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Dear Mme Fortier,
I was motivated to write you when I read through your calendar that arrived in my mailbox this week and saw that August contained a number of scientific and economic errors of fact and reasoning. I expect a staffer wrote this for you and I see your academic background is in sociology and business rather than science, but you should be aware of such errors to avoid reputational damage.
The most serious error I see is that the text refers to a price on pollution while never stating what pollutant is being priced, yet from the further context can only be carbon dioxide, an odorless, colourless gas present in only a trace amount (a concentration of (0.00041) in our atmosphere that is nonetheless essential for the flourishing of all plant an animal life forms on Earth - in other words for the very survival of every single one of your constituents. Carbon dioxide is the very food of all plants and all animals, and most notably humans depend completely on plant life for our metabolism and energy for our bodies. Carbon dioxide is most definitely not a pollutant but rather is a giver of life and this incorrect identification is leading to growing errors in government policy. Ottawa University and Carleton University have a few professors who are well known for their expertise in geology and climate who frequently speak and write about this fundamental error which has been known to scientists for a long time.
Another scientific error is made when the text refers to wildfires, flooding, droughts and extreme heat. In fact, research shows no evidence to connect atmospheric carbon dioxide with any of these - you can read this in the reports of the IPCC, where the science reports state there has not been an increase in the incidence of extreme weather events. In fact, such events appear to have declined in the last century and the gradual warming we have seen lowers the difference between night and day temperatures, making the naturally dangerous climate a little more stable and safe. More importantly, Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased. Human deaths are 50 times lower than they used to be - fifty times - thanks to the abundant, reliable energy from carbon fuels that enable us to protect our property from floods, build homes safe from storms and transport people and food in emergencies like natural disasters.
The short text goes on to make a fundamental economic error. Today, 85% of the energy used by humanity is provided by the abundant, cheap, reliable dense and portable carbon-based sources such as natural gas and coal and most of the rest is from very reliable nuclear and highly dependable hydro. About 4% is from intermittent, unreliable sources like wind and solar photovoltaic. By targeting carbon dioxide as a pollutant and taxing its production, government is ostracizing the essential technology that underlies all our other technologies - energy. The energy that frees us from back-breaking labour, provides an incredibly abundant and diverse food supply right down the street at Loblaws on Rideau St., the energy that powers the construction, heating and lighting and life-promoting machinery and technology at the Montfort Hospital and Elizabeth Bruyere Hospital, that has built and maintains all our schools, our homes, our offices, our roads and enables us to travel safely and comfortably in little protected bubbles of steel, plastic and heating and air conditioning known as cars. By taxing the production of carbon dioxide a government is directly attacking almost all productive human activity and such a policy reflects an anti-human standard of value. A balanced approach would be to look at all the advantages and disadvantages of industrial processes that emit carbon dioxide using human flourishing as the standard of value. After doing such an analysis (and it has been done in great detail) a reasonable person will see that the advantages of these processes outweigh the disadvantages by a very wide margin.
A further economic error is made when the text states that 90% of the taxes raised will go directly to families. The use of the term "families" here is logically incorrect. Families are not a unit of living beings, merely small groups of individual Canadians connected by marriage or genes. All Canadians are in families and are individual human beings. The taxation of carbon dioxide will necessarily tax individual Canadians (the only type of Canadian there is) and return what is left after the costs of administration to individual Canadians, not to families. I this context, the use of the term families is both incorrect and appears designed to mislead Canadians.
Yet another economic error is made at the end of the text when it is stated that a family of four will be paid more than the increased energy costs they will pay. Since a tax on carbon dioxide production by Canadians will be paid by individual Canadians, in aggregate it is impossible to pay them more than is taken from them. Since the claim is made that 90% will get more than they paid, the only possible rational conclusion is that a 10% minority of Canadians will see a large amount of their earnings seized in order to give these earnings to a 90% majority of people who did not earn them. Such a policy is a moral travesty - taking values from the minority who produced them to give the majority who did not or will not produce them. This is truly an inversion of justice and runs counter to the usual stance our current federal government takes on minorities.
This is much longer than I expected it to be. Your calendar text for August had only six sentences but those six were so full of errors it would take a book to provide the background information, facts, findings and rationale to fully explain and correct the errors. Fortunately, there are many such books written by scientists, scholars and economists. I hope my little attempt at clarity will prompt you to more carefully scrutinize information that comes out with your name on it as I hope your intention is to avoid being associated with information based on error and unreason and resulting in injustice and anti-human policies. I'd be happy to provide in-depth information on any subject I have referenced.
