Trudeau’s Attack on Canadian Farmers Will Raise Food Costs
A recent article at The Post Millennial (PM), “Trudeau’s war on farmers could create catastrophe as food prices soar,” claims that the Canadian government’s suppression of fertilizer use combined with heavy handed climate regulations are causing the price of food to rise in Canada. This is true, and is the standard and by this point expected result of environmental policies that target fossil fuels and farmers.
PM writer David Krayden says that the agriculture department in Canada wants Canadian farmers to reduce their use of fertilizers by 30 percent by 2030, while Trudeau claims the effort is voluntary, Krayden writes that “[t]here has been nothing voluntary about any of Trudeau’s climate change initiatives,” thus far.
Krayden is right to point that out. Allegedly a voluntary effort on the part of farmers, it will likely become mandated if the Trudeau government doesn’t get what they want. That is what happened in the Netherlands, when farmers voluntarily reduced nitrogen runoff by 70 percent, the government demanded another 50 percent, “voluntary or else.” Farms were bought out by the government, or seized, when they couldn’t meet government demands. Climate Realism discussed this issue, as well as similar attacks on agriculture in the name of climate change in other countries like those of the United Kingdom, in greater detail here, and here.
Trudeau’s government also has imposed federal carbon taxes on gasoline, natural gas, and propane, which Krayden writes “will cost farmers $978 million by 2030.” These numbers may well be underestimated, since farmers rely heavily on fuel for all their work, from planting to harvest to processing, not to mention transportation costs.
Krayden reports that Canadian farmers have already felt the burden of Trudeau’s climate policies, writing that “the net income for Canadian farmers fell 8.3 percent in 2022 and the expense of running a farm increased by 21.2 percent in 2022, the largest gain since 1974, when it was 22 percent.”
That date lines up well with the oil embargo of 1973-74, during which time the United States, Canada, among other countries, were targeted with an oil embargo by the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, and oil prices shot up 300 percent.
This time, though, Canada’s cost troubles are self-inflicted, driven by government climate policy.
Alarmists often claim that agriculture is a major cause of climate change, particularly livestock raising, and anything having to do with synthetic fertilizer use. The alarmists are wrong. One study, referenced by Climate Realism here and here, found that in the United States, cattle and livestock ranching was responsible for only 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Crops were responsible for only 10 percent. Canada’s own government admits that, according to their calculations, Canada emits only 1.5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. If Canada’s agriculture sector is comparable to the United States’, that would mean Canadian agriculture’s contributions to global emissions is practically nonexistent already.
Recently, as Krayden explains in the PM article, the Liberal government passed a carbon tax bill through the House of Commons and included carve outs for farmers, but “the legislation was gutted by a Parliamentary committee and could be approved by the Senate of Canada without offering any financial relief to farmers.”
That bill could now include a tax on the heating and cooling of barns and greenhouses, meaning Canadian farmers may be limited in what they can grow, at reasonable cost, during their long northern winters.
Trudeau has also called for a “tax” on grocery stores in order to lower food prices, Krayden writes “without explaining what kind of tax it would be or how it would work to reduce prices.” However, Krayden says that obviously grocery stores will “certainly pass that shortfall onto farmers.” Increasing the tax burden on grocery stores, which already operate at very slim margins, will certainly not decrease the price of food. If those costs are somehow placed on farmers, like grocery stores demanding lower prices of produce, at the same time that the government is making it more expensive to operate a farm, food shortages and even higher prices are the only possible outcome.
The Canadian government is dead wrong to go after Canadian agriculture in order to stop climate change. Not only will their efforts, even if successful in reducing emissions, have no impact whatsoever, but they will only serve to raise food prices, put farmers out of business, and generally make Canadians suffer. The Post Millennial was right to hammer on this issue, hopefully the Canadian government takes note and removes the burdens on their farmers.
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Misguided environmentalists have made our cities filthy
If you’ve visited a big city in recent years, you’ve probably noticed that the streets are strewn with trash, litter is scattered all over the sidewalks, the buildings are covered in graffiti, and off-putting smells seem to emanate from every corner.
Take San Francisco for example, which not that long ago was considered one of the most beautiful cities in America. Today, the Golden City is one of the filthiest, with a “dirtiness index of 189.03, ranking 9th among the 40 cities included in the report” and a “litter index of 210.2,” which ranks fifth.
San Francisco’s streets are riddled with garbage, needles, and human feces. Its sidewalks are overrun with homeless encampments. And its public spaces, once enjoyed by tourists, have become open-air drug markets in which vagrants can do as they please.
This week, San Francisco is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which means the city will be in the international spotlight as scores of dignitaries and high-ranking officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, travel to the city for a week of meetings.
In the days leading up to the summit, Gov. Gavin Newsom -- who also happens to be the former mayor of San Francisco -- launched a massive campaign to clean the host city, telling reporters, “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town,’ That’s true, because it’s true.”
On one hand, I give Newsom credit for his honesty in admitting that the only reason he ordered the deep-cleaning of San Francisco was due to the APEC summit. It is quite rare when politicians, especially one with his eyes on a future presidential run, actually tell it like it is.
On the other hand, I think Newsom’s superficial, last-minute attempt to sanitize San Francisco symbolizes the superficiality of the modern environmental movement and the misplaced priorities of climate change crusaders.
When I was a kid, I remember Earth Day and the environmental movement in general focusing more on cleaning up the environment and less on climate change alarmism. In grade school, I recall picking up garbage near my school and learning why it is wrong to litter. I also vividly remember my teachers telling us that it is our civic responsibility to keep our neighborhoods clean. One year, we even planted trees around town so that we could watch them grow and become part of the landscape as the years went by.
However, that was a long time ago. In the intervening years, mostly beginning with the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, the environmental movement has become much less concerned with maintaining a clean and beautiful environment and almost totally consumed with pushing climate change alarmism and green energy boondoggles.
San Francisco, for instance, has spent $40.8 billion in climate mitigation efforts over the past five years. In the meantime, it spends only $16.7 million per year on its entire streets and sanitation department.
In recent years, things have gone from bad to worse, as “climate and environmental justice” are now the focal points of those who claim to carry the environmentalist mantle. In fact, the environmental movement has been hijacked by social justice-oriented fanatics who are using environmentalism as a guise to push radical policies that have nothing to do with environmentalism but everything to do with increasing government power over the people and corporate control over the economy.
I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of Americans support clean cities, roads that aren’t filled with litter, and beautification efforts to enhance public spaces. This is what the environmental movement should focus on.
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Unrealistic plans to crack down on U.S. power plant emissions won’t work. We’ve been down this road before–and so have others
The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a new plan that would limit carbon emissions from power plants, despite rising electricity demand. Its stated intention is to force utilities to rely much more heavily on hydrogen and other green fuels, coupled with carbon capture technologies, to generate electricity.
The EPA’s proposed rule would force power plant owners to decide virtually overnight whether to install unproven and absurdly expensive carbon capture technologies or close their plants altogether to meet emission reduction targets–an unreasonable choice that’s being presented at a time when the U.S. Energy Department estimates that the U.S. will need to double its generating capacity by 2050 just to keep up with soaring electricity demand.
The likely consequences couldn’t be clearer. As James Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, recently warned at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) annual reliability conference, the “rapid, often disorderly transformation of the generation resource base” has increased the potential for “more frequent and more serious long-duration reliability disruptions, including the possibility of national-consequence events.” Translation: The rush to eliminate fossil fuels from the electric power mix could potentially expose America to large-scale brownouts or blackouts.
We’ve been down this road before
President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, promulgated in 2015 under the authority of the Clean Air Act of 1970 (as amended), sought to replace coal-fired electricity with renewables and more environmentally friendly natural gas. Last year, a six-to-three Supreme Court majority struck down that plan, ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that the plan overstepped the EPA’s regulatory authority.
Going further than Obama’s original Clean Power Plan, which at least acknowledged the importance of natural gas, the Biden administration's response to such worries has been to double down on restrictions: proposing to eliminate the coal and gas-fired power plants that keep America’s machines running and our lights on.
This, Clair Moeller, president and COO of Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc., told the FERC conference, “is bringing about a level of complexity and risk that is unprecedented.”
Given current technologies, the presumption that renewables can entirely replace coal’s baseload power is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are intermittent, whereas coal plants supply electricity around the clock, day in and day out. Moreover, power from coal-fired plants is dispatchable on demand because many utilities maintain large coal supplies on-site.
Green dreams and extravagant flops
The current debates about power generation focus on its environmental impacts rather than on the reliability of the grid that delivers power to homes and businesses. Coal and natural gas-fired generators not only are essential for supplying reliable baseload power but also as backup power sources when renewables are offline. The efficiency of solar panels degrades in extreme heat or cold. Windmill blades spin only when air is moving past them, and despite its greenness, nuclear power cannot be ramped up or down quickly in response to changes in electricity demand.
That’s why utilities and major grid operators are voicing concerns about grid reliability and the prospect of significant power shortages.
Green dreams aside, coal continues to generate a significant proportion of America’s electric power–about 19% overall. In some states the percentages are much higher: 74% in Missouri, 57% in Indiana, 70% in Kentucky, 41% in Colorado, 42% in Wisconsin, 61% in Utah, and 90% in West Virginia. All told, coal is the most important source of power generation in 18 states.
Another part of the story is that the U.S. currently lacks the infrastructure (transmission capacity) for carrying wind and solar energy from rural areas or offshore sites to population and manufacturing centers. Building out the needed infrastructure will require significant spending, which ultimately will rest on the shoulders of taxpayers or utility customers.
For years, NERC officials have been warning that the rapid loss of baseload power plants poses risks to America’s reliable electricity supply. The question now is how many shuttered coal plants will have to be brought back into operation–as Germany has been forced to do to keep people there from freezing in the dark during the winter–to reduce the gap between electricity demand and supply.
Just because a technology for generating power is technologically feasible doesn’t make it economically viable. Even a billion-dollar subsidy didn’t stop the giant Danish energy conglomerate, Ørsted, from walking away from a major wind farm project off New Jersey’s shores.
One of the lessons learned from that extravagant flop is that fossil fuels will be essential for the foreseeable future despite the administration’s unrealistic plans.
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A Rough Road Ahead for EVs
There’s a lot of talk these days about electric vehicles. People say EVs are good for the environment. They’re breaking our dependence on fossil fuels. They’re fast and cool. But they’re also expensive — so expensive, in fact, that EV automakers are worried about the massive amount of money they’re losing.
“Ford lost an estimated $36,000 on each of the 36,000 electric vehicles it delivered to dealers in the quarter — even more than its estimated $32,350 loss per EV in the second quarter,” according to Reuters. “During Ford’s second-quarter earnings briefing in July, Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley said the company would slow the ramp-up of money-losing EVs, shifting investment to Ford’s commercial vehicle unit and citing plans to quadruple sales of gas-electric hybrids over the next five years.”
Losing that much money on every EV is bad news for Ford, but it’s even worse for General Motors, which postponed the construction of a $4 billion electric vehicle plant in Michigan. “GM now plans to begin construction of its next-generation EVs at Orion Assembly in suburban Detroit by late 2025 instead of next year,” reports CNBC. “The factory currently produces Chevrolet Bolt EVs, which GM will cease producing at the end of this year. The delay is the latest sign of potential trouble for the ambitious multi-billion-dollar plans of traditional automakers to move to electric vehicles.”
GM remains committed to producing EVs exclusively by 2035, but that seems like a pipe dream the way the EV market is trending.
The big automakers didn’t pledge to go electric because they care about saving the planet. It’s all about government regulations and mandates. If they can make money off the latest fad, they’ll jump on board regardless of its impact on Mother Earth. Now that it’s not turning out to be profitable, well…
It’s not only the Big Three that are taking a financial hit. The sophisticated guy sipping a caramel latte and plugging his Tesla into an EV station at the local convenience store looks like he’s on the cutting edge of a technological and social revolution. But there’s a higher overall cost than the construction worker pumping gallons of 89 octane into his 2015 Ford F-150.
In a report titled “Overcharged Expectations: Masking the True Costs of Electric Vehicles,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that it costs the equivalent of roughly $17 per gallon to charge an electric car due to pressure on the energy grid caused by charging stations and the large federal subsidies helping to lower vehicle costs.
“The cost of electricity for EV owners is equal to $1.21 per gallon of gasoline,” the report says, “but the cost of charging equipment and charging losses, averaged out over 10 years and 120,000 miles, is $1.38 per gallon equivalent on top of that.” That’s where government steps in to hide the true cost, but the Texas Public Policy Foundation pulls back the curtain: “Adding the costs of the subsidies to the true cost of fueling an EV would equate to an EV owner paying $17.33 per gallon of gasoline. And these estimates do not include the hundreds of billions more in subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) for various aspects of the EV supply chain, particularly for battery manufacturing.”
As for the batteries, the report also discovered that the decade-long downward price trend of lithium-ion battery costs “has largely ended.” That’s bad news, too. EV drivers who need to replace their car battery will get a rude awakening. “Electric car batteries degrade over time,” reports automotive writer Madison Cates, “and while gas-powered car batteries can easily be replaced for $100-$200, it’s not that simple for electric cars. A Swedish car owner experienced this the hard way this week when they received a repair bill for $21,000 for their Tesla battery. Electric car batteries are not built to last; when they go out, you can expect a hefty repair bill.”
But wait — there’s more. Buyers willing to fork over the extra money for an EV will indeed have something of a novelty, but perhaps not for long. As a study by ISeeCars found, “While the average 5-year depreciation for all vehicles is 38.8 percent, electric vehicles are more than 10 percentage points worse at 49.1 percent.”
According to iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer, “Between incentives that effectively lower an EV’s price before it’s even purchased and concerns about battery replacement costs, used electric vehicles have always suffered higher depreciation than equivalent gasoline cars,” and “this pattern will continue until electric vehicles don’t require heavy incentives to sell and consumers gain confidence in their long-term ownership costs.”
It’s no surprise, then, that EV sales are slumping. Consumers were understandably caught up in the hype, but hype isn’t enough when reality sets in.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/102218-a-rough-road-ahead-for-evs-2023-11-17
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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