Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA – The old guard has gathered once again in Antalya, Turkey, for the thirty-first annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP31), where urgent pleas to “fight climate change” with more taxes and regulations ring out from the stage before everyone flies home in private jets.Greta Thunberg took a break from anti-Israel protests to attend COP31, repeating the same demands for “climate justice” with the same high-school dropout qualifications. Former Barack Obama climate crusader John Kerry made an appearance, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced he is finally stepping down from his “global boiling” message duties.Notable by his absence was Mark Carney, the former UN climate finance chief who saw his effort to shut out carbon fuel projects from bank financing abruptly collapse, clearing his calendar to become prime minister of Canada. His wife Diana Fox Carney made it to Antalya in her newly created role of “ocean envoy,” equipped with $2.1 billion in borrowed money for “connecting ocean conservation, climate action, indigenous leadership, economic resilience and maritime security.”That lofty goal seems almost as unlikely as the UN climate conference’s central mission, to achieve “net zero by 2050.” That target remains a legal commitment in Canada, thanks to former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s 2015 promise, but recent moves by the Carney government make it even more unlikely today.The giant Pathways carbon capture network remains a condition of Pacific Link, the proposed third oil pipeline on the Trans Mountain right-of-way. But the same deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith lifts a ban on natural gas power generation, clearing the way for traditional industry and artificial intelligence data centres, without a requirement to pipe their carbon dioxide to a deep sandstone formation under Cold Lake.Another little-noticed Carney move was billed as a temporary measure to save Ontario’s auto industry from US President Donald Trump’s designs.In late October, the federal government announced a three-year freeze on its greenhouse gas standard for new cars and light trucks, holding the current “fleet average” standard of 172 grams of carbon per mile until the end of 2029. After that, the plan officially remains to slash average vehicle emissions to 74 grams by 2035, aiming for electric vehicles to go up to 75% of new car sales..New cars already come with automatic engine shut-off and start at every stoplight, a sign that the low-hanging fruit of fuel efficiency is long gone. And if that target of electric vehicle adoption is ever to be reached, they would need a lot more than wind and solar panels to keep them running.How have 31 years of earnest climate pledges turned out, globally? Not well.Carney’s current circumnavigation of the globe includes a stop in Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping, whose government still directs the economy with Soviet-style five-year plans. China has just achieved another first, now consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined.Danish resource economist Bjorn Lomborg fills in more of the blanks with a new series of essays, released Friday by the Fraser Institute. Some sample headlines:“No, the planet is not on fire.” Using NASA satellite data, Lomborg’s team shows a downward trend in area burned by forest and other landscape fires, despite a big spike in Canada in 2023. Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia are all declining. Lomborg attributes North America’s lagging performance on decades of poor forest and urban interface management, with prescribed burning in Canada having declined significantly since the 1990s.“Pursuing net zero causes more harm than good.” Since Trudeau was elected, Canada’s carbon fuel supply has increased by 11%. Switching from coal to natural gas made gains, but solar and wind have made only a tiny contribution, at great expense.Lomborg calculates that since 2015, Canada has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 3%. “On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years.”Perhaps COP32 could be done as a Zoom call.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.
