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How climate activists harm Canadian energy security

Published

7 months ago

8 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By NICK POPE

 

Canadian Official Reveals Damage Eco-Activists Have Wreaked On Great White North’s Energy Security

Rebecca Schulz — the minister of environment and protected areas of Alberta, Canada — sat down with the Daily Caller News Foundation at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. to discuss how climate activists, along with the country’s left-wing government, have hampered Canada’s energy security.

Alberta is a province in Western Canada that is known for its abundant natural resources, especially oil and natural gas. However, the federal government in Ottawa — led by liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — has moved to restrict development in the province, harming the many blue-collar Canadians who rely on affected industries to make a living, Schulz explained to the DCNF.

“We have seen, over the last number of years, the activist, radical left starting to shape policy in a way that is, I think, very concerning, not only for just the basic needs of everyday people when it comes to safe, affordable, reliable energy, but I think, when it comes to to energy security,” Schulz told the DCNF.

“Certainly, we have a prime minister that is completely just bending to the activist base and ignoring, I think, the very real concerns of everyday commonsense as Canadians, and that’s a problem,” Schulz told the DCNF, referencing Trudeau. Later in the interview, Schulz predicted that Canadian voters will “vastly reject” Trudeau when they next head to the polls, in large part due to “the woke, ideological policies” that his government has pursued.

In Canada, one such official with deep ties to the climate activist movement shaping policy is Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault. A former Greenpeace activist who once scaled Toronto’s iconic CN Tower and climbed on the roof of a government official’s private residence to install solar panels in acts of protest, Guilbeault has stated that he does not seek to implement a “secret agenda” of policies aligned with his activist past while in office, according to CBC, a Canadian news outlet.

Notably, the Biden administration counts numerous former activists among its ranks, including Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Tracey Stone-Manning, who was connected to radical eco-activists concocting a tree spiking plot in Idaho in the late 1980s. BLM manages federally-controlled lands for uses like energy production and livestock grazing.

“It’s really problematic because it is completely ideologically driven and devoid of common sense and the realities that people are facing every single day. And I think, you know, of course, people do care about the environment. I, of course, as minister of the environment, I care that we’re doing the right thing for the environment that we’re leaving,” Schulz continued. “You know, the places that we live, and where we develop our resources from, we’re maintaining that for future generations. But I also know that we could not survive a day without oil and gas, or products made from oil and gas and petrochemicals. And that fact isn’t changing. That, in fact, is growing so, I think it’s pretty concerning that they are also then trying to essentially stifle any opinions or statistics or facts that don’t support their narrative.”

Canada is one of America’s biggest energy suppliers, providing about 52% of all gross oil imports in 2023 and exporting nearly three trillion cubic feet of natural gas to the U.S. in 2022, according to the Canadian Energy Centre. Most of the fuel comes to America via cross-border pipelines, though some is also delivered by rail or by sea, according to a 2021 report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.

The Keystone XL pipeline, a major project that would have helped bring oil from Alberta to refineries along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the U.S., was set to be a new expansion to the systems that bring Canadian energy to America.

However, activists waged a major pressure campaign against the project, and its developers ultimately scuttled it in June 2021 after the Biden administration nixed a crucial permit and generally showed minimal enthusiasm for the project upon entering office, according to The Associated Press.

“Projects like that, of that size and scope, obviously take a significant amount of political will,” Schulz said of Keystone XL. “And I think that was a hugely disappointing decision, because we know that market access matters for energy security and meeting the needs of, I would say, Canadians and Americans, and people around the world.”

Notably, Brent Sadler — a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Navy who now works as a senior research fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation — agrees with Schulz’s assessment that Keystone XL would have been a positive development for North American energy security.

In a recently-published report assessing American energy security in light of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) geopolitical ambitions, Sadler argued that policymakers impose “unnecessary restraints” on cross-border energy interconnection, and that security interests would be better served if they instead “get out of the way” and “permit cross-border energy infrastructure projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline.”

For now, Schulz will turn much of her focus to the Trudeau government’s proposed emissions cap for the oil and gas industry, which could see the government require energy producers to slash their emissions by about 37% relative to 2022 levels by 2030, according to Reuters. Its opponents — many of whom are located in Alberta — are characterizing the policy as a thinly-veiled production cap that will severely hurt the province’s workers and regional economy.

If finalized, the policy “would kill thousands of jobs, I would say tens of thousands of jobs, just directly in conventional oil and gas, not to mention what we’re seeing in oil sands and, of course, other related industries,” Schulz told the DCNF. “We just have a federal government that doesn’t look at any socioeconomic data on the impacts that their policy would have … No competent, responsible government would see those numbers and move ahead with that cap, but that is, in fact, what our federal Liberal government is doing in Canada.”

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Business

Tariffs Coming April 1 ‘Unless You Stop Allowing Fentanyl Into Our Country’

Published on January 29, 2025

By

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Harold Hutchison

Canada should expect Tariffs starting April 1

Secretary of Commerce-designate Howard Lutnick told a Senate committee that the threat of imposing a 25% tariff was to get Canada and Mexico to “respect” the United States and stop the flow of fentanyl into the country.

President Donald Trump nominated Lutnick, who rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald after the financial services firm suffered massive losses in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, to serve as Secretary of Commerce Nov. 19. Lutnick told Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing that the threatened tariffs were intended to “create action” on two major issues.

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“The short-term issue is illegal migration and worse, even still, fentanyl coming into this country and killing over a hundred thousand Americans,” Lutnick said. “There’s no war we could have that would kill a hundred thousand Americans. The president is focused on ending fentanyl coming into the country. You know that the labs in Canada are run by Mexican cartels. So, this tariff model is simply to shut their borders with respect, respect America. We are your biggest trading partner, show us the respect, shut your border and end fentanyl coming into this country.”

“So it is not a tariff, per se,” Lutnick continued. “It is an action of domestic policy. Shut your border and stop allowing fentanyl into our country, killing our people. So this is a separate tariff to create action from Mexico and action from Canada, and as far as I know, they are acting swiftly and if they execute, there will be no tariff. If they don’t, then there will be.”

Drug overdoses killed 105,007 Americans in 2023, which is slightly fewer than the 107,941 who were killed in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) seized over 55 million fentanyl pills in 2023 alone, CBS News reported.

One kilogram of fentanyl can reportedly kill up to a half-million people, according to the DEA.

Almost 22,000 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the U.S. border in fiscal year 2024 with another 4,537 pounds being seized in fiscal year 2025 to date, according to statistics released by United States Customs and Border Protection. Upon taking office on Jan. 20, Trump issued several executive orders, including designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, declaring a national emergency on the southern border and setting policy on securing the border.

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Daily Caller

Trump’s ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Agenda Will Likely Take On An Entirely New Shape

Published on January 29, 2025

By

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

During his campaign and since taking office, President Donald Trump often repeated his desire to bring back the same “drill, baby, drill” oil and gas agenda that characterized his first term in office.

But that term began 8 long years ago and much has changed in the domestic oil business since then. Current market realities are likely to mitigate the industry’s response to Trump’s easing of the Biden administration’s efforts to restrict its activities. 

Trump’s second term begins as the upstream segment of the industry has enjoyed three years of strong profitability and overall production growth by employing a strategy of capital discipline, technology deployment and the capture of economies of scale in the nation’s big shale play areas. Companies like, say, ExxonMobil and Oxy and their peers are unlikely to respond to the easing of government regulations by discarding these strategies that have brought such financial success in favor of moving into a new drilling boom.

This bias in favor of maintenance of the status quo is especially likely given that the big shale plays in the Permian Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, Bakken Shale, Haynesville and the Marcellus/Utica region have all advanced into the long-term development phases of the natural life cycle typical of every oil and gas resource play over the past 175 years. Absent the discovery of major new shale or other types of oil-or-natural gas-bearing formations, a new drilling boom seems quite unlikely under any circumstances.

One market factor that could result in a somewhat higher active rig count would be a sudden rise in crude oil prices, if it appears likely to last for a long period of time. Companies like Exxon, Chevron, Oxy and Diamondback Energy certainly have the capability to quickly activate a significant number of additional rigs to take advantage of long-term higher prices.

But crude prices are set on a global market, and that market has appeared over-supplied in recent months with little reason to believe the supply/demand equation will change significantly in the near future. Indeed, the OPEC+ cartel has been forced to postpone planned production increases several times over the past 12 months as an over-supplied market has caused prices to hover well below the group’s target price.

But it is wrong to think the domestic oil industry will not respond in any way to Trump’s efforts to remove Biden’s artificial roadblocks to energy progress. Trump’s efforts to speed up permitting for energy projects of all kinds are likely to result in a significant build-out of much-needed new natural gas pipeline capacity, natural gas power generation plants and new LNG export terminals and supporting infrastructure.

Instead of another four years of “drill, baby, drill,” the Trump efforts to speed energy development seem certain to result in four years of a “build, baby, build” boom.

Indeed, the industry is already responding in a big way in the LNG export sector of the business. During Trump’s first week in office, LNG exporter Venture Global launched what is the largest energy IPO by value in U.S. history, going public with a total market cap of $65 billion.

With five separate export projects currently in various stages of development, all in South Louisiana, Venture Global plans to become a major player in one of America’s major growth industries in the coming years. Trump’s Day 1 reversal of Biden’s senseless permitting pause on LNG infrastructure is likely to kick of a number of additional LNG projects by other operators.

The Trump effect took hold even before he took office when the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation entered into an exclusive agreement in early January with developer Glenfarne to advance the $44 billion Alaska LNG project. The aim is to start to deliver gas in 2031, with LNG exports following shortly thereafter.

America’s oil and gas industry has demonstrated it can consistently grow overall production to new records even with a falling rig count in recent years. Now it must grow its related infrastructure to account for the rising production.

That’s why Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra is likely to transform into “build, baby, build” in the months and years to come.

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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