Issue link: http://resourceworld.uberflip.com/i/783264
F E B R U A R Y / M A R C H 2 0 1 7 www.resourceworld.com 77 would need up to 360 square miles of land. In Canada, the WWS scenario would require 39,263 five-mega- watt wind installations costing $273 billion for onshore wind generation alone. The transmission lines would cost at least $104 billion and take 20 years to complete. "The WWS includes a call to shut down all coal, oil and natural gas production," Lyman said, adding that it implies also closing all emissions-intensive industries such as mining, petrochemicals, refining, cement, and auto and parts manufacturing. "The political and regional backlash against such policies in a country like Canada would threaten Confederation…Attaining the vision is not feasible today in technological, economic or political terms." If the growth, harvesting, processing and transportation of food are responsible for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, then strategies like Canada's carbon tax will result in more food imports from nations uncommitted to climate change strategies and thus will push food prices up. More than 150 food-processing com - panies have closed in Canada since 2008, with the loss of 30,000 jobs, notes Troy Media columnist Sylvain Charlebois. "Now that we know who the next White House tenant is the carbon tax's implications for the Canadian agriculture and food sector is even more worrisome," wrote Charlebois, Dean of the Faculty of Management and a professor in the Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie University in a recent column. "With Donald Trump at the helm, the US is likely to remain idle on climate change and that will make our agrifood systems much less competitive. Coupled with a possible reduction in US corpo - rate tax rates, a carbon tax on our agrifood companies could isolate Canada as the only green-focused economy in North America." Studies have shown that humans need 3-5kw of power each, and only the US, Japan and parts of Western Europe come close, notes Laurence Hecht, Editor-in-Chief of 21st Century Science & Technology. To achieve even 1.5kw for each of the world's 6.7 billion people would require building six million megawatts of generating capacity, a tough sell when you consider the world's largest solar photovoltaic plant, in Jumilla, Spain, produces just 23 megawatts, while the largest solar power plant in the world, in Nevada, produces only 15mw. And climate alarmists may be missing something: the natural factor. "What I find most disturbing about the current climate change hysteria is that the political and media crescendo of anthro - pogenic (human-influenced) warming fails to even mention natural forces," said M. A. 'Mo' Kaufman, a mining geologist in Spokane Valley, WA, in a December article in The Northern Miner. "I find it difficult to place anthropogenic CO 2 emissions as a pri- mary cause for global warming, since this gas has not correlated with past climate variations, even during recent geological time." Over history, he said, high CO 2 levels have consistently fol- lowed warm periods, rather than the opposite. "So what caused this stupendous glacial retreat, along with severe warming and cooling climate events in relatively recent times? Obviously, it was not elevated carbon dioxide. The most suspect forces were variations in solar activity, changes in the tilt of Earth's axis and variations in ocean conveyor systems. Volcanic eruptions have also played a role," he said. "These natural forces, which have been active in the past, still are and always will be with us." He cites astrophysicists Nir Shaviv, Henryk Svensmark and their colleagues, who say a most critical force causing climate change is highly energized cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system, which ionize the lower troposphere and create aerosols that induce cloud formation. Shaviv theorizes that variable cloud formation is a principal