Energy
Opinion: A Kamala Harris Presidency Is The Stuff Of Nightmares
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By PETER MURPHY
Vice President Kamala Harris is one election away from winning the White House and accelerating America’s climate hysteria that is already well underway thanks to the outgoing President Joe Biden.
“There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” then-Sen. Harris said during a CNN-sponsored town hall back in 2019, during her ill-fated run for president.
That same year, she threw her support behind the Green New Deal, proposed by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. That is a plan that would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to “transition” America from oil, gas and coal sources to so-called wind, solar and batteries–or, rather, to subjugate the nation to an all-powerful green state under the command of the federal government.
Harris later teamed with AOC to introduce the Climate Equity Act, which was a confusing, word-salad of a bill to address climate “injustice” in “front-line communities” using the familiar means of creating a massive new federal bureaucracy.
During Harris’ short-lived campaign for president, which crashed and burned months before the 2020 caucus and primary votes, she called for a climate pollution fee that would “make polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.” Typical of so many climate falsehoods, Harris conflates carbon emissions with “pollution.”
In his letter to the nation last Sunday announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race, President Joe Biden boasted that he had overseen passage of the “most significant climate legislation in the history of the world” — an apparent reference to his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. This “significant” legislation included hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare for companies to build wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles and other climate-related projects.
Because, after all, the U.S. is “the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change – still the second largest today after China’ said a story posted by the climate-rabid media outlet, Yahoo News. Expect a President Harris to double down on such unscientific drivel.
In a modern historical anomaly, Harris is poised to become a major party’s presidential nominee without a single caucus or primary vote, which is a throwback to the old days of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms at convention time.
Still, Harris is among the most privileged Americans to ever become a presidential nominee of a major political party, though not without difficulties. Her parents were both college professors, but they divorced when she was young. Following law school, Harris became a prosecutor in the Alameda County attorney’s office. With the assistance of her politically powerful mentor and very close friend, the charismatic California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, she was appointed to several public jobs, elected as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, and then U.S. senator.
After becoming a senator, Harris began running for president. Her 2020 presidential campaign helped reveal her radical positions on climate and a host of other issues and enabled her to get on the short list of vice presidential choices.
With Biden’s mental and physical decline now so obvious, Harris has become the beneficiary of a ninth-inning political coup d’état against the president, engineered by Democratic Party leaders, who pressured him to drop his re-election campaign on the eve of the party’s nominating convention.
Harris is no Scranton-born, working-class pretender, who rode Amtrak. She does not have any record of political centrism, moderation or bipartisanship, which Biden practiced off and on throughout his career and helped him win the presidency in 2020.
By contrast, Harris is a product of the one-party state of California, who supported destructive policies on climate change, energy, crime and welfare that helped spark in California high fuel costs, declining living standards and a population exodus.
The election of 2024 will have climate change on the ballot, as did the 2020 election. The big difference this time is that Americans have experienced more than ever the inflationary and detrimental effects of climate policies with no impact on climate change.
And, it is not a supposed moderate candidate making the climate sale to the public, but a true believer, Kamala Harris.
Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington D.C.-based organization in support of free market, technological solutions to energy and environmental challenges.
Energy
Federal Government Suddenly Reverses on Critical Minerals – Over Three Years Too Late – MP Greg McLean
From Energy Now
By Calgary MP Greg McLean
Government in Full Reverse
Canada-U.S. Trade Relations is obviously the most pressing issue facing Canadians today.
It’s important to remember how we arrived at this point, but also to question the sincerity of the Liberal Ministers and leadership contenders who are now posing solutions, such as:
- We need to diversify our resource trade
- We need to build pipelines and infrastructure to get our exports to tidewater
- We need to streamline our regulatory burden that stands in the way of development
- We need to halt the escalating carbon tax
- We need to reverse the capital gains tax increase
The Liberals are turning themselves inside out on the policy choices they have made over nine years, and put Canada in a precarious economic position vis-à-vis our trade position.
If you believe what they are saying now, these Liberal Ministers and leadership contenders are saying that Canada needs EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they have delivered over these past nine years.
I can’t comment on whether these NEW Liberal policy positions completely lack sincerity, or whether they are the result of a ‘deathbed conversion’, but nine years of moving in the exact opposite direction to their new words has led Canada to where it is today – and that is nine lost years for Canadians, our prosperity, and our role in a complex world.
Below is another example of a specific morphing of a Liberal policy – to the one I helped put forth – 3 ½ years ago – regarding Canada’s policy on critical minerals.
Minister Late to Critical Mineral Strategy
Here’s a gem of wisdom from December’s Fall Economic Statement:
Canada will work with the United States and other likeminded partners to address the impacts of non-market policies and practices that unduly distort critical mineral prices. This includes ensuring that market participants recognize the value of critical minerals produced responsibly, with due regard for high environmental standards and labour practices.
Then, on January 16th, the following from Canada’s Natural Resource Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson:
During a panel discussion in Washington on Wednesday, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson proposed that enforcing a floor on metals prices could be “one of the centerpieces of the conversations we would then be having at the G7” summit later this year.
Western nations have long warned that China’s dominance in everything from nickel to lithium has let the country’s producers flood the market with supply, thereby keeping prices artificially low for competitors. Wilkinson has touted price floors as a way to combat that market control.
What a great idea!
Here’s the relevant excerpt from June, 2021, from a dissenting report on the Natural Resources Committee, when I served as my party’s critic, in contrast to the government’s critical minerals approach at that time:
Recommendation 4: Coordinate with our allies to establish a dedicated supply stock of critical minerals, possibly through a physical storage and floor pricing mechanism for visibility and pricing purposes.
Excerpt: Canada is too small of a market to undertake this effort on its own, but it can play a key role with its longstanding leadership as the mining jurisdiction of choice in the world. Canada’s pre-eminent role as a financing jurisdiction for international mining is well understood. Although we are at the early stages of losing this historical leadership to Australia, acting quickly to solidify Canada’s leadership will be a strong signal. Australia and Europe have already established critical mineral strategies to offset the dominance of the market that China has exerted. At the very least, Canada’s coordination needs to include the United States, and probably Mexico (through CUSMA), as the ongoing funding of a critical mineral supply may require backstopping developments with a price amelioration mechanism. In essence, a floor price to ensure the protection of critical mineral developments from manipulating price volatility – and which has held back developments, or caused the insolvency of several of these developments, due to non-transparent world market pricing mechanisms. … Establishing a steady supply of these critical minerals will lead to more value-added opportunities, in conjunction with our trade partners.
Conservative Dissenting Recommendations
My question to the Minister: ‘What took you so long?’
This approach was presented three and a half years ago – and the Government chose to ignore it then.
No surprise now, perhaps, as we’ve seen this Minister flip-flop on so many of the nonsense policies he’s put forth or acquiesced in at Cabinet:
- The Clean Electricity Regulations (still opaque)
- Canada’ role in shipping hydrocarbons to the world
- Building energy infrastructure
To say nothing of the various Cabinet decisions he has been a part of that have led to Canada’s current weak negotiating position with our allies. We effectively have not had a Minister of Natural Resources under his tenure.
Nothing topped it off more succinctly than his speech at the World Petroleum Show, held in Calgary in September 2023, when his remarks on behalf of the Government of Canada left industry participants around the world questioning whether the Minister was ‘tone-deaf’ or if, in fact, he knew anything about natural resources.
It seems his move to the position I promoted – three and a half years ago – shows that he’s finally listening and learning (or un-learning his previous narratives, perhaps)– but it’s quite late in the day. Time and our future have been wasted.
Canada’s wealth is based on its success as a trading nation. Canada is blessed with immense resources spread across a vast country. It has succeeded as a small, open economy with an enviable standard of living that has been able to provide what the world needs.
Canada has been stuck in a situation where it cannot complete nation‑building projects like the Canadian Pacific Railway that was completed in 1885, or the Trans Canada Highway that was completed in the 1960s. With the uncertainty of U.S. tariffs looming over our country and province, Canada needs to take bold action to revitalize the productivity and competitiveness of its economy – going east to west and not always relying on north-south trade. There’s no better time than right now to politically de-risk these projects.
A lack of leadership from the federal government has led to the following:
- Inadequate federal funding for trade infrastructure.
- A lack of investment is stifling the infrastructure capacity we need to diversify our exports. This is despite federally commissioned reports like the 2022 report by the National Supply Chain Task Force indicating the investment need will be trillions over the next 50 years.
- Federal red tape, like the Impact Assessment Act.
- Burdensome regulation has added major costs and significant delays to projects, like the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project, a proposed container facility at Vancouver, which spent more than a decade under federal review.
- Opaque funding programs, like the National Trade Corridors Fund (NTCF).
- Which offers a pattern of unclear criteria for decisions and lack of response. This program has not funded any provincial highway projects in Alberta, despite the many applications put forward by the Government of Alberta. In fact, we’ve gone nearly 3 years without decisions on some project applications.
- Ineffective policies that limit economic activity.
- Measures that pit environmental and economic objectives in stark opposition to one another instead of seeking innovative win-win solutions hinder Canada’s overall productivity and investment climate. One example is the moratorium on shipping crude through northern B.C. waters, which effectively ended Enbridge’s Northern Gateway proposal and has limited Alberta’s ability to ship its oil to Asian markets.
In a federal leadership vacuum, Alberta has worked to advance economic corridors across Canada. In April 2023, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba signed an agreement to collaborate on joint infrastructure networks meant to boost trade and economic growth across the Prairies. Alberta also signed a similar economic corridor agreement with the Northwest Territories in July 2024. Additionally, Alberta would like to see an agreement among all 7 western provinces and territories, and eventually the entire country, to collaborate on economic corridors.
Through our collaboration with neighbouring jurisdictions, we will spur the development of economic corridors by reducing regulatory delays and attracting investment. We recognize the importance of working with Indigenous communities on the development of major infrastructure projects, which will be key to our success in these endeavours.
However, provinces and territories cannot do this alone. The federal government must play its part to advance our country’s economic corridors that we need from coast to coast to coast to support our economic future. It is time for immediate action.
Alberta recommends the federal government take the following steps to strengthen Canada’s economic corridors and supply chains by:
- Creating an Economic Corridor Agency to identify and maintain economic corridors across provincial boundaries, with meaningful consultation with both Indigenous groups and industry.
- Increasing federal funding for trade-enabling infrastructure, such as roads, rail, ports, in-land ports, airports and more.
- Streamlining regulations regarding trade-related infrastructure and interprovincial trade, especially within economic corridors. This would include repealing or amending the Impact Assessment Act and other legislation to remove the uncertainty and ensure regulatory provisions are proportionate to the specific risk of the project.
- Adjusting the policy levers that that support productivity and competitiveness. This would include revisiting how the federal government supports airports, especially in the less-populated regions of Canada.
To move forward expeditiously on the items above, I propose the establishment of a federal/provincial/territorial working group. This working group would be tasked with creating a common position on addressing the economic threats facing Canada, and the need for mitigating trade and trade-enabling infrastructure. The group should identify appropriate governance to ensure these items are presented in a timely fashion by relative priority and urgency.
Alberta will continue to be proactive and tackle trade issues within its own jurisdiction. From collaborative memorandums of understanding with the Prairies and the North, to reducing interprovincial trade barriers, to fostering innovative partnerships with Indigenous groups, Alberta is working within its jurisdiction, much like its provincial and territorial colleagues.
We ask the federal government to join us in a new approach to infrastructure development that ensures Canada is productive and competitive for generations to come and generates the wealth that ensures our quality of life is second to none.
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Devin Dreeshen
Devin Dreeshen was sworn in as Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors on October 24, 2022.
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