Scheer’s climate plan: was it worth the wait?

Andrew Scheer has certainly waited an awfully long time to release his climate plan. Pundits had given up trying to pry one from him, and I have often tweeted about him being “the man with no climate plan.” Well, no more, at last the plan has been unveiled.

Previously, the timid leader of the Conservatives (aka Cons.) would not even answer the most basic question about his climate policy: would he keep Canada in the Paris Accord? This made me wonder if Andrew Scheer was a climate denier. My concerns were further raised when Andrew Scheer’s Deputy, Lisa Raitt, retweeted a climate-denial article that she later deleted. When Scheer was asked about the incident, we only heard crickets.

The part of his climate “plan” that had been revealed earlier was that his first act as prime minister would be to repeal the federal carbon tax, which has become an obsession with the conservatives.

Scheer has distorted the truth in his propaganda campaign against the carbon tax; for example, when he misrepresented the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the price of carbon by tweeting a meme: “92 per cent of total tax revenue comes from people,” but he conveniently left out that the rebate would more than compensate for the price on carbon for 80 per cent of the public.

Scheer is certainly aware of the Climate Action Incentive, as the rebate is officially called, for it had been included in his 2018 Income Tax Return. Hmm, I wonder if Mr. Scheer claimed the rebate.

In his many tweets against the carbon tax, any mention of the Climate Action Incentive is consistently omitted. Scheer’s propaganda is a deliberate attempt to mislead the public and to distract public discussion away from the real threat of climate change, a topic that Scheer is clearly afraid to even mention.

Two days after Parliament voted to declare a national climate emergency, where all parties supported the motion except for the Cons., I listened to Scheer’s much anticipated speech on his climate plan. Without conviction, Scheer mentioned that: "climate change is real, and it represents a serious threat." However, climate change was not the focus of his Chelsea speech.

Inexplicably, he repeatedly boasted that his plan contained 11,000 words. As it turned out, this was the most impressive part of the plan, as the bulk of his discussion centered on his standard bashing of the carbon tax.

The only concrete initiative was to get large GHG emitters to invest in green technologies; the examples offered were LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) and CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). Scheer also wants to promote “green technologies” to other countries to help them reduce their GHG emissions. This sounds nice but will not help Canada reduce its own emissions. Interestingly, he stressed LNG and CCS, as the technologies to be exported. Why was there so little mention of renewable-energy technologies?

Is it only a coincidence that LNG is a “green technology” that supports natural gas, a fossil fuel, and CCS supports coal, another fossil fuel?

The new plan is certainly better than Scheer’s old plan, but, of course, he did not have one before. But wait, is that even true? Hmm, is Scheer’s climate plan actually a fossil-fuel protection plan?

The climate clock is approaching the eleventh hour. Big talk with little action is not what is needed. Proposing more research and innovation, and nothing else, is just a traditional conservative delaying tactic to avoid doing anything meaningful to reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

IMHO, the real problem is that politicians are trying to combat climate change by taking the minimal actions required to appease their respective voting bases, instead of doing what must be done to reduce GHG emissions. There is no free ride to Paris.