Clean fuel regulations defence runs dry
To the Editor:
A few observations on the clean fuels regulations story on page 16 of your July 13 edition.
Let’s begin with the Advanced Biofuel Canada (ABC) organization. Who are they? They are a group whose purpose is to promote the use of biofuels and work with governments to reduce the use of fossil fuels. It’s understandable that they would try to minimize the cost effects of the clean fuels regulations.
At one point they mention helping the B.C. government to implement the low carbon fuel standard. Could that be one of the reasons why B.C. citizens enjoy the highest fuel prices in Canada?
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Ian Thompson of ABC cites buying carbon credits from the marketplace. Who is selling the carbon credits and how did they acquire them? The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) says the regulations will cost the average family approximately $1,000 per year, much higher in provinces who have fossil fuel production as part of their economy.
Thompson disputes those figures but his only argument is that we are being fed “misinformation.” I’m afraid I will be using the PBO figures. The misinformation I’m hearing is “higher interest will reduce inflation,” “higher taxes won’t cause inflation” and “higher fuel prices won’t cause inflation”.
In 1980 Trudeau Sr. declared war on oil companies. Interest rates went through the roof and tens of thousands of families lost their homes and inflation soared. Today we have Trudeau Jr. doing the same thing with similar results. History is repeating itself.
Time has come to ditch fossil fuels
To the Editor:
Twenty-five years ago, when I started writing for the National Farmers Union about the harmful effects of putting more carbon dioxide into the air, I didn’t think global warming would actually affect me personally. Most of the negative effects of global warming were supposed to be hundreds of years into the future, and I would be long dead.
As I write on July 14, according to medical advice, I am effectively housebound here in southern Saskatchewan unless I wear an N95 mask due to wildfire smoke.
Countries around the world are breaking record-high temperatures — records that were set in just the last few years. Meanwhile, grasshoppers, flourishing in the heat, decimate our prairie pulse crops.
For 800,000 years, the Earth’s temperatures have closely tracked CO2 concentrations in the air. When CO2 levels are lower, the Earth’s temperature is lower. When CO2 levels are higher, the temperature is higher.
In the last 50 years, the CO2 levels have headed straight upward —w ay above any levels of the past 800,000 years. If our temperatures continue to track CO2 levels, those quickly rising temperatures will translate into heat waves that will make living improbable or impossible.
Why then would provincial governments like Saskatchewan and Alberta accelerate the pumping of more fossil CO2 into the air, and at the same time fight plans to green-up our western electrical grid — leaving federal money on the table?
People were smart enough to figure out how to use fossil fuel to power civilization as we know it. The question now is, are people smart enough to quit using fossil fuel in order to save themselves, their kids and the animals and the plants around them?
