Please, Mister Prime Minister, Plant Some Trees

If you read enough mainstream media, you might think anthropogenic changes to the climate are threatening civilization on Earth.

This is patently false, of course—deaths from climate disasters are down 98% from a century ago, according to data from the International Disaster Database. Who talks about that?

Meteorologists on television say stuff like “this is the hottest day/month/year on record,” as if “the record” means something. But often the “record” doesn’t go past the early 1900s. That’s like considering only the most recent few seconds you have experienced to be “the record” of your life.

Notably, these are the same breed of “experts” who for decades have wrongly predicted global cooling, acid rain, vanishing ice caps, and the death of the ozone layer, among other end-is-nigh declarations. Wikipedia describes these past follies as “conjecture” today; I wonder what we will think of today’s equally hysterical claims in half a century?

The truth of the matter is that we are presently in a period cooler than Earth tends to run. On a scale of many millennia, we can observe that currently the planet is not threatened by an increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

In fact, NASA admitted that recent increases in carbon dioxide is causing a greener planet. Co2 is sustenance for flora, after all. Who talks about that?

Earth recently exited an ice age, it would like to remind you. The planet experiences long cold periods, as well as long warm periods, on cycles of about 100,000 years. Data suggests Earth has done this for at least the past million years. A billion years ago, one ice age persisted for 300 million years. All this climate change without any anthropogenic contribution! Perhaps “the record” of a mere 50-100 years that weathermen refer to is irrelevant.

Better to live on a warmer planet than a cold one, anyway. According to a 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, for every death linked to heat, nine deaths are connected to cold. Shiver me timbers!

Speaking of timber, there are some really great things humans can do to help out Earth manage its climate. I’m not saying we do nothing. One of the things we can do is plant trees; forests create powerful effects on carbon sequestration and naturally moderate weather patterns. They also foster wildlife and other natural ecosystems, as well as offer valuable renewable resources in the form of wood, paper, and medicine.

Unfortunately, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on track to plant a small fraction of the trees he promised to. And instead of combatting this tragic trajectory by actually planting trees, he simply fudges the data: “The department initially said it had planted 29 million trees in 2021 . . . It now says it planted 83 million trees that year,” CBC notes of Natural Resources Canada records. And to think that this is only one of many promises than Trudeau has fallen well short on.

Fortunately, Canada is already largely forested, especially relative to its population. The country is therefore a massive carbon sink. It would be a tall task for Canadians to out-emit what our trees can absorb. Who talks about that?

But what about wildfires, you might ask? Well, those can indeed dent the carbon sink effect. It’s worth noting, however, that nearly half of all wildfires in British Columbia are human-caused, according to government data. And while the other half of fires typically start via lightning strike, widespread mismanagement of forestry—another human-end failure—has rendered many natural ecosystems less resilient to fire than they would otherwise be. We can do better in this regard by bolstering fire safety education, increasing punishment for arson, and improving forest management practises without asinine revenue-grabs like the “carbon tax.”

Canada’s carbon sink situation is lost on tax-happy Trudeau, who prefers “solutions” such as forced adoption of electric vehicles. He never mentions that EVs’ non-recyclable batteries hail from mines that permanently devastate earth and often exploit labour in horrendous conditions. Our governments also have a bad habit of subsidizing absurd ventures, such as companies that “capture carbon” and then bury said carbon underground—doing what trees do to live, only less effectively and more destructively.

Huh?

You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe that sequestering captured air underground is going to have a tangible impact on the planet’s weather. Same goes for thinking a ban on plastic straws will solve our pollution problems. These farces arrive at the helm of “Net Zero,” a baseless political plan determined to upend Canada’s economy in order to have—and I cannot stress this enough—no tangible impact on climate.

Net Zero is a policy based on taxing the air rather than on planting trees. It is a national embarrassment.

Nothing our humble country—already a massive carbon sink—can do will effect the global stage, where behemoths like China and India emit orders of magnitude more than Canadians ever could. And these larger, more pollutive entities do not intend to go “Net Zero” by 2050. They scoff at pursuing such a costly impossibility.

There is much merit to sustainable living, of course, but that involves basic concepts like recycling, local commerce, and planting trees. Sadly, these simple methods don’t generate money or power for companies or politicians. And so we end up with bad jokes like carbon capture and taxpayer-funded fear-mongering that amounts to thinly veiled government propaganda.

We have a housing crisis in Canada, and a homelessness one too. We have drug addiction crisis, and a mental health one too. Can we address some of these real issues before worrying about manipulating weather patterns with a magic wand?

With all due respect, Mr. Trudeau and Co., keep your promise and plant some trees—or shut up and go home. You’re blowing a lot of smoke these days, which you should know is bad for environment.