Immediately you know this is political, propaganda, fake news or misinformation just by the language and the terms like “unemployed trees”. However, the first read raises alarms as something is seriously wrong with the logic used. It reads like the disinformation produced by the Koch brothers on behalf of the fossil fuel industry in order to add confusion to those with weak minds. The conclusion, with the present small carbon tax on gasoline, is certainly ineffective, but the “largest scam in Canadian history” is rhetoric used in conspiracy theories and fake news .
The easiest way to take this logic apart is to simply replace the words as we did in university Logic 101 when we used “if p then q” . p and q can be anything, as you know, so it is appropriate to do the following.
Replace “trees” with “glasses of whisky” – These are both containers
Replace “CO2” with “whisky” – These are both known types of matter that can fit into containers
Canada has 594.7 billion glasses of whisky (OK, easy to follow)
Canada Produces 559 megatons of whisky (right, also easy to follow)
To capture all of Canada’s (produced) whisky takes 25.7 billion glasses of whisky. (What, say that again)
Therefore Canada has 569 billion unused glasses of whisky.
But, but wait. Line 1 is very clear that the glasses are already full of whisky so line 3 is quite wrong. It should read “To capture all of Canada’s whisky takes 25.7 billion empty glasses”.
This means that line 4 is fallacious as it inverts adding with subtracting. It should read
“Therefore Canada needs an additional 25.7 billion empty glasses for the excess whisky.”
Walking backwards to line 1 really says “Canada has 594.7 billion glasses already full of whisky” They are not sitting around empty waiting to get filled. They are already full.
When I first saw this it was obvious nonsense and didn’t need disassembly. I didn’t think anyone would miss seeing this simple adding to subtracting inversion. However, if this is the logic and arithmetic that the fossil fuel industry uses in keeping their finances in order, I would think that the CRA should be notified and a full audit initiated.
We need more trees. There are not 594.7 billion trees sitting around devoid of carbon waiting to get filled.
Do the authors really think we are that devoid of simple logic?
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