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Many of the environmental and climate change policies implemented around the world over the past few decades have proven ineffective, wasteful and expensive. Some of those policies and projects are stand outs because they were patently ridiculous as well as wasteful. We have had a lot of experience with this in Canada.
To pick but one example among many, remember the government’s $3 million wasted investment in an indoor cricket ranch and cricket protein processing facility.
Youthful officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) are the Trudeau government’s policy gatekeepers. Senator Mike Duffy famously referred to PMO staffers as the “kids in short pants” who think they own the government. Today, most kids at the PMO and their boss behind the scenes, Gerald Butts, are environmental purists. They would rather we return to medieval peasant status than see us burn another litre of gasoline. Experience over the past decade of Liberal mismanagement suggests the kids are sorely in need of greater adult supervision and maybe bike helmets.
Enough about Canada. There are examples from around the world suggesting many of the people responsible for policies promoted as being environmentally beneficial need something similar to adult supervision or a dose of common sense. Sri Lanka, an island nation south of India, provides a case in point.
As the saying goes, sometimes life imitates art. Fans of Mike Judge’s futuristic movie, Idiocracy, will recall how a US government in the future decided to irrigate crops with Gatorade. After all, the TV ads said it contained essential minerals and nutrients.
Just a few years ago the government of Sri Lanka did something equally idiotic. As a cost saving measure compatible with environmental orthodoxy it banned the importation of all fertilizer. It turned out that following the ban Sri Lanka’s agricultural production didn’t fare much better than the crops irrigated with Gatorade.
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Sri Lanka is a poor country trying to climb out of a financial hole engineered by its recently ousted government and its predecessors going back to around 2015. Former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019-2022), was famously corrupt and dangerously eccentric. He claimed his bizarre fertilizer ban was inspired by the goals of environmental sustainability and would rejuvenate the country’s flagging economy.
Climate alarmed environmentalists claim manufactured nitrogen fertilizers contributed significantly to human generated methane emissions globally. While methane does not last as long in the atmosphere as CO2 (7-12 years as compared to several decades) it has a much stronger warming effect while it remains in the air. Farmers in the Netherlands jammed that country’s highways for weeks a few years ago when they successfully protested government attempts to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and the size of their cow herds.
Making matters worse, Rajapaksa forced Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector to go organic virtually overnight. Chemical fertilizer imports were abruptly banned in April 2021. Rajapaksa figured the government and farmers would save millions and he could earn virtue points among climate alarmed politicians and lenders in the developed world. He boasted Sri Lanka would become “the world’s first organic nation.”
The government told Sri Lankans that prior to “the introduction of poisonous agricultural chemicals” the average lifespan of Sri Lankans was 140 years. It’s as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was running their ministry of health.
In 2022, after food production crashed, Sri Lankans’ living standards shrank along with their waistlines. Prior to the fertilizer ban, Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production. Within six months without fertilizer, rice production fell by 20%. Going green also impacted tea production, reducing revenues by $424 million.
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Overall economic conditions worsened. The government announced in April 2022 that it would default on $8.6 billion USD in loan repayments to foreign and domestic lenders. India provided the country with a $4 billion USD line of credit to help reduce the size of the humanitarian crisis. It didn’t help that the war in Ukraine and post-COVID inflation had caused a big spike in global food prices.
We know wealthy, developed countries like Canada are not immune to adopting ineffective and economically damaging policies recommended by environmental activists. The financial impacts show up in a decade’s worth of deficit budgets and $2 trillion in gross federal debt. For example, our federal government recently blew $34 billion when its own overly ambitious environmental regulations and dysfunctional pipeline approval process caused numerous delays and cost overruns during the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
It is not difficult to imagine how wasteful spending and ill-conceived environmental policies might affect a poor country. Canada’s per capital GDP is $53,372 and we can’t afford environmental policy boondoggles. Sri Lanka’s per capita GDP was only $3,800 in 2023. The losses in food production and export revenues caused by having to go organic overnight contributed to the country’s economic collapse that threatened the livelihoods and health of its population.
And let’s not forget buried among the numerous green transition laws, regulations and policy pronouncements made by the Canadian government, measures have been proposed for limiting the use of nitrogen fertilizer. Government promotional materials have recommended that farmers make greater use of manure as a fertilizer. We have over 40 million acres of farmland in Saskatchewan. We lack the necessary supplies of manure. And, amazing as they might think they are, not even the kids in short pants could spread the amount of bullshit required.
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