A rchive Date
[ 13-09-2022 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://financialpost.com/opinion/joe-oliver-trudeaus-growing-isolation-on-fossil-fuels
Trudeau’s growing isolation on fossil fuels
Ottawa cannot admit to the terribly damaging consequences of its green policies and the urgent need to fundamentally change course
Author : Joe Oliver, Special to Financial Post
Publishing date: September 1, 2022
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be feeling isolated in his campaign against fossil fuels, especially Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), as leaders around the world reduce their countries’ reliance on inadequate renewable energy and tone down their own rhetoric about lowering GHG emissions. But for political and ideological reasons his government cannot admit to the terribly damaging consequences of its green policies and the urgent need to fundamentally change course. To the contrary, it keeps doubling down on its climate obsession.
Witness the latest pronouncement from Steven Guilbeault, minister of environment and climate change, that the government will block new pipelines from Alberta that could deliver LNG to the Maritimes for export to Europe and India. Lest there be any lingering doubt, Trudeau declared there was no business case for them — having previously trammelled potential projects with regulations designed precisely to make them uneconomic.
hese assaults on reason and the national interest must have been jarring to a desperate German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his visit to Canada, the fifth largest producer of natural gas in the world. Europe’s biggest economy is on its knees, its leader reduced to begging Vladimir Putin and anyone else for natural gas and coal to avert an economic and human disaster this winter.
Ottawa’s policies have: stranded the bulk of Canada’s vast proven oil and gas reserves, cost jobs and growth across the country, undermined national unity, jeopardized energy security, deprived Indigenous communities of transformative economic opportunities and now precluded assistance to allies in dire need. All this harm was deliberately inflicted to improve Canada’s green scorecard (and Trudeau’s resumé), which no one living more than a half mile from Rideau Cottage cares about. The climate measurement we should focus on is not the puny 1.5 per cent of global emissions we generate but overall global emissions, which could be lowered significantly if Asian countries substituted our LNG for the coal they currently burn.
Many green militants like Guilbeault also oppose carbon-free nuclear power, which raises doubts about their real goals. Are clean and green their true aim or are they exploiting a climate “emergency” to increase the role of government and advance globalist objectives by posing as saviours of a public they have first terrified with visions of an apocalyptic climate emergency. Committed — one could say devout — environmentalists also prioritize the planet, Gaia (the Earth as a self-regulating organism), plant life and other species over human flourishing, which is why they don’t mind imposing such destructive policies. Let’s just say that does not accurately reflect the desires or needs of eight billion human beings.
Europeans have started to rethink the critical error of excessive reliance on intermittent wind and solar power, finally coming to grips with the unavoidable reality that renewables alone cannot provide sufficient reliable energy, not even at exorbitant cost. So they need natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear power to avoid blackouts, forcing their poorest citizens to chose between food and heat and depriving businesses of the ability to compete in the global economy. Even President Biden, who still talks the talk, brought an empty gas can when he met Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh in mid-July. And his misnamed U.S. Inflation Reduction Act requires leasing two million acres in federal lands onshore and 60 million offshore each year for a decade for oil and gas development. Meanwhile, inflation rages and a recession looms, with sub-par global growth seemingly certain.
The irony of this grim spectacle will not be lost on developing economies. Wealthy countries have long browbeaten them about avoiding fossil fuels, thus ignoring the urgent humanitarian needs of a billion people with no access to electricity, including 57 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans. Chinese President Xi isn’t promising to follow the green pied piper over a cliff until 2060. India’s Narendra Modi is in even less of a hurry: his commitment to net zero will wait almost 50 years. King Coal and fracking are back no matter the apocalyptic pseudo-science of Al Gore, the doomsday hectoring of Greta Thunberg, the condescending certitude of World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, the vacuous hysteria of self-appointed Hollywood experts or the hypocritical virtue signalling of our very own apparently perpetually airborne prime minister.
Economic growth creates the wealth that makes adaptation and scientific innovation affordable. They are much less costly and more effective in meeting our climate challenges. Since the focus on GHG mitigation has become an article of faith change people’s minds about it will be as hard as getting them to abandon their religious beliefs. But change they must, just as they abandoned fear of global cooling in the 1970’s. Yes, that was a thing, touted by Paul Ehrlich and the New York Times. Alarmists were also into peak oil and imminent mass starvation due to overpopulation.
Reality is dragging the world back toward rational self-interest and common sense. At some point, Canadians will choose a government that catches up and puts these things, and people, first.
Joe Oliver was minister of natural resources and then minister of finance in the Harper government.
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