This page is a personal opinion essay. It is written by the individual who built and maintains this unofficial fan website for The Threads. It does not represent the views of The Threads, its members, or anyone associated with the band.
Development of this website was funded by the Alberta Freedom Foundation. The arguments below reflect the author's own opinions on climate policy — this is advocacy, not neutral analysis, and it is presented as one side of a genuinely contested public debate with real empirical disagreement on both sides. Where the underlying numbers are themselves disputed among economists and energy researchers, I've tried to say so rather than present a single figure as settled fact. Sources are listed at the bottom of the page.
I want to be clear about where I stand before making the policy argument: climate change is real, it's driven substantially by human greenhouse gas emissions, and the basic physics isn't in serious scientific dispute. Atmospheric CO₂ has risen from roughly 280 parts per million before industrialization to over 420 ppm today, and global temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C since the late 19th century.[1] My disagreement isn't with the diagnosis. It's with the dominant policy prescription — the specific mix of subsidies, carbon pricing, and net-zero mandates that has become the default Western response — which I believe delivers poor value for an enormous cost, and divides the public more than it helps the climate.
"Why build when policy can render assets obsolete overnight?"
Wind and solar generation depends on the weather, and that creates a genuine engineering and cost problem that I don't think gets discussed honestly enough. Germany's experience with what's called Dunkelflaute — extended periods of low wind and low sun, mostly in winter — is the clearest example. During a documented Dunkelflaute episode in November 2024, renewables fell to about 30% of generation and fossil fuels covered the remaining 70%; wholesale prices spiked to roughly €800 per megawatt-hour, more than ten times the recent average.[2] A more severe episode on December 12, 2024 saw wind and solar output fall to a small fraction of demand for several hours.[3] Germany has responded by committing to build up to 20 gigawatts of new gas-fired power plants by 2030 specifically to cover these gaps — a fossil-fuel buildout happening in service of a decarbonization strategy, which I think says something important about the limits of relying on intermittent sources without a genuinely scalable storage solution.[4]
I'll note, in fairness, that the picture isn't uniformly bad. Germany's own grid reliability statistics (the SAIDI index measuring outage minutes) have actually improved over the same period that renewable penetration rose, and balancing costs have fallen due to better forecasting and grid coordination.[5] So this isn't a story of imminent blackouts — it's a story of cost. Keeping a large, expensive fossil backup fleet on standby for the days when renewables underproduce is a real system cost that headline "cost per kilowatt-hour" figures for wind and solar tend to leave out.
I'll be straightforward about something here: an earlier draft of this argument cited a figure of $100 to over $2,000 per ton of CO₂ abated for U.S. renewable tax credits. Having checked that claim against the actual research, I don't think it holds up as a representative figure, and I'm not going to repeat it. The serious empirical estimates I could find — from the Rhodium Group, the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute, and UC Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas — converge on a range of roughly $33 to $96 per ton of CO₂ for the main U.S. clean electricity tax credits, which is in the same range as, or below, most estimates of the social cost of carbon.[6]
That actually sharpens rather than weakens my argument, in a way I think is worth sitting with: even at the more favorable, defensible end of the cost range, a meaningful share of that spending — researchers estimate 28% to 72% of the subsidized investment — would likely have happened anyway without the subsidy, meaning the public is paying for emissions reductions that, in a substantial fraction of cases, weren't actually caused by the policy.[7] That's a real cost-effectiveness problem even without an inflated headline number attached to it. I'd rather make the honest version of this argument than the exaggerated one.
I also want to be straightforward about carbon taxes specifically, because the research here doesn't support some of the harsher claims commonly made against them. Multiple empirical studies of actual carbon tax implementation in Canada and Europe — not models, but observed outcomes — find that carbon taxes shifted relative prices but did not increase the overall price level; if anything, the net effect was slightly deflationary, and GDP impacts were negligible or statistically insignificant.[8] I think intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the inflation and recession fears sometimes attached to carbon pricing in political debate are not well supported by the actual data from the jurisdictions that have tried it.
Where I think the legitimate critique lives is elsewhere: regional and sectoral effects. British Columbia's carbon tax was associated with a measurable fall in household income and consumption relative to a counterfactual, concentrated among higher earners — which the researchers read as a sign the tax's redistribution mechanism worked as intended, but which also shows the tax wasn't free; someone paid for it.[8] And in a province like Alberta, where the economy is unusually concentrated in emissions-intensive resource extraction, a uniform national carbon price lands far harder on one region's primary industry than on the country as a whole — which is, I think, a legitimate basis for Alberta's resentment even if the aggregate national numbers look mild.
Global coordination is the other real problem, separate from the inflation question. Even a well-designed, low-cost domestic carbon price does little if emissions keep rising elsewhere — and they have. A unilateral price imposed on one mid-sized economy is, on its own, a mostly symbolic gesture against a genuinely global atmospheric problem.
Predictable rules matter for long-lived capital investment. When subsidy programs are introduced, modified, and occasionally clawed back — and when net-zero mandates shift with each change of government — the practical effect is that investors price in policy risk on top of ordinary commercial risk. I believe this is part of why energy-intensive industry in Europe, including Germany, has faced real pressure to relocate or scale back: 2025 reporting put German energy-intensive industrial output roughly 17% below pre-2022 levels, a period that overlaps with both the post-Russia-sanctions energy shock and the broader Energiewende cost structure.[9] I don't think it's possible to cleanly separate how much of that is the 2022 gas shock versus the underlying policy framework, and I want to be honest that the two are tangled together in the data — but I don't think the policy framework is blameless either.
In Alberta and Western Canada specifically, federal carbon and emissions policy layered on top of an economy concentrated in oil and gas creates exactly this kind of asset-stranding anxiety: why commit capital to multi-decade energy infrastructure when the regulatory floor under it can move with the next election?
I think climate policy has become a marker of political identity rather than a genuine cost-benefit conversation, and that this has made the policy worse, not better. When skepticism about a specific subsidy program or a specific mandate's design gets treated as equivalent to denying the underlying science, it shuts down exactly the kind of scrutiny that would catch cases like the inflated cost-per-ton figure I corrected above. Good policy needs critics who are allowed to say "this specific program is a bad deal" without being treated as opponents of the goal itself.
At the same time, I think the costs of climate policy have landed disproportionately on people without much political voice in how the policy was designed — rural communities near wind and solar buildouts, lower-income households facing higher heating costs, workers in industries being phased out without a comparably well-funded transition plan. A policy response that's actually serious about both decarbonizing and maintaining public support needs to take those costs as seriously as it takes the emissions target.
None of this is an argument for doing nothing. It's an argument for spending differently:
I think a policy response built this way would cost less, divide the public less, and very plausibly deliver more actual emissions reduction per dollar spent than the current default approach. That's the case I'm making — not that the problem is fake, but that the dominant answer to it is a worse deal than its advocates claim.
The physical climate trend (CO₂ levels, global temperature) and the documented Dunkelflaute events in Germany are not seriously contested. The cost-per-ton figures for renewable subsidies, the inflationary impact of carbon taxes, and the precise contribution of energy policy versus the 2022 gas shock to European industrial decline are all genuinely disputed among economists and energy researchers — I've tried to present ranges and acknowledge the disagreement rather than pick the most dramatic number on either side. I also want to flag directly that an earlier version of this essay's argument relied on a per-ton subsidy cost figure that mainstream economic research does not support; I've replaced it with the figures I could actually verify, even though they make a less dramatic claim than the original. I'd rather the argument be smaller and accurate than large and wrong.