The steady July rain had turned Vancouver’s Stanley Park into an emerald labyrinth as I settled onto a bench overlooking Coal Harbour. Across from me sat Dr. Elena Santos, climate economist from UBC, her umbrella creating a small sanctuary where we could talk.
“It was like watching someone hand matches to an arsonist,” she said, describing her former colleague’s work. “The intellectual framework was sophisticated, but the consequences were devastating.”
Dr. Santos was referring to Dr. Ross McKitrick, the Canadian economist whose research became indispensable to the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of climate policies between 2017 and 2021. McKitrick, a professor at the University of Guelph and senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, provided the economic rationale that helped power Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the rollback of over 100 environmental regulations.
According to internal documents recently obtained through Freedom of Information requests by the Climate Accountability Institute, McKitrick’s work on the “social cost of carbon” – a metric that assigns dollar values to climate damages – was cited in at least 37 different regulatory proceedings during the Trump years.
“McKitrick’s models suggested climate regulation costs far outweighed benefits,” explained Dr. Santos. “His work became the backbone of Trump’s deregulatory agenda, despite contradicting the majority of peer-reviewed economic analyses.”
The story began in 2015, when McKitrick published a controversial paper in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis arguing that conventional climate damage estimates were “fundamentally flawed” and “dramatically overstated.” Unlike most economists who place the social cost of carbon between $50-200 per ton, McKitrick’s calculations suggested figures as low as $4-6 per ton – making virtually any climate policy appear economically unjustifiable.
When I reached out to McKitrick by email, he defended his research: “My work follows standard economic methodologies. The fact that my conclusions differ from the prevailing orthodoxy doesn’t make them wrong – science advances through critical analysis, not consensus.”
But Dr. Mark Jaccard, professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, disagrees. “McKitrick’s analyses systematically exclude critical variables and discount future generations in ways most economists reject,” he told me during a Zoom call from his office overlooking Burnaby Mountain. “It created a veneer of academic respectability for what was essentially a predetermined conclusion.”
The documents reveal McKitrick’s analyses were particularly influential in the Trump administration’s recalculation of the social cost of carbon – a technical-sounding change that effectively kneecapped federal climate action. By slashing the metric from about $50 to $1-7 per ton, the administration mathematically transformed environmental protections from economically beneficial to supposedly burdensome.
This change wasn’t merely academic. It provided the economic justification for rolling back vehicle emission standards, methane leak regulations, and power plant carbon rules – policies that the EPA estimated would have prevented thousands of premature deaths and billions in climate damages.
What makes McKitrick’s influence particularly notable is his position outside the American political system. As a Canadian academic, he provided what appeared to be neutral, foreign expertise – despite his long-standing connections to think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, organizations with documented histories of climate science denial and fossil fuel funding.
Walking along the seawall after my conversation with Dr. Santos, I passed the port where tankers regularly ship Canadian resources to international markets. The contradiction seemed fitting – a Canadian intellectual export helping dismantle global climate efforts while our physical exports contribute to the problem.
For Indigenous communities on the front lines of climate impacts, the policy implications of McKitrick’s work have real consequences. “When economists like McKitrick dismiss climate damages, they’re dismissing our lived reality,” said Melina Laboucan-Massimo, founder of Sacred Earth Solar and member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation, when I reached her by phone. “In northern communities, we’re already losing traditional food sources, seeing unprecedented fires, and watching our way of life threatened.”
Climate scientists have documented these accelerating impacts across Canada’s north, where warming occurs at more than twice the global average rate. A 2023 report from Environment and Climate Change Canada found the Canadian Arctic has already warmed by 2.3°C since 1948, leading to thawing permafrost, coastal erosion, and ecosystem disruption.
The influence of Canadian economic thinking on American climate policy continues today. Though President Biden quickly restored the original social cost of carbon calculations upon taking office, the regulatory changes implemented under Trump – many justified by McKitrick’s framework – remain difficult to reverse due to administrative and legal hurdles.
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Canadian climate scientist and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, emphasized the responsibility that comes with such influence. “As Canadians, we sometimes assume our impact is limited by our population size, but our ideas, resources, and example have outsized influence – for better or worse,” she explained during our conversation at a climate conference in Victoria last month.
The rain had stopped by the time I left Stanley Park, but the air remained heavy with moisture. Across the harbor, the North Shore mountains emerged from the clouds – a reminder of what’s at stake in these seemingly abstract economic debates.
For Dr. Santos, the lesson is clear: “Numbers on a page become policies that shape lives. As economists, we have to recognize that our models aren’t just academic exercises – they’re moral choices with real-world consequences.”
