Energy
Next federal government should close widening gap between Canadian and U.S. energy policy

From the Fraser Institute
After accounting for backup, energy storage and associated indirect costs—estimated solar power costs skyrocket from US$36 per megawatt hour (MWh) to as high as US$1,548, and wind generation costs increase from US$40 to up to US$504 per MWh.
At a recent energy conference in Houston, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s “irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.” He added that “Natural gas is responsible for 43 per cent of U.S. electricity production,” and beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there’s “simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.”
In other words, as a federal election looms, once again the United States is diverging from Canada when it comes to energy policy.
Indeed, wind power is particularly unattractive to Wright because of its “incredibly high prices,” “incredibly huge investment” and “large footprint on the local communities,” which make it unattractive to people living nearby. Globally, Wright observes, “Natural gas currently supplies 25 per cent of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3 per cent.”
And he’s right. Renewables are likely unable, physically or economically, to replace natural gas power production to meet current or future needs for affordable, abundant and reliable energy.
In a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, for example, we observed that meeting Canada’s predicted electricity demand through 2050 using only wind power (with natural gas discouraged under current Canadian climate policies) would require the construction of approximately 575 wind-power installations, each the size of Quebec’s Seigneurie de Beaupré wind farm, over 25 years. However, with a construction timeline of two years per project, this would equate to 1,150 construction years. This would also require more than one million hectares of land—an area nearly 14.5 times the size of Calgary.
Solar power did not fare much better. According to the study, to meet Canada’s predicted electricity demand through 2050 with solar-power generation would require the construction of 840 solar-power generation stations the size of Alberta’s Travers Solar Project. At a two-year construction time per facility, this adds up to 1,680 construction years to accomplish.
And at what cost? While proponents often claim that wind and solar sources are cheaper than fossil fuels, they ignore the costs of maintaining backup power to counter the unreliability of wind and solar power generation. A recent study published in Energy, a peer-reviewed energy and engineering journal, found that—after accounting for backup, energy storage and associated indirect costs—estimated solar power costs skyrocket from US$36 per megawatt hour (MWh) to as high as US$1,548, and wind generation costs increase from US$40 to up to US$504 per MWh.
The outlook for Canada’s switch to renewables is also dire. TD Bank estimated that replacing existing gas generators with renewables (such as solar and wind) in Ontario could increase average electricity costs by 20 per cent by 2035 (compared to 2021 costs). In Alberta, electricity prices would increase by up to 66 per cent by 2035 compared to a scenario without changes.
Under Canada’s current greenhouse gas (GHG) regulatory regime, natural gas is heavily disfavoured as a potential fuel for electricity production. The Trudeau government’s Clean Electricity Regulations (CER) would begin curtailing the use of natural gas beginning in 2035, leading largely to a cessation of natural gas power generation by 2050. Under CER and Ottawa’s “net-zero 2050” GHG emission framework, Canada will be wedded to a quixotic mission to displace affordable reliable natural gas power-generation with expensive unreliable renewables that are likely unable to meet expected future electricity demand.
With a federal election looming, Canada’s policymakers should pay attention to new U.S. energy policy on natural gas, and pull back from our headlong rush into renewable power. To avoid calamity, the next federal government should scrap the Trudeau-era CER and reconsider the entire “net-zero 2050” agenda.
Carbon Tax
Don’t be fooled – He’s Still Carbon Tax Carney

Dan McTeague
Carney and the Trudeaupians in his cabinet haven’t had some kind of massive conversion. They’ve not done any soul searching. There’s no repentance here for having made our lives harder and more expensive. They remain ideologically opposed to Affordable Energy.
Over the next several days you will see headline after headline proclaiming that the Carbon Tax is old news, because Mark Carney has repealed it. ‘Promises made, promises kept!’ will be the line spouted by our bought-and-paid-for media, desperate to prevent Pierre Poilievre from winning the election.
Of course, this will be the same media who has spent the past few years declaring that Canadians love, are positively infatuated with, Carbon Taxation. So forgive me for scoffing at their sudden about-face, clapping like trained seals when Justin Trudeau’s newly anointed heir waives his pen and proclaims to the electorate that the Carbon Tax is dead.
The thing is, it’s not. It’s still there. And it will still be there as long as Mark Carney is running the show.
And of course it will. Mark Carney is an environmentalist fanatic and lifelong Apostle of Carbon Taxation. Just listen carefully to everything he’s said since he threw his hat in the ring to take over as PM. He’s said that the Carbon Tax “served a purpose up until now,” but that it’s become “too divisive.” He was careful to always pledge to repeal the Consumer Carbon Tax, rather than the entire thing. And in the end he didn’t even do that, just zeroed it out for the time being.
Carney and the Trudeaupians in his cabinet haven’t had some kind of massive conversion. They’ve not done any soul searching. There’s no repentance here for having made our lives harder and more expensive. They remain ideologically opposed to Affordable Energy.
The fact is, the only reason they’re changing anything is because we noticed.
They’re determined that that won’t happen again. The Carbon Tax will live on, but as hidden as it can possibly be, buried under every euphemism and with every accounting trick they can think of.
Trust me, we at CAE would be taking a victory lap if the Carbon Tax were really dead. We did as much as anyone – and more than most! – to wake Canadians up to what it was doing to our quality of life, our ability to gas up our cars, heat our homes, and afford our groceries. When the day comes that this beast is actually slain, we will have quite the celebration.
But that day is not today.
What happened, instead, was that an elitist Green ideologue shuffled the deck chairs on the Titanic in the hopes that the working people of Canada would miss the Net-Zero iceberg bearing down on us.
Don’t be fooled!
Energy
OPEC Delivers Masterful Rebuke To Global Energy Agency Head

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By
Some readers will remember the infamous May 2021 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) titled ‘Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector.’ The report projected a roadmap for transforming the world’s $300 trillion oil-and-coal-based energy system into one that runs on unreliable, intermittent alternatives like wind and solar.
Most educated observers viewed the report as a piece of propaganda coming from an agency then in the process of transforming itself from a historically reliable source of real data and analysis into just another advocate for the climate alarm narrative. It surprised no one when, just a few years later, Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, publicly boasted about that exact transformation as being the agency’s overt mission now.
One passage in the report’s set of recommendations immediately caught everyone’s eye due to its boldness and transparent illogic. That passage says, “There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway.”
To reinforce this stunningly absurd notion, Birol, in an interview published by the Guardian upon the study’s release, insisted that, ”If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.”
It was a moment when the formerly respected agency shed a great deal of its credibility.
Making matters worse for Birol and IEA, barely a month later a spokesperson for the IEA urged OPEC to “open the spigots” to raise oil production to meet rising global demand that was outstripping the agency’s forecasts as the world recovered from the COVID-19 insanity. Three months after that, Wood MacKenzie, Rystad, and Moody’s had all issued studies directly contradicting IEA’s absurd assessment, and Birol was joining former President Joe Biden in calling for U.S. oil producers to drill more wells and produce more oil.
This sort of ill-advised posturing and self-contradiction is what happens when a scholarly enterprise consciously lurches into advocacy.
At this past week’s CERAWeek conference in Houston, Birol contradicted himself one more time, telling attendees, “I want to make it clear … there would be a need for investment, especially to address the decline in the existing fields. There is a need for oil and gas upstream investments, full stop.”
This latest impulse to respond to the next new thing surely surprised no one. But it was a bridge too far for officials at OPEC to sit by and absorb silently. In a March 13 statement posted on the OPEC website, the cartel reviewed Birol’s and IEA’s recent history of inconsistency and urged Birol to take a step back and consider the impacts it has had and will continue to have on investments for the future.
“Aside from the risk of whiplash that such severe yo-yoing between positions could cause, a serious point needs to be stressed,” OPEC writes. “The world needs unambiguous clarity on the realities of the future of supply and demand. Agencies that recognize the responsibility that comes from offering analysis of the long-term perspectives of the industry should not be shifting positions or mixing messages and narratives every couple of years on this matter, particularly ones that were founded to ensure the security of oil supplies.”
Oof. Blunt, but true. It is a dressing down that is well-deserved and long overdue.
Does Birol’s latest shift signal a recognition that the energy transition for which it has advocated has failed? It’s hard to know.
Regardless, once an agency like IEA makes a public decision to transform itself away from sterile analysis into the realm of advocacy, going back will be hard. Aside from the loss of credibility, which has only increased as Birol has lurched from one position to another and back again, such a transformation completely shifts the organization’s culture. Going back now will require time and a great deal of organizational pain.
Here, another obvious question arises: Is Fatih Birol the right person for this job? It is a question that should have arisen before the loss of so much credibility and trust. For the 32 member countries who subscribe to the agency and pay its bills, there is no time like the present to determine the answer.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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