Rhetoric—not evidence—dominates climate debate and policy.
By Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute, June 2025
Within the Western tradition, most people would likely agree that challenges such as those posed by man-made climate change are best addressed with pure reason. Risks would be assessed conservatively and objectively and handled using unbiased, pragmatic, effective, efficient control measures that could treat our “climate condition” without causing untoward side-effects such as economic destruction, political discord, social discord, and so on.
Instead, much of the discourse surrounding climate change seems intended to sow political and social discord more than to rationally understand and manage the risks of man-made climate change. This discourse takes the form of narratives—often false—that evoke emotions more than reason and subjectivity more than objectivity. They are false narratives that do not cohere with reality.
In this study, we examine four such climate narratives circulating in public discourse regarding climate change:
Fallacy 1: Climate Change Is Caused by Capitalism
As we will observe, this is backward: the more capitalist a country is, the more effective it is at protecting its environment and combatting climate change.
The “problem” of GHG emissions and environmental degradation is not capitalism. In fact, looking at countries which are more capitalist and economically free reveals that they are the world’s top performers at protecting their environments, while less capitalist countries are generally extremely poor at protecting their environments.
Fallacy 2: Even Small-Emitting Countries Can Do Their Part to Fight Climate Change
Again, in reality, even a casual inspection of the emission trends and projections of large-emitting countries such as China would reveal that for small-emitting countries like Canada, even driving their greenhouse gas emissions to zero would have no measurable impact in reducing climate risk.
Canada’s current national GHG emissions can be exceeded by the emissions of China’s smallest cities. As of 2015 (the most recent available data for Chinese cities), the combined emissions of 30 of China’s relatively small cities (populations under one million) were 709 Mt, not much less than Canada’s total 2015 emission of 746 Mt of CO2 (Cai et al., 2019). The population of those cities was only 14 million—less than half of Canada’s 2016 population of 35 million (Statistics Canada, 2017).
The idea that small GHG-emitting countries like Canada can meaningfully affect the future trajectory and pace of global climate change and mitigate climate change risk is a fallacy, particularly in a world with massive emitters such as China.
Fallacy 3: Vehicle Electrification Will Reduce Climate Risk and Clean the Air
However, when looking beyond the hype, it becomes evident that vehicle electrification presents an array of climate and environmental benefits and harms that extend beyond climate change.
Significantly expanding the mining industry on a worldwide basis to meet the growing demand for critical minerals and rare earth elements will have a negative effect on the ambient environment in many jurisdictions that produce and process minerals and metals.
Fallacy 4: Carbon Capture and Storage Is a Viable Strategy to Combat Climate Change
This fallacy, most popular with those in the fossil fuel industry and those of a more market-oriented and politically conservative bent, is no more realistic than the previous three. An examination of the history, effectiveness, and efficiency of carbon capture and storage suggests that it is a far more limited approach to regulating greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than proponents suggest.
Carbon capture and storage is a technology long on promise to control greenhouse gases and mitigate climate risk as an alternative to energy and emission controls and regulation. For several decades, however, the technology has largely been used to enhance oil production rather than to sequester carbon to reduce atmospheric GHG concentrations.
CCS has also been shown to be quite expensive compared with other GHG mitigation actions, and project proponents invariably seek massive government subsidies to enable their proposed schemes to advance. Between failures to lower costs, to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide, and to deploy widely, at this stage the idea that carbon capture and storage can replace other forms of greenhouse gas mitigation methods has to be considered fallacious.
This post contains the Executive Summary and selected quotations from the Fraser Institute report. For the full report, click here.