All Episodes
Jan. 20, 2022 - Rebel News
42:33
SHEILA GUNN REID | Ottawa's ‘climate emergency’ is a cautionary tale

Sheila Gunn-Reid’s episode features Tom Harris exposing Ottawa’s $60 billion climate plan—a $60,000 per-resident cost over 30 years—with negligible impact (0.014% of global emissions, one ten-thousandth of a degree warming by 2100). Harris warns of blackouts from unreliable wind/solar, turbine collapses ($75–$100M fixes in New Brunswick), EV battery fires, and supply chain abuses like child labor in Congo cobalt mines. Ignoring cooling risks—such as a mid-century solar minimum—Ottawa’s push for costly, disruptive policies mirrors Trudeau’s federal overreach, while activists exploit emergencies to impose carbon taxes. The plan’s futility and dangers demand public resistance before cities like Calgary face similar financial and environmental traps. [Automatically generated summary]

|

Time Text
Watching The Gunn Show 00:02:19
Oh, hey Rebels, I'm Sheila Gunread and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
However, and I say this every week, this is the internet, so you can listen or watch whenever is convenient for you.
That's the beauty of not being tied to terrestrial TV and or radio.
Now, tonight, my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada, and he's talking about the new report that he just authored regarding the extreme cost of the climate emergency, according to the city council, in Ottawa.
It will cost Ottawa taxpayers close to $60 billion with a B dollars to pursue these goals.
Now, if you like listening to the show, then I promise you're going to love watching it.
But in order to watch, you need to be a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's what we call our long-form TV style shows here on Rebel News.
Subscribers get access to my show, which I think is pretty great, but you also get access to Ezra Levant's nightly Ezra Levant show, David Menzies' fun Friday night show, Rebel Roundup, and Andrew Chapados' show, Andrew Says.
It's only eight bucks a month to subscribe.
And just for my podcast listeners, you can save an extra 10% on a new Rebel News Plus subscription by using the coupon code podcast when you subscribe.
It's really easy.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com to become a member today.
And now please enjoy this free audio-only version of my show.
Are climate emergency declarations really non-binding?
What do you think?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
The city of Calgary just declared a climate emergency and I don't think it's going to amount to just pointless virtue signaling because it never does.
Ottawa's Climate Emergency Cost 00:14:33
The city of Ottawa is looking to spend nearly $60 billion over the next 30 years to take action on their climate emergency declaration.
In the city of roughly 1 million, not only will the financial burden be enormous for every man, woman, and child, but so will the practical burden.
Solar panels everywhere you look, electric buses that don't work in snowstorms, and towering wind turbines everywhere, producing infrasound to drive you insane.
My friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition has run the numbers in his new report about what the city of Ottawa's climate plan really means for the long-suffering residents of that city.
And he joins me tonight to share his findings, but also to warn us, because this climate plan followed directly from a climate emergency declaration, and those things are happening in otherwise sensible cities all across the country.
Take a listen to what Tom had to say.
So joining me now from his home in Ottawa, I think snowy Ottawa, by the way, is my friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
Tom, first of all, I heard that climate change has struck Ottawa much the same as it has struck northern Alberta this week.
Are you snowed in?
Oh, we just finally took at least 24 hours to clear our road.
And we are not a minor road.
I mean, we're kind of an intermediate road.
And yet it took them over 24 hours.
I think that might be a good better use for Ottawa's money than their $60 billion climate plan.
But you know, Sheila, you'd laugh because a few years ago, there were a few environmental groups and they brought in world-class skiers to the Museum of Aviation and Space here in Ottawa.
And they were moaning about the lack of snow and they were saying how we're going to see a snow-free winter in Ottawa pretty soon.
And, you know, this was just a disaster.
So I went to the microphone and I said, well, you know, the snow cover in Ottawa has actually been actually North America as a whole has been increasing gradually for decades.
And they were furious with me.
One woman in the audience, she stood up and she shook her fist and she said, Go home.
I said, well, check the data yourself.
I mean, the likelihood that we're not going to have snow is just about zero.
And I understand it would be a horrible thing for skiers to lose all their snow, but it's not happening.
Oh man, they were just furious.
Yeah, don't threaten me with a good time, less snow.
Give me a break.
Or real data.
Yeah.
Climate change has kept my children home from school two days this week because the school buses aren't running.
Because we've had freezing rain and then the temperature plummeted 35 degrees and then a blizzard with zero visibility blew in.
So, you know, they keep promising me climate change, but maybe the carbon tax is working.
It's just working a lot faster than they said.
That's right.
Well, you know, Ottawa is the seventh coldest capital city in the world.
And so I had in my original article that was just published, you know, it'll be published Wednesday morning at World Commerce Review.
I had that it didn't seem to cross the city councilors' eyes that a little bit of warming might not be too disappointing for most Ottawans.
Well, my advisory team said, oh no, you're being too sarcastic.
But I mean, it's true.
A little warming isn't going to hurt Ottawa.
And, you know, the funny thing is, they show in their master plan, their climate change master plan, they show that the average temperature in the summer is rising.
But what they don't tell you is that the maximum temperature is not rising.
It's just that the temperature at night is not quite so cool.
So you end up with a higher average.
So I say, well, so what?
And, you know, Sheila, that's the thing that we're just about to do: we're releasing a report on the city of Ottawa's climate change plans.
They call it their climate change master plan, you know, which is funny because they actually released in 2019 a declaration of climate emergency.
Oh, Calgary just did one.
Yeah, I heard that.
It's insane.
I mean, you know, we're talking about global temperatures going up 1.2 degrees since 1880.
I mean, it's almost nothing.
And it's a good thing because we were in the middle of the little ice age or at least ending the little ice age around 1880.
But there were protesters outside and they were yelling and screaming, you know, climate emergency, end of the world.
So the city just buckled and they passed this climate emergency.
And like the city of Calgary, I'm sure a lot of the people that work on the council probably think that there will be no consequences.
Well, there were in the case of Ottawa.
And that's why the city of Ottawa is a cautionary tale for governments around the world.
In fact, that is the name.
That is the title of our new report, looking at the infeasibility of the plan and also the negative repercussions.
And by far, the biggest negative repercussion, I would say, is that because of very flimsy wind and solar power, which is going to become Ottawa's primary energy source, we're going to see major blackouts in the middle of the winter.
You know, minus 30 and you get a blackout, you'll have a lot of people die.
A lot of people don't realize it, but in Texas, you know, it was only a little below freezing when they lost their power, and they lost it because the wind died just before the storm hit.
A lot of media will tell you, oh, no, it's because the fossil fuels failed.
Well, the reason they failed is because not only did they have to compensate for the extreme cold by Texas standards, but they had to compensate for 58% of all the electricity.
Because a little before the storm hit, 58% of their electricity was coming from wind and solar power.
But the wind died, the solar panels got covered with snow.
And so, boom, they lost 58% of the whole state's power.
So, the natural gas, of course, had to ramp up quickly.
They compensated to some extent, but then when it got really cold, too, they just simply couldn't keep up.
And so, believe it or not, people don't know this because, of course, media won't tell you since it would make wind power look bad.
700 people died.
700.
Okay.
And this is in a state where minus two is considered very cold.
I think if it happened in Ottawa, you'd see thousands of people die.
And they came within just a few minutes of their whole electricity system completely crashing.
So that's a cautionary tale, too.
And people should take that a lot more seriously because Texas is not cold by your standards.
It's not cold by Ottawa standards.
Imagine what would happen if suddenly, bam, our electricity system collapsed and didn't come back for weeks.
I mean, we would see the whole city would be completely ruined.
And, you know, the funny thing is, Sheila, we would also see pollution skyrocket because you know what has actually gone through the roof in sales over the last few years?
Wood burning fireplaces.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure that too.
But home generators.
Yeah, if you actually look at the statistics for the leading home generator producer, it runs with different fossil fuels, of course.
It produces electricity so that when you have a blackout, you don't have your furnace conk out or whatever.
Anyway, their sales have gone through the roof.
And an interesting article by Robert Bryce in the Wall Street Journal said this is pretty good evidence that the system is becoming very unstable and people don't trust it.
You know, their stock prices have gone Zoom.
So, yeah, there are some advantages if you're a wind and solar power manufacturer or if you make home generators, but that would, of course, cause a lot more pollution around the city of Ottawa.
You know, I'm glad that you called it a cautionary tale because, you know, especially with Calgary and their brand new mayor making this climate emergency declaration, as Alberta experienced almost four weeks of an incredible deep freeze by any measure, there are some really huge price tags attached to these virtue signaling initiatives.
It may seem just like virtue signaling, but this really costs the residents of these cities a lot of money besides making all those things that you rely on unreliable.
For example, you just lived through a major snowstorm.
How do you think electric buses would have done in all of that?
Well, imagine electric snowplows.
I mean, when you're ramming through like four feet of snow or something, you don't want a little flimsy electric battery powering you.
You know, that's another element of Ottawa's plan, which is completely insane and also very dangerous.
The fact is, they want to electrify our complete transportation infrastructure, not just the buses, not just the snowplows, not just all the city equipment, but they want everybody in the city to drive electric cars.
And yet, electric cars are highly unreliable.
Just take a step back.
If we look at buses, for example, in Berlin, Germany, just last winter, they had all sorts, you know, something like two dozen buses break down in the middle of their routes because they only get about half the range when it's that cold.
Minus six for them is very cold.
I'm sure for us, that's just right.
So they're finding a lot of them simply break down.
And so Ottawa would experience that.
We'd also experience, of course, huge amounts of time to charge them up.
And that actually is interesting because one of our advisors, Brian Leyland, who's a consulting engineer from New Zealand, he says that, look, he says, look, the average car run by gasoline goes into a service station and in five minutes it fills up and it's gone.
If you're trying to fill a electric car, you know, charge it up, it's going to take you anywhere from half an hour to an hour.
So at least six times longer.
So what you're going to need is six times more filling stations because you have to have enough space for them to sit while they're being charged.
So suddenly a city like Ottawa, which might have, I don't know, 200 gas stations or something, you have to multiply that times at least six.
So suddenly they're going to be like everywhere, you know, so that the costs are incredible with respect to that.
And, you know, Brian also says something really quite interesting.
He says, you know, generally speaking, when you move forward with new technologies, you're doing it because it's greater convenience, you know, they're more efficient, everything else.
He said, for example, the Model T, it was a big improvement over the horse and buggy.
But he says the electric car is a step backwards to a car with a tiny petroleum tank, as he calls it, and that takes forever to charge.
He says, enormously inconvenient.
You don't want to break down in the winter because how quickly would you have battery power if you're actually heating your vehicle with battery power?
So all in all, what you're going to see is Ottawa citizens being left stranded on street corners at the coldest weather because the buses will break down and they cost twice as much.
And yet they're spending a billion dollars on all these new buses.
And as we've talked about before, one of the consequences of this is huge increases in the cost of living.
We were talking earlier, I think, in a previous interview about a 40% rise, approximately in property taxes just to pay for their climate plan.
So the other thing is, of course, many of the things they're putting up are not particularly safe.
If you look at industrial wind turbines, just before the interview, we were talking about those turbines that collapsed or a turbine that collapsed in New Brunswick.
Now, these are 100-meter-tall turbines.
Okay, they're higher than the Peace Tower.
And that's what Ottawa wants to put in to the tune of 710 industrial wind turbines all over the city.
Now, in New Brunswick, what happened is a turbine fell down because there were faults in the foundation.
They were actually design flaws.
So the company that built them decided, well, we better look at our other 55 turbines and see if their problems are similar.
And they found that of the 55 turbines, 50 of them have to be taken down.
And the cost is unbelievable.
$75 to $100 million is the cost to take down these turbines and fix the foundations.
And it's going to take them two years.
All to ratepayers, too, by the way.
All this, the company does not eat this cost.
It gets passed along to the ratepayer.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, just recently near Sault Ste. Marie in September, one of the turbines completely collapsed and threw blades all over the place.
You know, in Ontario, you're allowed to have a turbine.
I think it's a half a kilometer or it's less than a kilometer anyways from nearby homes.
In other places in the world where they have had experience with turbine fires, because you get a fire 60 stories up, you don't put it out easily.
And of course, with some of the materials like lithium and whatever burning in the green technology, you can't even put them out.
It's interesting, the fire chief in Austin, Texas, where they've had various issues like this.
He says that the amount of water required to cool, you can't actually put out a lithium battery fire in an EV, in an electric vehicle.
It's easily 10 times more than the amount of water required in the case of a normal electric or normal gasoline-powered car.
And you can't put them out.
I mean, they just burn until they just burn themselves out.
And so in places like Germany, they've actually banned parking electric vehicles in underground parking lots or indoor parking lots.
So it's not safe.
It doesn't work very well.
Charging Controversy 00:02:30
It costs a fortune.
Sounds like a good deal.
You know, let's talk about, you touched on the increase to property taxes to pursue what the city of Ottawa wants to do.
You guys have broken down the numbers in your study here, and it's frightening.
How many people are in the city of Ottawa?
Well, there's a million.
And so when you end up with almost a $60 billion plan.
Hang on, let's stop right there.
$60 billion to pursue the climate plans in one city, Ottawa, between now and 2050.
Please tell us what this means to the individual taxpayer.
Well, that works up to $60,000 for every man, woman, and child in Ottawa.
And Bob Lyman, our economics advisor, he wrote part of the report, of course, that we put out actually Wednesday morning, which will be this morning as a result of our broadcasting the next day.
And here are a couple of quotes.
He said, the plan includes suggestions for several additional taxes and fees that could be imposed on city residents, the largest of which are road tolls, $1.6 billion on road tolls, congestion charges, $388 million, development charges, $234 million, road user fees, $188 million, and land transfer tax increase, $130 million.
He concludes this part of the report.
I'm sure this was tongue-in-cheek.
He says, no doubt the imposition of such charges will create some controversy.
I love the way Bob sort of understates that, you know, it's just beautiful because I mean, this is going to make Ottawa, you know, they say, oh, we want a robust, you know, advanced, clean city.
It's going to make us highly flimsy with a very pathetic, weak electrical grid and transportation system.
It's going to make us more polluted.
It's going to make us bankrupt.
I mean, it would simply ruin the city.
And, you know, you'd laugh.
One of our donors from British Columbia, I shared our report with him just confidentially ahead of time.
And he said, oh, I really hope Ottawa does do this because then you'd have lots of people dying in a total catastrophe.
And then they won't do that here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just too bad.
It would take absolute carnage in the capital city for the rest of the country to learn its lesson.
But sometimes people do need to learn things the hard way.
The Pollution Paradox 00:07:12
And some of these ideas that you have noted in your report sound like they are just cooked up in a fifth grade classroom where they're like, you know what, we need solar panels.
Where are we going to put acres of solar panels?
Actually, 36 square kilometers, as you've examined?
36 square kilometers?
We're just going to put them on the roof.
No big deal.
It'll be fine.
And you know, the percent increase over the amount they have now is hundreds of thousands of percent.
161 and a half thousand percent.
Oh, yeah, just a little bit every day.
And where do you think they're going to put them all?
I mean, you know, the Ontario provincial or what are they, professional associations, they talk about the fact that we don't have adequate recycling capability, even for the amount of green energy that we have right now.
I mean, if you take solar panels and you just dump them in landfills, then what happens is they break down with the weather and they leach lead and all kinds of toxic substances into the soil.
So, of course, we ship them to China where they throw them in the ground.
And now they can leak on your house, though.
Now they'll just leak on the roof of your house and just leach down into your house and make it a toxic waste site.
You know, Alan McRae, in, I think in Calgary, he's done all kinds of very interesting calculations on this whole issue.
And he, I think it was him, who actually calculated that the amount of energy it actually takes to make a solar panel to ship it to its location, to install it, to maintain it, and eventually to dispose of it is more than the amount of energy that you get from these things.
And so, in fact, what they are called is non-negative on net energy.
Okay, so if you have a country which brings in more and more and more of these kinds of energy sources, you're going to have to import more and more electricity, okay, or import more and more energy or get energy from other sources to compensate for these things.
You know, that's something a lot of people don't realize is that the amount of energy that they put out is very, very variable as well.
I mean, obviously, if you look at the Ontario statistics for the amount of energy they expect to get from wind and solar, you can see that the capacity factor or the fraction of the amount of energy that you get versus what you think you're going to get in the wintertime, it goes to zero for solar.
And I wonder why.
Well, maybe it's because they're covered with snow.
So we have five hours of daylight.
Yeah, that's right.
That wouldn't help either.
But wind is the opposite, actually.
You get most of your wind in the winter, and then in the summer, it goes down to something like 13%.
So they're very, very poor energy sources.
And even environmentalists like Robert Kennedy Jr. say that if you build wind power, you're building natural gas because you need to have something that can ramp up and down quickly to compensate for when the wind dies.
Okay, that nuclear power doesn't do that.
Hydro doesn't do that.
You really need natural gas because it reacts quickly.
You can get the turbines to generate power suddenly, you know, when you need it.
And so, you know, I asked Ronald Stein, who's a California-based electric vehicle expert.
He's an engineer.
He was on our radio show on America Out Loud.
And I asked him, I said, when you count the source of the electricity and how you have to make the batteries in largely in China, you know, with materials mined by slave labor in the Congo.
I mean, when you actually take that, if you ignore how it's made and you don't care about human rights or environment, do you actually save in greenhouse gases when you drive an electric vehicle?
And he said, no.
He said, you're just moving it to another location.
Because if you're getting your power from a source that, well, natural gas, for example, that produces greenhouse gases, and if you're making it and processing it in highly energetic required materials, okay, to make these things takes a lot more energy than just to make a normal car, then he says you don't save in greenhouse gas emissions anyways.
Now, whether it's worth reducing greenhouse gases, I mean, that's another topic.
But if you think it is, and I say this to the city of Ottawa, if you're trying to reduce greenhouse gases, don't bring in electric vehicles.
You know, don't bring in wind turbines and solar panels.
That's going to increase real pollution.
It's going to kill, of course, millions of birds and bats.
That sounds very environmentally friendly to me.
Yeah, you know, Sheila, one of the things that's very weird is they keep talking about wind power as being environmentally friendly.
Well, you should go to Michael Moore's video.
And, you know, he's a well-known left-winger.
So, I mean, you would think that he's not going to attack something that is a favorite of the left.
But he shows in his movie Planet of the Humans.
If people do a search on Planet of the Humans, and there's a two-minute clip in there that shows how wind and solar power machines are made.
And they're highly toxic.
In fact, they're highly polluting.
I would say that per megawatt, they're the most polluting energy sources on the planet.
And they kill huge numbers of wildlife, and in particular, the bats that are killed by wind turbines.
You see, when a large wind turbine blade crosses the sky, right behind it is a low pressure zone.
And that low pressure zone is low enough that it actually bursts the lungs of bats.
And so the bats die in their own blood.
I have an expert who's a friend, who's a, I have a friend who's an expert in bats.
And he loves bats.
He thinks they're the greatest thing on earth.
And they are.
I mean, they eat thousands of mosquitoes every night, every bat.
And he says that the wind turbine expansion, and you know, there's a third of a million industrial wind turbines around the world.
And these are huge, eh?
Like 60 stories high.
He says it's going to drive some species of bats to complete extinction.
And as I say, that has a big impact on the mosquito population in the area.
I'm sure if mosquitoes were voters, they would vote for wind turbines.
Get rid of those nasty bats.
But birds, and of course, some people say, oh, well, you know, there's more birds killed by cats, but cats don't kill condors and golden eagles and things like that.
You know, the Altamont wind farm in California, it's killed something like 3,000 golden eagles since it was commissioned about three or four decades ago.
Thousands of golden eagles.
As I say, cats don't kill golden eagles.
Cats are part of nature.
The cats are doing what cats do.
Cats go and eat birds and mice and all of those sorts of things.
They are part of nature.
Turbines are not.
Yeah.
So I think what's going to happen is, I mean, I don't think they'll ever fully enable the plan because when you start to have massive blackouts, people dying and things like that, the public are going to go up in arms and they're going to vote out any politician that supported this.
The sad thing is it will take many years to undo the damage.
You know, Rod Stein pointed out in our interview on America Out Loud this week.
He pointed out that what will happen is that when they close down coal stations, and by the way, there's no reason to close coal stations.
Cobalt Mines and Clean Energy 00:06:22
No, I mean, coal stations can be made very, very clean if they use the latest technology.
It's a great energy source.
And, you know, one of the things that people don't realize about coal, same thing with nuclear, is that it actually is a very secure energy source because these raw materials that are needed to run nuclear stations and coal stations, you can get like a year's supply, pile it up on the property, and you don't have to rely on shipments or gas pipelines or whatever.
So, I mean, they are a very, very secure energy source.
In fact, there's a group in the United States called Secure the Grid, and they promote energy sources that don't require having pipelines coming in or shipments or whatever else.
And the point they're making, of course, is that you have a much more secure grid if you have enough coal on site to last for a year or two, or enough nuclear in the case, well, that might last for 15 years.
So if you really want a secure grid, you want to have coal and nuclear part of your grid.
One of the things that's really unfortunate is in the city of Ottawa climate change plan, they don't even use the word nuclear once, not even once.
You know, they keep talking about reducing greenhouse gases, and their main way of doing that is through these nonsensical wind and solar panels, which of course won't do that because you'll need lots of natural gas to back it up.
But they don't talk about nuclear.
And what they don't realize is there's a new technology called small nuclear, small modular reactors, SMRs.
And these are being built around the world and they can power a city like Ottawa, for example, with six small modular reactors.
You know, that would be sort of typical for a city.
And they're very safe.
You know, you can put them, you don't need a lot of space for them.
That's the other thing, of course, that people don't realize is that wind turbines have to be spaced apart far enough that the second wind turbine has some wind to actually generate it because you're taking energy out of the wind.
I mean, that's how the wind turbine works.
And so if you put another one too close behind it, the wind is very weak.
And so you wouldn't get much power.
So you need to have them spaced apart a certain amount.
And as I said, in places like Europe, where they actually have had serious wind turbine problems, you know, in Denmark, you can cross the country by foot from one side to the other and never lose sight of an industrial wind turbine.
Not once, okay?
I suppose if you suck your head in a hole, you wouldn't see it.
But aside from that, you see them everywhere.
And I mean that literally.
And so they have in Europe a two-kilometer setback in many countries because they recognize they're unsightly.
And anybody who lives near them, I mean, we have a whole section in our report on the infrasound.
This is low-frequency sound, the whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, that goes through the wall, through your body, through your skeleton.
And there are all kinds of reports of people who develop nausea, you know, migraine headaches, constantly feeling sick, panic attacks.
And as soon as they move away from the turbine, goes away.
As soon as they move back, it comes back.
And so the negative impact to Ottawan's health of unreal, 710 industrial wind turbines.
I don't know where they're going to put them all.
I mean, if you do space them apart two kilometers, which they're not currently required to do, would they be able to fit 710 of them into the city?
I don't know.
But the bottom line is talk to somebody like Shelly Correa, for example, from Lincoln County.
She moved there because she had a boy who would benefit from a nice tranquil environment.
And Lincoln County was like Mayberry, you know, from Andy of Mayberry.
I mean, it was a wonderful place to live.
And they promised they would not put up any industrial wind turbines.
Well, guess what?
I think it's a half a kilometer from her house, you know, approximately.
They put up a 60-story wind turbine.
You know, and people who live near these things, they give you firsthand evidence.
I'm quoting it in our report, where it's actually horrible for people's local health, okay, for the residents that live nearby.
So when you look at the Ottawa plan from a health perspective, from a pollution perspective, from a safety perspective, from a finance perspective, and even from a greenhouse gas reduction perspective.
Or the human rights perspective, as you mentioned, 40,000 children working in these dangerous rare earth mineral mines to produce batteries so that people in Ottawa can pat themselves on the back about how green they are.
Well, that's right.
In fact, Ron Stein, along with Todd Royal, wrote a book called Clean Energy Exploitations, I believe is the title.
I'll send you the link and you can put it because it's an amazing book.
It goes through where do all these materials come from.
And the sad thing is, unlike fossil fuels, which are found throughout the world, and especially in Canada, I mean, it's wonderful.
We have so much of it.
These sources of energy, these sources of raw materials, the rare earths, the cobalts, the things like that, they're found in countries that have massive human rights abuses.
They have virtually no environmental protection.
And a great example is cobalt.
Cobalt, artesian cobalt, comes from the Congo mostly.
Interestingly enough, all the mines are pretty well owned by China.
So they ship them to China where they use extremely good environmental controls to produce their batteries.
Not anyway, the bottom line is they got 40,000 children working in mines mining cobalt in the Congo, for example, in addition to what you were saying.
And what we have is because the spaces they have to get into to get some of the cobalt is quite small, they use children and they're working for something like a dollar a day under virtually slave labor conditions.
You know, they're breathing in terrible fumes, radioactive dust, everything else.
And this is going to make supposedly clean energy.
You know, one of the points we make is that if Ottawa went full blast into wind and solar power, as they're saying they will, they would be supporting some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses on the planet.
Okay.
And for nothing, for nothing except virtue signaling, because the fraction of greenhouse gases of the world that Ottawa produces, get this, Canada is 1.6%.
Cautionary Tale of Clean Energy 00:09:33
Ottawa is less than a hundredth of that.
So it's 0.014%.
And, you know, I contacted one of our experts in the United States, Pat Michaels, who used to be state climatologist in Virginia.
He was saying that, okay, if we use the EPA's model for what temperature change would occur as a result of Ottawa's climate change plan, and if it continued all the way to the year 2100, what he figured was that the temperature change would be about one ten-thousandth of a degree.
We saved the world, Tom.
So if you take that number, and you know, one of our allies, he actually took that number and he said, okay, if we want to reduce global temperature by two degrees or whatever, what would it cost?
It turns out there isn't enough money in the entire world at that kind of a rate.
You know, now, of course, the calculation doesn't really make much sense because it assumes that we are the master controllers of climate and all we have to do is spend enough money and we can pull it down.
But I mean, it just shows how ludicrous Ottawa's plan is.
I mean, we're spending $60,000 for every man, woman, and child in Ottawa to get one ten-thousandths of a degree change, which is at least two or three orders of magnitude lower than anything you could ever measure, let alone feel.
And, you know, this brings up a really interesting point.
Richard Lindsay was saying that if, in fact, there weren't any meteorologists and climatologists telling people, the temperature change in their lifetime would be so small they would not even notice.
They would not even notice.
I mean, 1.2 degrees on a global average, which is kind of meaningless because nobody lives in a globe.
We all live in regions.
But a 1.2 degree change, first of all, would be beneficial because we were in the little ice age, but nobody's going to feel that.
I mean, in your entire life, climate catastrophe, climate crisis, they keep saying, but nobody can even feel what's happening.
You know, in Ottawa, for example, if you look at some stations, they're actually cooling.
Like on Hogsback, for example, it's actually gradual decline.
And that is indeed what should really concern Ottawa residents, because as such a cold city, if what some of the solar scientists are saying is true, then we're headed for global cooling.
Because by the middle of the century, we're supposed to actually be at a grand solar minimum when all the different cycles in the sun, they all hit rock bottom at the same time.
And the last time this happened a few hundred years ago, it was so cold that the Thames River in London froze a meter thick, a meter thick.
It never freezes, even in the winter now.
So, you know, if we're headed back to those conditions, that is far, far more dangerous than a little bit of warming.
As we say in our report, 20 times more people around the world die to excessive cold than due to warming.
And yet the city of Ottawa says nothing about adapting to cold.
They say nothing about adapting to cooling.
They're all focused on warming in a cold city.
Like it is completely crazy.
So, I mean, yes, we should plan for climate change.
We should adapt.
We should make sure we have lots of robust energy.
Because if it cools, that's the big threat.
If it cools, cities like Ottawa are going to be creamed.
If all they did was prepare for warming and put up the most flimsy and most environmentally damaging energy sources, I mean, we'll be in very hot water because it'll be so cold.
You know, it's funny.
You mentioned the two timelines are going to converge and someone's going to be right and someone's going to be really, really wrong.
And because it's happening, supposed to happen for both of these around the middle of the century.
So Ottawa is supposed to achieve their climate goals by 2050.
And we might get mugged by reality by a cooling trend, a solar cooling trend at roughly the same time.
So someone's going to be right, someone's going to be wrong.
But in the end, I think we all pay for it.
Tom, I hear that your voice is slightly giving way.
So I'm going to ask you, where can people find your report, which is very comprehensive and very common sense, but also support some of the other work that you're doing, both at the Climate Science Coalition, but outside of the Climate Science Coalition?
And don't forget your podcast, Tom.
You're the worst at self-promotion.
Yeah, first of all, the podcast, we have two podcasts that we've pre-recorded, which are going to go up talking specifically about the problems with the Ottawa Climate Change Plan, and that's exploratory journeys.
And you can go to icsc-canada.com and you click on the resources at the top and you go down, you choose exploratory journeys.
And you can listen to our two podcasts specifically that'll be uploaded in the next day or two about the Ottawa plan.
So our web, our homepage is icsccanada.com.
And in fact, it's icsc-canada.com.
And you'll see an advertisement for our report in an article that was just published.
It'll be Wednesday morning by the time this is aired in World Commerce Review.
Now, the report itself is 25,000 words.
And so not too many people are going to want to read that.
But you'll be happy to hear that the World Commerce Review article is only a little over 3,000 words.
And that one should be on the web as well.
So we'll be advertising all of that on the icsc-canada.com website.
And we're pushing hard to get a lot of publicity for this because this is a cautionary tale, not just for Canadian cities, but for cities around the world that are thinking that they can actually yield to environmental activists and get away with it.
The fact is they can't because these people will use the climate emergency in Calgary, for example.
They'll use it as a lever to force you to try to get a master plan because they'll say, well, if there's an emergency, then you've got to do something.
So get to it.
And if the city is like in Calgary, like our weaklings in Ottawa, they will develop a multi-billion dollar plan.
So you really have to stop it now because the environmentalists will never be pleased.
I mean, never.
If you achieve one target, they're just going to move the goalposts until you achieve that.
And so you got to stand up to them at some point, unless you're prepared to totally ruin your society.
So, you know, these politicians who think they're going to get a free ride in Calgary by declaring a climate emergency, oh, and then they've solved it, they can go away.
No, they're going to have massive consequences.
They have to stand up to the environmentalists now before you get to the point like Ottawa, where you're absolutely creaming the city with huge expenses.
And if they enable these things, a lot of deaths.
Okay.
All for environmental destruction worse than you would have with any fossil fuel plan.
So, yeah, they have to stand up to this.
And if people want to help support us, because this isn't our first report, we're going to put out lots of reports on these kinds of things.
They can go to icsc-canada.com and we'd be very happy to accept their donations.
Well, you know, you're one of just a couple of small organizations who are doing this sort of work yourself and Friends of Science and a couple other organizations.
That's it.
And you're up against the foreign funding on the other side.
They, you know, they just keep getting foreign money dumped in so that they have these fossil fuel demarketing campaigns and they are affecting our municipalities and people who say, well, I don't work in oil and gas.
It doesn't affect me.
I don't care.
You pay a carbon tax, you pay municipal taxes, and that's where all these bad ideas manifest for the normal people.
So, Tom, thanks so much for your hard work on this and making these big, complex issues easily digestible for normal lay people and non-scientists because that's who it affects is the non-scientist.
Oh, yeah.
And when people hear the price tag, they say, What?
$60 billion?
Like, that's insane.
That's like too much for a country, let alone a city.
Yeah.
If Justin Trudeau had a bad idea that cost $60 billion, we'd all be lighting our hair on fire.
But this is just the city of Ottawa.
People need to understand that.
Tom, I could talk to you all day about how bad the environmentalist movement is, but I know that you're recovering from something.
And I want to thank you so much for taking the time.
And we'll have you back on again very soon when the second half of this report comes out.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks, Tom.
You know, the federal politicians told us that the Paris climate agreement was non-binding, so we shouldn't have to worry about it.
But now they're bringing in federal legislation to make the targets binding.
We also saw politicians tell us that the UN Compact on Migration was non-binding.
But then we saw the federal government partner with George Soros on immigration policies right after that.
When a politician tells you that a climate emergency declaration or any declaration agreement is non-binding, they're lying to you and you should hold on to your wallet.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.
Export Selection