Energy
A Wealth-Creating Way of Reducing Global CO2 Emissions
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
It is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contention there’s no “business case” for exporting Canada’s abundant, inexpensively produced natural gas as LNG. But Canadians might do well to politely decline management consulting advice from a former substitute drama teacher who was born into wealth and has never had to meet a payroll, balance a budget or make a sale. Bluntly stated, someone who has shown no evidence of being able to run the proverbial lemonade stand. And one whose real agenda, the evidence shows, is to strangle the nation’s most productive and wealth-generating industry. With the first LNG ship finally expected to dock at Kitimat, B.C. over the next year and load Canada’s first-ever LNG export cargo, Gwyn Morgan lays out the business and environmental cases for ramping up our LNG exports – and having them count towards Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Pierre Poilievre’s Axe the (carbon) Tax campaign is a spectacular success. But the Conservative Party of Canada needs its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Paradoxically, it’s a fossil fuel that provides much of the answer.
Canada’s rich endowment of natural gas resources offers an immense opportunity to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions while also helping to rescue the Liberal-government-ravaged Canadian economy by exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, Japan, South Korea and the other coal-dependent Asia-Pacific countries. Switching from coal to natural gas for producing electricity and generating heat for buildings and industrial processes can typically reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent for the same unit of output, while all-but eliminating the toxic compounds and lung-clogging particulates emitted from burning coal that shorten the lives of millions living in smog-stricken Asian cities.
More natural gas is urgently needed, since countries throughout Asia – especially China and India – are currently adding even more coal-burning power plants to meet rapidly growing electricity demand. The benefits of fuel-switching are not speculation, but a proven result: the United States’ pronounced switch starting in the mid-2000s from coal to natural gas for electricity materially reduced that country’s CO2 emissions (see accompanying graph), nearly equalling the entire European Union’s emissions cuts, as I wrote about in this previous column.
A study by respected consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, released in late 2022, determined the following:
- “Canada is well-positioned geographically…Western Canadian LNG is much closer to Asia relative to US Gulf Coast LNG, which needs to be shipped through the Panama Canal to get to Asia”;
- “LNG from Canada would be cost-competitive for northeast Asian importers…due to its relatively low shipping and liquefaction costs”;
- “LNG from Canada has lower emissions intensity than LNG coming from many other global LNG exporters”;
- “Asia will not be able to produce enough natural gas domestically to meet its escalating demand, therefore Canadian LNG is a compelling alternative: With its high environmental standards and stewardship, Canada would be a great partner to fill the LNG demand gap in Asia”; and
- “If Canada aggressively ramps up its LNG exports…the emissions displaced from Canadian LNG would total 5.5 [gigatons of CO2 equivalent] from 2022 to 2050 or 181 [megatons of CO2 equivalent] on average per year, which is equivalent to removing all Canadian cars from the road.”
These impressive benefits – not to mention the opportunity to create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs in our country and provide long-term returns to investors, among them millions of pension-dependent retirees – were recognized long ago by the energy industry, Western provincial premiers and former prime minister Stephen Harper. And for a time it indeed seemed that Canada was on the cusp of an LNG boom. By 2010, there were more than 20 LNG projects in the works in B.C., representing hundreds of billions in total investment. These included Exxon Mobil’s $25-billion West Coast Canada project, Chinese-owned CNOOC’s $36-billion Aurora project, Malaysian firm Petronas’s $36 billion Pacific NorthWest project, and the Shell-led $43 billion LNG Canada project at Kitimat.
Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
But through a decade of trying to navigate Canada’s increasingly obstructive and Byzantine regulatory process, project proponents dropped out one by one. Today LNG Canada is the only one of those major projects left standing. (Two much smaller LNG projects, Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound at Squamish, and Cedar LNG just a few kilometres from the LNG Canada project, are also proceeding, and one other large project proposed by the Nisga’a First Nation is making regulatory progress.) LNG Canada succeeded only because South African project leader Andy Calitz, backed by the enthusiasm of the Haisla Nation which saw the immense potential to create a self-sustaining, wealth-generating economy for its people, refused to give up.
After five years of construction, the LNG Canada liquefaction facility and loading terminal are nearing completion, with the first LNG ship scheduled to sail to China in 2025 (possibly even this year). The Kitimat plant itself is just one component of Canada’s first LNG export project. TC Energy Corp.’s (formerly TransCanada Pipelines) $15 billion, recently completed Coastal GasLink pipeline will carry the required natural gas from the northeastern B.C. gas fields to the Kitimat terminal. And additional billions of dollars have been invested in drilling natural gas wells, proving up the immense reserves needed to feed the LNG facility for decades to come, and constructing field production systems.
The economic benefits are myriad. Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double from $700 million in 2024 to $1.4 billion in 2027. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
And that’s just LNG Canada’s Phase 1, which will produce 14 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG, or approximately 1.8 billion cubic feet (bcf) per day. With that one project coming on-stream, about 10 percent of Canada’s total natural gas production will be exported to international markets, earning premium prices. Construction of Phase 2 is scheduled to begin in 2026 and will double the facility’s output, with first delivery scheduled for 2032. A report from Canada Action estimates that completion of both phases will reduce CO2 emissions in Asian countries as much as would removing 18 million cars from Canadian roads. That is a far more efficient and realistic way of reducing emissions than the Trudeau government’s current scheme to force everyone into electric vehicles within a decade.
A major barrier for LNG project sponsors has been Canadian regulators’ fixation on a project’s domestic emissions – which come mainly from producing the energy needed to operate the liquefaction and storage process and loading facility. These emissions are miniscule compared to the enormous emissions reductions when natural gas is used instead of coal in consuming countries. But in their zeal to force Canada to “net zero” emissions, government authorities initially tried to veto LNG Canada generating its electricity and compression power using some of the natural gas that will be already piped to the site, insisting instead upon hydroelectric power. This seriously delayed the project due to the need for B.C. Hydro to first build a new dam to supply the required power, along with a new, $3 billion transmission line that has not even begun its environmental review process.
Regulators finally waived their objection so the project could be finished, and it will initially use natural gas for power. But the same objection is now being raised with respect to another major LNG venture proposed in the same region. The Ksi Lisims LNG project would utilize a floating liquefaction and loading facility docked at lands owned by the Nisga’a First Nation north of Prince Rupert. Its natural gas would be supplied through an already-approved but never-built pipeline planned for one of the cancelled LNG projects. The $10 billion venture would have approximately two-thirds the capacity of LNG Canada Phase 1. The facility would be powered by hydroelectricity.
Ksi Lisims sounds like a great addition to Canada’s modest LNG lineup, one that British Columbians should applaud. Instead, the proponents have been assailed by objections over the greenhouse gas emissions from the facility and the natural gas production process, and concurrently the B.C. Wilderness Committee is calling on the province’s NDP government to veto any further LNG development. None of these zealots acknowledge the vastly greater reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that will be achieved as consuming countries switch to natural gas.
Prior to the December 2018 UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland, Canada’s Conservative Party urged leaders of their nation’s delegation to propose that the use of imported natural gas to displace coal and thereby reduce emissions in one country should count towards the exporting country’s emissions reduction targets. But this made far too much sense for our Prime Minister and his team of anti-fossil-fuel eco-zealots. A new federal government that encourages LNG projects might well see a return of those other big sponsors that were driven off.
And that brings us back to Pierre Poilievre and the need for a Conservative alternative to Trudeau’s carbon tax. LNG export would be not only vastly superior in reducing emissions, it would also create tens of billions of dollars in economic benefits for a beleaguered Canadian private sector. It is beyond high time. A Macdonald-Laurier Institute report, Estimating the True Size of Government in Canada, concludes that Canada’s private sector has shrunk to just 36 percent of the nation’s GDP. That’s right – Canada’s public sector now represents nearly two-thirds of the Canadian economy, if one includes in that measure the vast amounts governments spend on tax credits and other tax-related expenditures, plus the economic impacts of regulating the pricing or outputs of private industries. This is appalling.
Even more incomprehensible is a research report from the Harvard Kennedy School noting that “Communist” China’s private sector generates “approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs.” By those measures, the private sector in ostensibly free and democratic Canada, with its allegedly market-based economy, has been reduced to barely half the relative size of the private sector in authoritarian China.
It is clear that for Canada, getting out of the way of privately-driven growth in LNG exports would be a vastly superior environmental alternative to Trudeau’s economically destructive and politically divisive carbon tax, while also helping to reverse the decline of what was once a proud, thriving nation into an indebted, unproductive, government-dominated basket case.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
This article supplied by Troy Media.
By Gwyn Morgan
Canada is paying a steep economic price for climate policies that have delivered little real environmental progress
In 2015, the newly elected Trudeau government signed the Paris Agreement. The following year saw the imposition of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which included more than 50 measures aimed at “reducing carbon emissions and fostering clean technology solutions.” Key among them was economy-wide carbon “pricing,” Liberal-speak for taxes.
Other measures followed, culminating last December in the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan, targeting emissions of 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. It included $9.1 billion for retrofitting structures, subsidizing zero-emission vehicles, building charging stations and subsidizing solar panels and windmills. It also mandated the phaseout of coal-fired power generation and proposed stringent emission standards for vehicles and buildings.
Other “green initiatives” included the “on-farm climate action fund,” a nationwide reforestation initiative to plant two billion trees, the “Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Program” to promote net-zero standards in new construction, and a “Green Municipal Fund” to support municipal decarbonization. That’s a staggering list of nation-impoverishing subsidies, taxes and restrictions.
Those climate measures come at a real cost to the industry that drives the nation’s economy.
The Trudeau government cancelled the Northern Gateway oil pipeline to the northwest coast, which had been approved by the Harper government, costing sponsors hundreds of millions of dollars in preconstruction expenditures. The political and regulatory morass the Liberals created eventually led to the cancellation of all but one of the 12 LNG export proposals.
Have all those taxes and regulatory measures reduced Canada’s fossil-fuel consumption? No. As Bjorn Lomborg has reported, between the election of the Trudeau government in 2015 through 2023, fossil fuels’ share of Canada’s energy supply increased from 75 to 77 per cent.
That dismal result wasn’t for lack of trying. The Fraser Institute has found that Ottawa and the four biggest provinces have either spent or forgone a mind-numbing $158 billion to create just 68,000 “clean” jobs, increasing the “green economy” by a minuscule 0.3 percentage points to 3.6 per cent of GDP at an eye-watering cost of more than $2.3 million per job.
That’s Canada’s emissions reduction debacle. What’s the global picture? A decade after Paris, 80 per cent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. World energy demand is up 150 per cent. Canada, which produces roughly 1.5 per cent of global emissions, cannot influence that trajectory. And, as Lomborg writes: “achieving net zero emissions by 2050 would require the removal of the equivalent of the combined emissions of China and the United States in each of the next five years. This puts us in the realm of science fiction.”
Does this mean our planet will become unlivable? A U.S. Department of Energy report issued in July is grounds for optimism. It finds that “claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” And it goes on: “CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed and aggressive mitigation policies could be more detrimental than beneficial.”
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright responded to the report by saying: “Climate change is real … but it is not the greatest threat facing humanity … (I)mproving the human condition depends on access to reliable, affordable energy.”
That leaves no doubt as to where our largest trading partner stands on carbon emissions. But don’t expect Prime Minister Mark Carney, who helped launch the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) at COP 26 in that city in 2021 and co-chaired it until this January, to soften his stand on carbon taxes. His just-released budget imposes carbon tax increases of $80 to $170 per ton by 2030 on our already struggling industries.
Doing so increases Canadian businesses’ competitive disadvantage with our most important trading partner while doing essentially nothing to help the environment.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who has been a director of five global corporations.
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
Family in Spain eating by candlelight during a blackout, April 2025
From Resource Works
By Stewart Muir
Canada’s own 2024 grid scare proves we’re on the same path unless we change course.
Europe’s green-energy unraveling is no longer a distant cautionary tale. It’s a mirror — and Canada is already seeing the first cracks.
A new Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the European story in stark detail: a continent that slashed emissions faster than anyone else, only to discover that doing so by tearing down firm power before its replacement existed comes with brutal consequences — collapsing industry, sky-high electricity prices, political fragmentation, and a public increasingly unwilling to subsidize wishful thinking.
The tragedy isn’t that Europe tried to decarbonize quickly.
The tragedy is how they did it: by insisting on an “or” transition — renewables or fossil fuels — instead of what every energy-literate nation outside Europe pursued: renewables and fossil fuels, working together while the system evolves.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Canada has already had its first European-style crisis. It happened in January 2024.
Canada’s early warning: the January 2024 electricity crunch
Most people have already forgotten it, because our political class desperately wanted you to. But in January 2024, Western Canada came within a whisker of a full-blown energy security breakdown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. were stretched to their limit. The grid was under cascading stress. Contingency plans were activated. Alberta came terrifyingly close to rolling blackouts.
It wasn’t caused by climate change. It wasn’t caused by a mysterious cyberattack.
It was caused by the same structural brittleness now crippling Europe:
- Insufficient firm power, after years of political messaging that we could “electrify everything” without adding real generating capacity.
- Overreliance on intermittent sources not backed by storage or gas.
- A planning system that punted risk into the future, betting the grid could be stretched indefinitely.
The January 2024 event was not a blip. It was a preview.
Our European moment in miniature.
But instead of treating it as the national wake-up call it should have been, B.C. did something telling — and deeply damaging.
The B.C. government’s response: attack the messenger
Just a couple of years ago, an economist publicly warned about the economic price of emerging system vulnerabilities due to a groaning stack of “clean economy” policies.
The B.C. government didn’t respond with data, evidence, or even curiosity. Instead, a cabinet minister used the safety of legislative privilege — that gold-plated shield against accountability — to launch nasty personal attacks on the economist who raised the concerns, which themselves had originated in the government’s own analysis.
No engagement.
No counter-analysis.
No willingness to consider the system risks.
Just slurs — the very definition of anti-intellectual governance.
It was a moment that told the whole story:
Too many policymakers in this province believe that energy systems obey politics, not physics.
Physics always gets the last word.
Europe shows us what political denial turns into
The WSJ reporting couldn’t be clearer about the consequences of that denial:
- Germany: highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world.
- U.K.: highest industrial electricity rates among major economies.
- Industrial flight: chemical plants closing, data centres frozen, major players hinting at exiting Europe entirely.
- Grid instability: wind farms paid tens of millions not to generate because the grid can’t handle it.
- Public revolt: rising support for parties rejecting the entire green-transition agenda.
- Policy whiplash: governments rushing to build gas plants they swore they’d never need.
Europe is now an object lesson in how good intentions, executed poorly, can produce the exact opposite of what was promised: higher prices, higher volatility, declining competitiveness, and a public ready to abandon climate policy altogether.
This is precisely what January 2024 warned us about — but on a continental scale.
The system cost we keep pretending doesn’t exist
Every serious energy expert knows the truth Europe is now living: intermittent renewables require massive amounts of redundant capacity, storage, and backup generation. That’s why the U.K. now needs 120 gigawatts of capacity to serve a demand previously met with 60–70 gigawatts, even though electricity use hasn’t meaningfully grown.
This is the math policymakers prefer not to show the public.
And it’s why B.C.’s refusal to have an honest conversation about firm power is so dangerous.
If we electrify everything without ensuring affordable and abundant natural gas generation, we’re not building a green future.
We’re building Europe, 10 years early.
The lesson for Canada — especially for B.C.
Here is what Europe and January 2024 together say, in one clear voice:
1. There is no energy transition without firm power.
Renewables are part of the system, but they don’t run the system. Natural gas does. Hydro does. Nuclear does. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with rolling blackouts.
2. Political denial makes crises worse.
When ministers attack economists instead of answering them, it signals that ideology is running the show. Europe learned the cost of that. We will too, unless we change course.
3. Affordability is the foundation of public consent.
Europe lost the room. Once people see their bills double while factories close, the climate agenda becomes politically radioactive.
4. B.C. has an advantage Europe would kill for.
Europe dreams of having an abundant, local, low-carbon firm-power fuel like northeastern B.C.’s natural gas. We treat it like a political liability. That’s not strategy. It’s negligence.
5. The transition will fail if we don’t treat electricity like the national security asset it is.
Without energy, there is no industry.
Without industry, there is no prosperity.
Without prosperity, there is no climate policy that survives the next election cycle.
What we need now
Canada must embrace an “and” strategy:
Renewables and natural gas. Electrification and realism. Climate ambition and economic competitiveness.
January 2024 showed us the future in a flash. Europe shows us the end state if we keep ignoring the warning.
We can still choose something better. But only if we stop pretending that energy systems bend to political narratives — and start treating them with the seriousness they demand.
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