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How does Prime Minister Mark Carney’s support for the new Pacific Link Pipeline fit in with a decade of warnings from the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau that fossil fuels pose an “existential threat” to humanity?

The answer, of course, is that it does not.

Especially so, given that global energy-related fossil fuel emissions reached an all-time high last year amid perpetual warnings from the United Nations and other climate bodies that we are now on the verge of locking in catastrophic global warming above 1.5-degrees Celsius by 2100.

What it really means is that even the Liberals are now acknowledging that climate change (or more accurately human-induced climate change versus natural climate change) is not a threat to human existence, but one of many challenges Canadians face.

They include an ongoing affordability crisis, low economic productivity, high housing costs, beleaguered health care, opioid use, two ongoing wars impacting Canadian foreign policy and continuing economic uncertainty at home because of the unresolved trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump.

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Climate change not a primary concern for Canadians

It’s not that Canadians don’t care about climate change – although polls suggest it is no longer their primary concern – but they want realistic ways of addressing it that won’t bankrupt them

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist in 1998, elaborates on these views in a series of papers debunking climate alarmism, published by Canada’s fiscally conservative Fraser Institute last week.

“Climate change is undeniably one issue among many,” Lomborg writes but, “at some point, the climate policy conversation went off the rails, and climate change stopped being treated like other issues.

“First, it is often wrongly suggested that global warming is an existential challenge, risking the end of mankind. Indeed, former prime minister Trudeau famously said, ‘Climate change is not only an existential environmental threat, but one of the defining security challenges of our time’… And current Prime Minister Mark Carney declared climate change ‘an existential threat’…

“If the world is about to end, the implication is that any spending is justified. After all, if a world-obliterating meteor is hurtling towards us, we don’t ask about the costs of avoiding it.

“Second, it is often – and somewhat contradictorily – claimed that the green transition will make energy cheaper, societies safer, and everyone richer. In this rainbows-and-unicorns scenario, there are no trade-offs, and we can afford climate policy and everything else. Carney has also claimed that the goal of net zero (emissions by 2050) is ‘the greatest commercial opportunity of our time’…”

“Both these claims are repeated ad nauseam by Canadian politicians and campaigners and willingly spread by media outlets hooked on selling climate catastrophes and green utopias. Both turn out to be phenomenally untrue.”

Lomborg goes on to elaborate in a series of papers about how all forms of energy have advantages and disadvantages and that there are always trade-offs in terms of benefits and consequences to society.

Prematurely abandoning fossil fuels, he warns, will lead to human catastrophes that are seldom, if ever, addressed by those ideologically committed to keeping the world’s remaining fossil fuel resources in the ground.

PM called climate change ‘existential threat’ in previous role with UN

Carney did call climate change an “existential threat” in his previous role as the UN special envoy on climate action and finance, and as co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, where he was the leading global corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes.

But in his 2021 book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, he did not call for ending the use of fossil fuels.

Rather, he argued that oil and natural gas extraction and marketing was acceptable as long as it was done in the context of increasingly stringent and enforceable emission standards and realistic carbon pricing, consistent with achieving the overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

Carney would argue that including a $20-billion carbon capture and storage facility known as the Pathways Project as part of the 1250-km Pacific Link Pipeline from Bruderheim Alberta to the Roberts Bank Terminal in Delta in southern B.C., for export to global markets, fulfills that commitment.

But the Pathways project, even if it works as advertised, will only capture a fraction of the increased emissions created by the new pipeline – about six million tonnes compared to 20 million tonnes initially and 16 million tonnes annually by 2045, assuming the pipeline’s capacity isn’t expanded by then.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com