Four Climate Fallacies - June 2025 • Fraser Institute

 I am not going to publish the entirety of this 24 page report.

You can see their ratings on truthfulness here; https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fraser-institute/

Executive Summary 

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. 

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 pro jections of large-emitting countries such as China would reveal that for small-emitting countries like Canada, even driving their greenhouse gas emis sions to zero would have no measurable impact in reducing climate risk. 

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. 

Fallacy 4: Carbon Capture and Storage Is a Viable Strategy to Combat Climate Change T his fallacy, most popular with those in the fossil fuel industry and those of a more market-oriented and politically conservative bent, is no more realis tic 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. 

Conclusion This study started with an admonition variously attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Ronald Reagan, and others, that “what gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, but what we know that isn’t so” (May, 2019). 

We examined four climate narratives currently circulating in public discourse regarding climate change which fit this definition of “what gets us into trouble”:

Read the entirety of the report here:

 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/four-climate-fallacies.pdf