How Canada Can Solve Global Warming through a Strong Economy

[jawagord]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Bill Gates is right, many people are naive to the scale of the problem and their involvement in it. But what is your point? That because the problem is large and difficult, Canada should not bother even trying to solve it?

To educate Milo, to educate.

A carbon tax or other vilifications of CO2 is not going to work when our modern economy depends on processes that emit carbon. The irony of posting about CO2 on this website dedicated to building skyscrapers should be apparent?

Wind turbines and solar panels are not substitutes for fossil fuel power generation, they are niche sources of power. The only scalable, dispatchable, low carbon power source is nuclear power.

Canada is not an economic island that can go off on its own way, we belong to a world economy, we are inexorably interconnected with all other economies. If we don’t want to make steel here or produce oil, those productions will move to some other country, no net gain for the planet, but plenty of hurt for Canadians.

Slow change through improvements in efficiency are happening but are offset by growth in population.

There is no fix to global warming, we can only adapt to the consequences. It’s much easier for wealthy countries to adapt than it is for poor countries.......so the solution will not be found by making ourselves or other countries poorer.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Mister F

The argument that Canada is too small to make a difference is such BS. The world has dozens and dozens of countries with less than 50 million people. If each one has that same attitude, suddenly you have 1.8 billion people saying "we're too small".

And it's not even selfish. It's self destructive. Climate change doesn't just mean a warmer climate. It means that infrastructure is more expensive. Extreme weather events are getting more severe and frequent. More frequent storms, droughts, heat waves, and polar vortexes. Changes to flora and fauna. This is going to be costly for all of us, including in Canada.

But we don’t have dozens and dozens of smallish countries fighting climate change. We have zero and a few countries undertaking completely ineffective pointless token gestures. If climate change has that many negative effective effects we should be trying to mitigate those negative effects, not subsidizing sports cars for rich assholes.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by jawagord

To educate Milo, to educate.

A carbon tax or other vilifications of CO2 is not going to work when our modern economy depends on processes that emit carbon. The irony of posting about CO2 on this website dedicated to building skyscrapers should be apparent?

Wind turbines and solar panels are not substitutes for fossil fuel power generation, they are niche sources of power. The only scalable, dispatchable, low carbon power source is nuclear power.

Canada is not an economic island that can go off on its own way, we belong to a world economy, we are inexorably interconnected with all other economies. If we don’t want to make steel here or produce oil, those productions will move to some other country, no net gain for the planet, but plenty of hurt for Canadians.

Slow change through improvements in efficiency are happening but are offset by growth in population.

There is no fix to global warming, we can only adapt to the consequences. It’s much easier for wealthy countries to adapt than it is for poor countries.......so the solution will not be found by making ourselves or other countries poorer.

It's not binary, even if (and I agree it's likely) we cannot prevent significant global warming, that doesn't mean that we should not even bother trying, and that there wouldn't be significant benefits to reducing our GHG emissions.