic oil. They would rather make the Saudis rich than see some other Canadian do better than them.
This is just the beginning. People start to realize that they come close to not being able to afford life anymore. Years ago, energy poverty was a topic that got no attention by the political class. Today you ignore it at your peril. Their solution is new subsidies but this also only works to a point. Ever more money out also means that budgets get squeezed and even with all their accounting tricks and cooked books, they cannot make ends meet anymore. So subsidies must go down. And as it’s the majority population that suffers most, and they make or break governments, you may guess twice what is going to happen. Europe especially will have some hardcore climate skeptics in parliament and sometimes in government. New wind energy plants are not being constructed anymore in Germany – we seem to be close to peak BS.
Think about a citizen in the North. Would you double your energy bill to prevent winter nights to become 0,5 C milder? So that government can send the money to other countries who just keep the money and continue life as usual. And CO2 will make Sahara greener and Tuvalu will float on the Pacific as before. Or would rather save a little in your heating bill.
France has the lowest CO2 emissions in Europe, from its electricity generation, due to going heavily into nuclear energy in the 1970s. They also have had some of the cheapest electricity in Europe too.
However, Macron still wants to reduce the amount of nuclear in France’s energy mix despite the protests over high energy costs. He plans to reduce it (from it’s current 75%) to 50% of the mix by 2035 (a delay from his predecessor’s plans of 50% by 2025).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nuclear-energy-emmanuel-macron-reactors-environment-global-warming-a8654371.html
Watch out, Extinction Rebellion (XR) is coming for you, with the complete support of the UK political establishment. Frightening.
The AfD (Alliance for Deutschland) says that without coal and nuclear Germany will become dependent on energy imports as renewables cannot fill the gap. The Telegraph reports that, “Rural protests against wind farms are increasing in Germany…. Even without the slowdown in wind energy, Germany is certain to miss its target of a 40 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the end of the decade”.
Many German’s surely realize they will become more dependent on Russia for gas as they phase out coal. A large percentage (30%?) of German’s must be realists? The AfD, famous for their hard line on migrants, is now gaining support as the only major political party clearly against wind power and supportive of coal. The AfD is probably the only hope the German people have for bringing an end to the huge developing economic disaster from the $billions being wasted on wind and solar.
Weather stations at Airport are based there is given local information related to flying conditions. They are not designed to tell you about a wider area, and never have been. Their use in this role came about because they were ‘better than nothing ‘and in the old days of weather and it was accepted that is was ‘unsettled science ‘ the problems this caused where just part of the game . But in the new world of ‘settled science ‘ all that happened is that the measurements are sold as ‘unquestionable ‘ despite the reality that the old problems remain.
In addition as airports have got bigger with lots more hard standing, if you worked in such environments you will be aware hot these can get and moved from probs to jets , and stand behind a jet taxiing and you will feel a ‘wave of hot air ‘ passing over you. These problems may have got worse from when the stations where first set up, often in WW11.
So we have poorly sited weather stations, not designed to be use in the way they are, whose ‘problems ‘ have grown for a number of reasons over the last fifty years.
As H.L. Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Let’s hope time is running out on this particular hobgoblin.