Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. He is the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies

He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. 

Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate.  Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).

Recent Research by Ross McKitrick

— Sep 12, 2023
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Wrong Move at the Wrong Time: Economic Impacts of the New Federal Building Energy Efficiency Mandates is a new study that finds the cost of a newly constructed home in Canada will increase by $55,000, on average, by 2030 as a result of the federal government’s proposed energy efficiency regulations for buildings. Crucially, the stricter building regulations will only reduce Canada’s total emissions by 0.9 per cent.

— Jul 27, 2021
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Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5°C Climate Ceiling

Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5°C Climate Ceiling finds that the government policies required to implement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s goal, to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, would impose social and economic costs that far exceed the expected benefits.

— Mar 16, 2021
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Estimated Impacts of a $170 Carbon Tax in Canada finds that the federal government’s plan to impose a $170 per tonne carbon tax by 2030 will result in 184,377 fewer jobs nationwide and cause a 1.8 per cent drop in Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which in 2019 would represent a loss to the economy of about $38 billion.