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‘Anti-human’: Tucker Carlson, Michael Shellenberger blast John Kerry’s COP28 speech

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From LifeSiteNews

By LifeSiteNews staff

‘I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult,’ Shellenberger told Carlson.

American conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson and journalist Michael Shellenberger recently blasted Democratic climate czar John Kerry for giving an “anti-human” speech at this year’s United Nations COP28 “climate change” conference.

Making the strong statements during the Monday edition of his X (formerly Twitter) show, Carlson played a clip of Kerry, who serves as U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, explaining at the COP28 conference in Expo City, Dubai on Sunday that he sees the global elimination of coal-fired power plants as an essential measure in tackling so-called “climate change.”

Calling Kerry and many in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration “half-demented 80-year-olds,” Carlson pointed out that despite the pleas of Kerry and others like him, other nations are moving full-stream ahead with the burning of coal as a means of powering their countries, and thereby sustaining their populations and economies.

“China, for example, burns more coal each year than the rest of the world combined… this year, the Chinese have generated 14 percent more electricity from coal than they did last year; same thing in India,” Carlson said, adding that other large nations such as Indonesia have also ramped up their use of coal.

Carlson argued that this presents a hypocrisy among the Biden administration, which often talks about “climate change” and the purported role of the West in the creation of the so-called crisis while ignoring the behavior of China, India and other nations.

Continuing his show, Carlson interviewed journalist Michael Shellenberger about the behavior of Kerry and other members of the political establishment, inquiring what he sees as the true motivation behind the climate “religion.”

Shellenberger replied by accusing the global “elite” of having an outright hatred for humanity, pointing to the fact that politicians, including the British prime minister, took private jets to the recent U.N. conference in Dubai, all the while increasing energy costs for ordinary citizens and harping on the need for their citizens to reduce energy consumption.

“I think that what’s so different now is that the elites are just openly and blatantly expressing their hatred of humankind, particularly the hatred of working people, of poor people,” Shellenberger told Carlson “the obvious alternative to coal is natural gas… if this was actually about ‘climate change’ you would just produce more natural gas because it produces half the carbon emissions of coal.”

Pointing to the fact that cheap and reliable energy is one of the main factors that keeps the masses out of poverty, particularly in places like India and China, Shellenberger characterized the West’s plans as akin to a “death cult,” in which Western leaders use “apocalyptic” language about the climate in an attempt to stop or limit the production of cheap energy, regardless of its human consequences.

“I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult.”

Carlson replied in agreement, telling Shellenberger that far from being motivated by the health of the environment, the true goal is “tyranny.”

Kerry, under former President Barack Obama, was on the team that negotiated the Paris Accords, which demanded that successful, wealthy countries drastically cut back emissions. It was never voted on in the U.S. Senate as an official treaty. President Donald Trump pulled the country out of the accords, but the U.S. has rejoined the agreement under the Biden administration.

“A global transition away from oil, gas, and coal would not only harm U.S. economic development but also afflict harm on the poorest nations,” according to Alex Epstein, an energy policy commentator. “Fossil fuels are so uniquely good at providing low-cost, reliable energy for developing nations that even nations with little/no fossil fuel resources have used fossil fuels to develop and prosper. E.g. South Korea (83% FF), Japan (85% FF), Singapore (99% FF),” Epstein wrote recently on X.

“Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels,” he wrote. “No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive FF use. The reason is that development requires energy, and FFs are a uniquely cost-effective, including scalable, source of energy.”

LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac, who has researched this topic for decades, says “implementing Kerry’s policies would result in hundreds of millions more deaths than they would save. That is the real intention,” he says, “world depopulation on a massive scale.”

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Alberta

For second year in a row, Alberta oil and gas companies spend more than required on cleanup

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From the Canadian Energy Center

By Grady Semmens

$923 million spent cleaning up inactive wells, sites and pipelines in 2023

As a business owner, Ryan Smith values few things more than predictability when it comes to the oil and gas market and the demand for his company’s services.

That’s why knowing that next year in Alberta, the regulator requires at least $750 million worth of work cleaning up inactive oil and gas wells and other legacy energy infrastructure is tremendously helpful for the CEO of Calgary-based 360 Engineering & Environmental Consulting.

“Having a minimum spend in place for the province makes the market more predictable and consistent, which in turn helps our clients and our business plan for the future, which is a good thing,” says Smith, whose company has completed more than 5,000 site closure activities in Canada and internationally since 2015.

“Site closure has really emerged as a growth market over the last decade, especially in Western Canada where the regulatory systems for oil and gas are more advanced than anywhere else we are exposed to. It is an integral part of the energy lifecycle, and if it is done well it adds a lot of value to the industry.”

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) introduced an industry-wide minimum “closure” spending requirement in 2022, part of Alberta’s Inventory Reduction Program to accelerate the remediation of inactive oil and gas wells, facilities and pipelines across the province.

The mandatory quota determines the minimum level of work a company must conduct primarily to decommission and reclaim a proportion of its inactive inventory.

Inactive wells are defined as those that have not been used for six months or a year, depending on what they are being used for. When a company decides that they will not reactivate an inactive well they decommission it through a process called abandonment.

A well is considered successfully abandoned after it is cleaned, plugged with cement, cut to a minimum of one meter below the surface and covered with a vented cap. After abandonment comes remediation and reclamation, where the land around the well is returned to the equivalent of its original state.

The first two years under the new rules saw Alberta’s energy industry significantly exceed the minimum closure requirements.

In 2022, companies spent more than $696 million, about 65 per cent more than the initial threshold of $422 million. The AER increased the minimum spend to $700 million in 2023, which producers surpassed by 22 per cent with total expenditures of $923 million.

The 2024 minimum remains at $700 million, while in July the regulator announced that the minimum spend for 2025 was raised to $750 million.

This closure work does not include remediation of oil sands mining sites, which is handled under the Mine Financial Security Program, nor does it include the closure of orphan wells (wells without a legal owner) managed by the industry-funded Orphan Well Association.

Gurpreet Lail, CEO of Enserva, an industry association representing energy service companies, suppliers and manufacturers, says there was an initial rush of closure work when the quotas were first put in place, but activity has since become more even as companies develop long-term closure plans.

“A lot of the low-lying fruit has been taken care of, so now companies are working on more complex closure files that take more time and more money,” Lail says.

Facility owners say that Alberta’s rules provide direction for planning closure and remediation work, which in the past may have been put on hold due to the ups and downs of the oil and gas market.

“When commodity prices are up, everyone is focused on drilling more wells and when prices are down, budgets are strained for doing work that doesn’t bring in revenue. Having a minimum spend makes sure closure work happens every year and ensures there is longer-term progress,” says Deborah Borthwick, asset retirement coordinator for Birchcliff Energy, an oil and natural gas producer focused in Alberta.

Over the last few years, Birchcliff has budgeted more than $3 million for annual facility closure work, far above its required minimum spend.

The company completed 11 well abandonments and decommissioned 23 facilities and pipelines in 2022, according to its latest environmental, social and governance report.

Borthwick says having the closure quota for 2025 already set has allowed it to plan ahead and line up the necessary service companies well in advance for next year’s remediation work.

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Economy

Trudeau Government Capping the Canadian Economy (and Energy Industry) Just to Impress International Agencies

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From EnergyNow.ca

By Kasha Piquette

The incoming Trump Presidency has promised  to “unleash American energy” with plans to “free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development.”  This week, the Trudeau government unveiled the draft details of its plans for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the Canadian oil and gas sector. These proposed regulations would cap all greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 35 percent below levels in 2019 with the lofty goal of achieving a 40-45 percent reduction by 2030.

It is a plan that the province of Alberta and others contend would be a cap on production and cause elevated prices for consumer goods across Canada, cost up to 150,000 jobs and reduce national GDP by up to C$1 trillion ($720 billion).

These proposals would make Canada the only oil and natural gas-producing country to attempt an emissions cap on such a scale. The regulations propose to force upstream oil and gas operations to reduce emissions to 35 percent less than they were in 2019 by 2030 to 2032. Notably, while hydrocarbon production increased from 2019 to 2022, Canadian emissions from the sector declined by seven percent.

Perhaps significantly, and much to the apparent annoyance of Alberta’s Premier, the Federal announcement was made slightly ahead of the UN COP29 Climate Summit in Azerbaijan. Per the Paris Agreement, each country submits its climate ambitions to UN as National Determined Contributions (NDCs).  However, the federal government has also passed the Net Zero Accountability Act, which, by December 1st, 2024, could require even more aggressive reduction targets for 2035. Does this mean that the federal government may be positioning itself to announce even more ambitious emission targets – all to be announced at that conference?

It is unclear whether, how and in what form, the emissions cap will come into effect. With the next federal election slated for late October 2025 and polls that show the current Liberal-NDP coalition government to be far behind the opposition Conservatives, the federal carbon tax and the proposed emission cap have an uncertain future.

Other business interests have voiced concerns about Canada’s increasingly discordant, incoherent climate policies and regulations, which have caused the Canadian oil and gas sector to be at a competitive disadvantage in the global energy market.  Clearly, Alberta considers that the Federal government has, once again, overstepped its constitutional bounds with the proposed emissions cap and, along with its victorious Supreme Court challenge against the Impact Assessment Act, has vowed to launch more court challenges.  Alberta and other Provinces have contended that, with regional exemptions, the federal carbon tax is being applied unfairly as a patchwork of standards with Alberta, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia, and the opposition Conservative party, mounting a growing chorus against the Liberal government’s broader price on carbon. By contrast, the proposed regulations for an emissions cap have been aimed specifically at one industry sector – one that is largely concentrated in western Canada.

Meanwhile, Canadian oil production, aided by the new export capacity of the TransMountain Pipeline completed this year, has grown to a record 5.1 million barrels per day making Canada the prime (60%) source of US crude oil imports in 2023.  Meanwhile, the industry has been engaged in considerations for the potential development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to trap greenhouse gasses underground. However, this untested technology would cost billions, needs to be proven on a larger scale and requires industry cooperation combined with all levels of government support.

The Federal announcement, and the hostile reaction from Alberta and possibly other oil-producing provinces, mean that once again, Canadian investment in the oil and gas sector will be confronted with ever more uncertainty as they encounter time-consuming court challenges.  These competing political agendas ensure that major Canadian investment decisions will, once again, be deferred while other international jurisdictions race to develop their hydrocarbon export capabilities, investments that are unencumbered by any emissions caps.

Canadians need to consider carefully how these policies and debates are affecting our energy security and standard of living as Canada. In addition to carbon pricing, Canada has already promulgated regulations for EV mandates in the transportation sector, policies that have required tens of billions in subsidies. It has also introduced the complex clean fuel standard and the proposed national clean electrical standards. These policies are affecting not just Canada’s productivity, GDP and exports. By attacking the Western provinces, Ottawa is unnecessarily creating regional tensions and a less politically stable federation. We need to think about how co-operative federalism can be re-established in ways that account for the basic needs of all Canadians – and not just accommodate arbitrary targets for emissions designed to impress international agencies.


Kasha Piquette is an Alberta-based strategic energy advisor and a former Deputy Minister of Alberta Environment and Protected Areas.

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