From Friends of Science Calgary
May 21st, 2024
The Honorable Senator Pamela Wallin, Chair
And Honorable Senators of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Finance and the Economy
The Senate
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A4
Honorable Senator Wallin and Committee Colleagues,
RE: Challenging comments by Mark Carney on Senator Galvez Sponsored Bill S-243 and related Climate-Aligned Finance Issues such as CCUS and Net Zero – A Professional Engineer’s Perspectives
On Wed. May 08, 2024, Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England testified to your committee on his views regarding Senator Rosa Galvez-sponsored Bill S-243, Climate-aligned Finance. Mr. Carney is also presently the appointed UN Climate Envoy as well as a senior executive with Brookfield Asset Management, and is chairman of Bloomberg Inc., parent company of Bloomberg L.P., and was the chair of the Financial Stability Board from 2011 to 2018.
In the realm of finance, Mr. Carney is unequalled in experience and knowledge.
However, he advocated for climate technologies like Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) which is within my realm of professional expertise, and he supported climate policies which are within the realm of one of my colleagues, Robert Lyman, former federal public servant of 27 years, a diplomat for 10 years, with decades of policy experience on the GHG file.
Robert Lyman has recently assessed the cost of climate policies to Canadian citizens. While an international survey showed that people would be willing to contribute 1% of their annual income to addressing climate change ($430 based on Statistics Canada’s 2022 $43,000 estimated median Canadian Income), Lyman’s analysis of a list of policies and costs created by Navius Research, shows that Canadians are already facing $28,000 in climate policy costs per household from 2020-2030 ($2,800 per household per year). That number is based on the Carbon Policy Tracker’s $476 billion ($11,900 per resident of Canada) estimate of total federal and provincial climate measure expenditures over that period. These figures do not include the EV battery plant subsidies, which now hover around the $50-billion mark; nor does it include foreign climate funding (i.e. for the Green Climate Fund or other).
Mr. Carney supported Senator Galvez Bill S-243 on principal that other jurisdictions are moving ahead with similar legislation. He also supported:
- CCUS – Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage
- CfD – Contracts for Difference
- Cap and Trade
- NetZero targets
Mr. Carney claimed that without urgent and stringent climate policies Canada would face $5.5 trillion in future damages, a number drawn from a white paper sponsored by Senator Galvez.[1] He noted that RBC has estimated it would cost $2 trillion[2] to accomplish the transition to NetZero and that there lies $26 trillion in global economic opportunity in making this transition.
I dispute these claims.
I wrote a plain language assessment of the Nov. 2022 Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on GHG Emissions and GDP. “Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office just confirmed that continued greenhouse gas emissions will reduce our GDP growth by just 6.6% over the next 80 years (National Post, December 7th, 2022). So, instead of growing 378.0%, we will only grow by 371.4%. That equates to a GDP savings that is only $140 billion less than the do-nothing case.”
The PBO report looked at three scenarios. GDP growth with no “climate change” consequences, the impacts of “climate change” based on the unrealistically high RCP 8.5 emission scenario (current emission growth is below RCP 4.5), and the consequences of full compliance with the 2015 Paris Accord commitments (again using RCP 8.5). The estimates shown above are based on a 2%/year GDP growth rate. That $140 billion is the GDP reduction at the turn of the century. Consolidated over the years, the total would be $3.6 trillion dollars. Applying a 3% discount puts the net present value of “climate change” around $0.7 trillion. Those numbers will be lower if realistic emission scenarios are used. In other words, far from the $5.5 trillion in damage that the Senator Galvez sponsored report claims.
The PBO’s last scenario is the most telling. Full global Paris Accord compliance will improve Canada’s GDP at the turn of the century by just $17 billion dollars. Over the years that equates to just $443 billion ($87 billion discounted at 3%). Again, all based on unrealistic emission scenarios. How many trillions will Canada spend for those improvements?
It appears that the implausible RCP 8.5 scenario[3] is being used by the financial community to create a climate emergency that only exists on paper.
My Professional Engineering colleagues did an assessment of RBC’s analysis and found the alleged “$2 Trillion Transition” was severely underestimated.[4] The following glaring example should be a wake-up call.
“RBC’s estimate of the cost to go to net zero on the electrical grid with wind and solar backed up with batteries is $5.4 billion which includes $3.6 billion for batteries. “The True Cost of Wind and Solar Electricity in Alberta” puts the cost of batteries at almost $2 trillion just for Alberta. Alberta has approximately half of the fossil fueled power generation in Canada so the cost would scale up to about $4 trillion for all of Canada, just for the batteries to back up wind and solar power.”
RBC’s analysis also relies heavily on the hope of CCUS as the answer for dramatic emissions reductions. As a Professional Engineer who worked on one of the first CCUS projects[5] in Canada, I am in a position to say that, while Canada’s expertise in this area is second-to-none, CCUS will not address emissions reduction in any meaningful way. In part, this is due to the proportionately small amount of carbon
dioxide that will be captured; in part because of the enormous volume of embodied emissions in building the proposed carbon pipeline.
As Robert Lyman reported in “Speed Bumps on the Road to NetZero,”[6] referencing a report by JP Morgan’s seasoned energy analyst Michael Cembalist, that CCS/CCUS is most well-developed in the field of academic papers.
After 20 years of planning, subsidies and political promotion, by the end of 2020 carbon capture and storage facilities stored just 0.1% of global CO2 emissions.
Mr. Carney has recently miscalculated embodied emissions in the “Blueprint…”[7] plan that he and various parties put together, of which the federal government has adopted some 80% of the plan according to Mr. Carney’s public statements. The focus on “Blueprint…” was to impose NetZero standards on new builds with the stated objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The federal housing plan will dramatically increase Canada’s carbon footprint.[8]
“Even if embodied emissions are cut in half, such as in the COP26 test home the carbon footprint of a 3.9 million home build out would be huge. … That’s still 32 tCO2 x 3.9 million homes =124,800,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions. This doesn’t include infrastructure!”
The same will be true of CCUS capacity building. Likewise, if adopted, Robert Lyman has pointed out that CCUS will become a long-term ‘trap’ for taxpayers.
Furthermore, the federal government, and presumably many of those backing NetZero objectives, are relying on a Canada Energy Regulator (CER) report, which the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has found wildly overestimates the possibilities and wildly underestimates the costs. My colleague and fellow Professional Engineer, Ian Cameron, has written a summary report on “Getting to NetZero” comparing the CER’s vision versus the brutally realistic analysis by CCPA.
The key conclusions from the CCPA David Hughes’ report titled: Getting to Net-Zero in Canada (pp.62-63):
- Canada’s March 2023 policies would see only a 16% reduction in emissions below 2022 levels by 2050 and must be greatly strengthened.
- To offset the relatively large proportion of fossil fuels in 2050 end-use energy demand, the CER over-relied on CCUS (33 to 38-fold increase), and a thousand-fold increase in direct air capture. This is a high-risk strategy. Instead, Mr. Hughes recommends reducing end-use demand for fossil fuels.
- The CER’s Canada net-zero scenario assumed maintaining high levels of fossil fuel production for export in 2050, along with carbon capture and direct air capture to offset emissions from producing oil and gas for export.
- The CER over-optimistically assumed that hydrogen can grow from almost nothing to 11-12% of end-use energy by 2050.
- Electricity generation will have to increase from the CER’s 39-41% share of end-use energy to a “more realistic” 55%.
- Tripling the sequestration capacity of Canada’s forests, as assumed in the CER’s two Net-zero scenarios, will require major improvements in forest management practices.
Senator Wallin and colleagues, I hope you appreciate that the NetZero climate targets set by the federal government and the methods for reaching them, which are supported by Mark Carney and proposed to be aided by the Senator Galvez Climate-aligned Finance Bill S-243 are simply impossible. As summarized, in Ian Cameron’s work, fulfilling their government’s net zero agenda will entail a quarter century of evermore energy and economic deprivation.
Likewise, it is unclear how the Senator Galvez bill would lead to more ‘clean-energy’ as the mining and manufacturing of wind and solar devices, back-up batteries, and related transmission lines require astronomical amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal! Prof. Emeritus Vaclav Smil explains that in this article, “To Get Wind Power You Need Oil”[9] and he explains in more detail why there’s no “Energy revolution? More like a crawl”[10]
Furthermore, as Robert Lyman has written in “A Multi-Polar World At Risk: What About Energy Security?”[11] these policies simply hand the competitive and energy security advantage to China.
A recent interview with Dr. Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation offers this insight – if the Net Zero objectives were really about climate change, wouldn’t the West welcome cheap EVs from China, cheap solar panels and wind turbines? Obviously these will decimate Western economies as China can ruthlessly cut prices since it is not a free-market economy. Likewise, the more Canada subsidizes industry in the hope of creating or maintaining a market edge, a vicious cycle of subsidies sets in, as Dr. Peiser testified to US Congress in 2013.
This sounds very similar to Canada today.
Another topic that Mr. Carney brought up was that of Contract for Differences, a policy he supports. It appears that in trying to implement this policy, the federal government is attempting to design it so that this policy can never be repealed, even if a new government took office.
Robert Lyman’s report “Turning Taxpayers Into Risk Takers: Contracts for Difference, the Eternal Subsidy”[12] notes how this is simply a means of ‘de-risking investment’ in industries that cannot stand alone; so taxpayers (again) have to prop them up.
It should be noted that Mr. Carney’s Brookfield Asset Management and Bloomberg are heavily invested in renewables. This is an apparent conflict of interest for him as an expert witness, allegedly on climate finance issues, in my opinion.
Lyman has pointed out in a number of reports and presentations that in addition to Canada’s much-hated carbon tax, there are in fact over 400 various climate regulations, incentives, subsidies, for which no audit has ever been done for effectiveness and no cost-benefit analysis. Of CfDs he writes:
“Yet another way in which CFDs could be applied would be to insure investors in “clean energy” projects that, regardless of how either markets or policies may change, they will continue to receive financial benefits from taxpayers that approximate or equal the benefits that they now expect to receive from existing and announced federal subsidy programs. The number of these programs is very large; they include both direct expenditures and tax expenditures (e.g. credits, deductions, deferrals, exemptions and preferential tax rates).”
“To date, the federal government has announced only one CFD. On December 20, 2023, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the Canada Growth Fund had concluded an agreement with Calgary’s Entropy Inc. Freeland proclaimed, could reduce emissions by up to 9 million tonnes over 15 years. …”
From the CBC article of Dec. 23, 2023: “Under the terms of the deal, the Canada Growth Fund has agreed to purchase up to 185,000 tonnes of carbon credits from Entropy for a 15-year term at an initial price of $86.50 per tonne.”
The CO2 emissions abatement is 185,000 tonnes in the article.[13] As such the math is: (185,000 tonnes x $86.5 per Tonne + 200 e 6) / 185,000 tonnes = $1,167.58 / tonne.
Robert Lyman continues in his report:
“How can this be considered as justified? The alleged benefit of CFDs as applied to investments in many “clean energy” projects like CCUS or EV batteries is that it may accelerate the commercialization of new emissions reduction technologies. One has to wonder what evidence there is that CFDs are needed, in addition to all the other measures in place, to do this. Also, if the general public is to take on the economic risks, what benefits are there to compensate for this? The only benefits are the theoretical ones that may come from changes in global emissions and temperatures over which Canadians have little influence and no control.”
Mr. Carney also supported the concept of cap and trade.
In Canada, Alberta was blindsided by Minister Guilbeault’s announcement from COP28 in Dubai of the imposition of cap-and-trade legislation. One must ask what role the unelected, unaccountable Trottier Family Foundation had in this; apparently significant as the CEO of their charity writes in this report.[14] The Trottier Family Foundation and many ENGOs are backing Senator Galvez Bill S-243, but one has to question the influence of foreign-funding to Canadian ENGOs and collaboration by Trottier with ClimateWorks and others. Some excerpts from the CEO’s article:
The Trottier Foundation’s many partners were present at COP28 to call out Canadian climate delayers. We were there with our “emissions caps”- baseball caps to show support for Canada’s announcement of an oil and gas emissions cap framework.
Beyond fashion stunts to demonstrate support for Canada’s new emissions cap framework, COP is also an excellent venue to fast-track climate deals and develop new initiatives.
For example, after attending a civil society gathering with Quebec’s Minister of the Environment and Fight Against Climate Change about BOGA [Beyond Oil and Gas], our foundation started planning a new initiative on expanding BOGA membership to new Canadian provinces.
Second, we promoted climate finance by hosting a panel with Senator Rosa Galvez, Ben Caldecott and Catherine McKenna on how Canada can become a leader in this space. Our foundation also partnered with a large financial institution on a new initiative that will be announced soon.
Third, we participated in COP’s first ever Health and Climate Day. We are the first funder attempting to decarbonize Canada’s healthcare system.
Fourth, we collaborated with other funders and networks like Bloomberg, the Open Society Foundation, C40 Cities, ClimateWorks, WINGS and the Canadian Philanthropy Commitment on Climate Change.
Additionally, the Trottier Foundation was funding the bulk of Canadian ENGOs attending COP, …
The push for cap-and-trade will do nothing to stop climate change. And as Robert Lyman writes in “Gaslighting Alberta Canada’s Oil and Gas Methane Regulations”[15]
“As is typical of global and national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there has been no published estimate of the costs and benefits of the actions involved. The federal government estimates that the proposed new regulations will cost Canadian industry about $15 billion between 2027 and 2040.”
“One is left asking questions about the priority being placed on efforts globally and in Canada to reduce methane emissions. Fundamentally, why would Canada, a country whose methane emissions constitute 0.2% of the global total, decide to far exceed the methane emission reduction pledges made by other countries and to incur proportionately far more of the costs?”
“Canadians should demand answers.”
In the above excerpts of the Philanthropy for Change article by the CEO of the Trottier Family Foundation, we see that ClimateWorks Foundation of the USA is collaborating with a large Canadian philanthropy on climate and finance policies.
ClimateWorks partners have been working away at establishing global cap-and-trade systems for over 2 decades, apparently an extension of what Enron began before it collapsed in a heap of ashes and fraud. ClimateWorks partners like the Oak Foundation have been principal funders of the Tar Sands Campaign against Alberta (and other parts of Canada, like Ontario’s GEA).
Matthew Nisbet of Northeastern University has followed these parties for years and in this paper he wrote:[16]“Significant funding was also devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry. Nearly a quarter of all funding, however, remained dedicated to promoting renewable energy and efficiency-related actions with comparatively little funding devoted to other low-carbon energy technologies.”[17]
Prof. Jessica Weinkle has been tracking the Conflicts of Interest that are rampant in the world of climate change.
These include the relationship between Mr. Carney and Mr. Bloomberg. Prof. Weinkle posits that the next financial sector melt-down may come from the melding of climate finance and climate science, using models designed by parties who are effectively self-dealing to arrive at a catastrophic future prediction that is not found in the actual climate data.
Weinkle writes of the 2008 financial crash that a model was popularized with catastrophic effects.[18]
“MacKenzie and Spears showed that financial analysts knew the models were inaccurate but felt compelled to use them because common ways of compensating for its inaccuracies actively “performed” the market; the model created, shaped, and organized the phenomena it intended to describe. The Gaussian copula model created consensus. As one of the traders interviewed by the two researchers put it, “once everyone was using it, you have to use it as well, because it then becomes a good guide to prices.”
Pertinent to this discussion is the relationship between this and the establishment of the Task-force on Climate Related Disclosures, where Mr. Carney, then Governor of the Bank of England, appointed Mr. Bloomberg to lead that group.
“In their article, MacKenzie and Spears concluded that the financial crisis [of 2008] “was caused not by ‘model dopes’, but by creative, resourceful, informed and reflexive actors quite consciously exploiting the role of models in governance.” Their ability to do so underscores the extent to which financial markets are actively designed. Reflecting on the earlier 1987 stock market crash, in which models were also implicated, MacKenzie mused that “the design of financial markets is always implicitly political: it influences who will perform which transactions with whom and with what effects.” In turn, he explained, “it prompts a question: what sort of a world do we want to see performed?”
“This is a question Mark Carney, who was governor of the Bank of England and chair of the Financial Stability Board, could well have asked himself in 2015, when he charged former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with leading the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to develop regulatory guidelines for treating climate change as a risk to financial stability such that they must be disclosed. At the time, a major politically oriented risk modeling project funded by Bloomberg and colleagues had just wrapped up. The project was reportedly intended to “mak[e] the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world.””
The organization I lead has written an Open Letter to the OSFI,[19] several of them,[20] [21]and a report,[22] rejecting the efforts to align finance with climate scenario models that are based on implausible assumptions. I believe that you and your committee should review these, as well as the material provided above.
For my part, as an individual I operate a website which provides data analysis rebutting the catastrophic claims of climate activists and people like Mr. Carney and Mr. Bloomberg. Those claims are built on three basic principles. Those principles and their shortcomings are visualized below and discussed in more detail in my OPPS-29 – Climate Change – “The Science”[23] post.
- CO2 is responsible for the 1.07 °C warming (based on the IPCC’s 2021 AR6 SPM report) since the pre-industrial era (pre-1850). That claim is not based on proper Scientific Method principles. There are no empirical CO2/Temperature datasets (a basic Scientific Method requirement) that show CO2 driving the climate on any statistically significant historical time scale. In addition, much of that 1.07 °C warming was not due to human emissions since 86%+ of our emissions were post-1950. Warming out of the Little Ice Age began centuries before CO2 concentrations began increasing.
- Current computer models project a CO2 induced catastrophic temperature rise, what I call the All CO2, All the Time (ACO2AT) narrative. Every future projection and attribution study referenced in the literature (scientific, media, political arena, etc.) is based on computer models that are self-acknowledged to “run way too hot” and use implausibly high emission scenarios (OPS-55 – The State of Climate Science[24]). All current policy decisions are based on computer models that the modeler’s have said are wrong, giving a whole new meaning to the basic modelling rule Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If the models cannot represent observed temperatures, they are useless for future projections and policy decisions.
- Extreme weather events are getting more frequent and stronger. The empirical data says otherwise. Extreme weather event trends have been statistically flat or declining as CO2 has been rising. Every flood, fire, drought, heat wave, hurricane, etc. is put forward as direct evidence of “climate change” or “climate change” is increasing the chance of the event happening (i.e. the attribution studies mentioned previously). Climate changes over decades, centuries, millennia, etc. What happens in any particular day, week, month, year (for example, Canada’s anomalously high fire season, 18.5 million hectares burnt) does not reflect “climate change”. For perspective, Canada’s 2020 fire season had a record low burn acreage (0.23 million hectares) with a long-term declining trend. CO2 did not increase our burn acreage for 0.23 to 18.5 million hectares in 3 years.
I am not going to get into a detailed discussion on the science, but in a recent post (CSS-53 – CO2’s Moneyball Moment), I did lay out empirical data (and associated discussion) that shows how little effect CO2 (and humanity) are having (or can have) on our current climate. The basic premise of the post is laid out in the statement below.
“Moneyball was a movie about the Oakland Athletics (the A’s). In 2001, key members of their team had moved on to greener pastures (i.e.: teams like the New York Yankees had a lot more “green”). The A’s (a small market team) had to make do with less prominent (i.e.: cheaper) players and rely on more in-depth, less consensus statistical data than most teams relied on at the time. Their manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) is known for a lot of quotes that have been routinely adapted to many business and societal situations. One of his most famous, “If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?” can be easily adapted and applied to CO2. If CO2 is such a good climate driver, why doesn’t it drive the climate good?”[25]
It has been clear to most of the scientific community since the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that carbon dioxide is not the control knob to control climate.
Thus, the measures like Climate-aligned Finance Bill S-243, CCUS, CfDs, cap-and-trade, and attempts to reach Net Zero climate targets will do nothing to stop climate change, but they will devastate Canada’s economy, as I have shown you herein, and will hand the global competitive advantage to China. The ‘money’ in the carbon dioxide game all goes to green crony capitalists and comes from the pockets of taxpayers. If, as the Bank of Canada recently said it is time to ‘break the glass’ and declare an emergency on Canada’s productivity, then it is certainly time to break the death grip the climate finance community has on industrial development in Canada and the Western world.
The climate emergency only exists on paper and in self-dealing climate and finance models. The real emergency is that we are facing a Net Zero Tulipomania. Contrivances like Climate-aligned Finance Bill S-243 or the Compulsive Obsessive carbon molecule accounting programs like that of the International Sustainability Standards Board will only stave off the inevitable economic collapse of society. A society that ceases to be productive and spends much of its time, talent and actual energy counting carbon dioxide molecules is doomed to fail.
Please stop the climate catastrophe charade. Reject Bill S-243 and any other climate-finance legislation. Call for due diligence on climate change science and a moratorium on the use of the implausible RCP 8.5 scenario for policy purposes, by any government agency or government funded climate research unit.
Sincerely,
Ron Davison, P. Eng.
President, Friends of Science Society
End Notes
[1] https://rosagalvez.ca/en/initiatives/aligning-canadian-finance-with-climate-commitments/
[2] https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/the-2-trillion-transition/
[3] Deloitte’s “The Turning Point” uses a variation of RCP 6.0 – also implausible. Deloitte also makes the fatuous claim, with no evidence provided that “Such a transformation could increase the size of the world economy by $43 trillion in net present value terms from 2021-2070.” One need only look at Germany, the alleged model of the Energy Transition, to see that it is drowning in debt and undergoing rapid degrowth and deindustrialization. As MEP Roger Helmer put it in 2013, EU energy prices are causing an ‘industrial massacre.’
[5] ZAMA ACID GAS DISPOSAL/MISCIBLE FLOOD IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS (climatechangeandmusic.com)
[6] https://blog.friendsofscience.org/2021/05/09/speed-bumps-on-the-road-to-decarbonization-part-1/
[9] https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil
[10] https://youtu.be/5guXaWwQpe4?t=387
[11] https://blog.friendsofscience.org/2024/04/25/a-multi-polar-world-at-risk/
[12] https://blog.friendsofscience.org/2024/05/13/turning-taxpayers-into-risk-takers/
[13] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carbon-capture-growth-fund-entropy-1.7065431
[14] https://pfc.ca/good-cop-bad-cop-the-role-of-philanthropy-at-cop28/
[20] https://blog.friendsofscience.org/2023/11/21/you-must-ensure-energy-security-for-all-canadians-osfi/
[23] https://climatechangeandmusic.com/climate-change-the-science/
[24] https://climatechangeandmusic.com/the-state-of-climate-science/
[25] https://climatechangeandmusic.com/co2s-moneyball-moment/
