For decades, human-induced climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions from the use of oil, natural gas, and coal has been framed as an existential crisis. That’s why people have reluctantly complied with carbon taxes and acquiesced to the financial burdens of climate action. To save the planet. For our children!But that’s all changed. Fear that rising carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human industrial use of oil, natural gas, and coal would mean a four-to-five degree Celsius rise in temperature by 2050, with potentially catastrophic outcomes, drove the carbon market industry. The net zero and carbon tax premise was that if you make it very expensive to use oil, natural gas, and coal by charging a carbon tax, then other alternative energies will magically appear, which will be cheaper, ‘cleaner,’ and which will keep temperature rise below the Paris Agreement’s subjective choice of two degrees Celsius, or the preferred 1.5 degrees Celsius.Where did the 2 degrees Celsius figure come from? Hans Schellnhuber (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), the so-called “father of the two-degree limit,” once asked why he gave that number, saying it was an easy number for politicians to remember.Now we discover the “settled science” was all a charade — built on faulty premises and bad science; all propped up by massive funding from ‘green’ philanthropies to climate activists, for the ultimate goal of establishing global carbon trading systems. Saving the planet was just the ruse to get you to comply..Recently, the authoritative body in charge of delineating climate scenarios for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports are used to guide government climate policies, formally rejected RCP 8.5/SSP5-8.5 as implausible and abandoned its use. These were the source of the claimed climate emergency, as the scenarios were labelled and understood to represent the risk of ‘business-as-usual’ warming when the RCP 8.5/SSP5-8.5 scenarios were actually implausible.For years, central banks have used these implausible scenarios to evaluate climate risk.Earlier, in December of 2025, the economic ‘climate damage’ function that those same central bankers were using was retracted by the publisher as flawed and implausible. The paper was by Kotz et al. (2024), and it claimed climate change would cost $38 trillion a year in global damage by 2049. Not true.And more recently, it was revealed that a very influential paper nicknamed “Wedges” that promoted a “wedge-by-wedge” transition from conventional oil and gas to renewables was flawed and unachievable. The paper asserted that “Humanity can solve the carbon and climate problem in the first half of this century simply by scaling up what we already know how to do.” Nope. Wrong.Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out that the world spent $14 trillion on renewables since 1992, mostly in subsidies to wind and solar farms. In 2025, wind and solar power combined still only provided 3.3% of the world's energy, with all renewables excluding hydro providing 5.9%, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy 2026, summarized by retired energy economist Robert Lyman, and published by Friends of Science Society (where I am the Communications Manager).And finally, the work of Professors William Happer and William van Wijngaarden shows that carbon dioxide is not like a big blanket, wrapping around the Earth and choking the life out of us (as is taught to most school children). .In simple terms, Professor Happer explains that the warming effect of increased carbon dioxide concentration is like painting a barn red. The first coat of red paint (i.e. first 400 ppm of CO2) has a noticeable warming effect, but an additional coat of red paint (i.e. doubling of CO2) is barely noticeable, and so on. More CO2, less warming effect. No climate emergency.However, it seems that none of this news has filtered through to the world of carbon markets. According to the World Bank, the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) (for corporate ESG goals) is said to be worth some $3.02 billion USD globally, while the Compliance Carbon Markets (under regional cap-and-trade schemes) are said to mobilize over $100 billion USD annually.The Golden Hind is still Carbon Capture and Storage. Since it is considered a tech-based ‘permanent removal’ of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Sylvera, a carbon market consulting firm, rates the value at between $150 and $500 per tonne. Goldman Sachs sees the carbon market value of CCS as $7,000 per tonne by 2050. Thus, PM Carney’s edict, “No Pathways (CCS), no pipeline,” despite the Pathways financial burden of mostly tax-funded or subsidized $16.5 billion for no useful outcome.By contrast, “Nature-based Carbon Solutions,” meaning the buying and selling of carbon offsets on things like the Great Bear Rain Forest, are valued at about $31 per tonne presently (with a global range of $7 to $24 per tonne according to Sylvera). According to CBC, wind and solar offsets in Alberta have fluctuated between values of $15 to $25 per tonne. That is the indulgence you pay to offset the sin of emitting — rather magical medieval thinking, no? But that’s the premise behind Article 6, international carbon markets, and the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism — things you probably have never heard of!A CCS pipeline delivery of CO2 to underground storage partially addresses the peculiar nature of carbon markets, which entail the “lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no one.” (Mark Schapiro, “Conning the Climate,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2010) In the CCS process, the CO2 is compressed into a dense fluid, and it is then delivered via pipeline to a holding cavity underground, but for what practical purpose other than to avoid accusations or arbitrary fines for corporate “carbon pollution?”Carbon markets are simply a con, built on a scientific and economic house of cards, which has collapsed. There’s no need to tie the West Coast Pipeline development to CCS, nor to tie any provincial or personal activity to a National Carbon Credit Framework, as proposed in the recent Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement.The fundamental premise that CO2 drives dangerous warming and that carbon markets are the tool to address climate change has been shown to be untrue. “The science is settled” jigsaw puzzle that underpinned carbon markets and the climate emergency has fallen apart. This fiduciary deception must not be allowed to continue.
