The problem with Electric Vehicles

From Canadians for Affordable Energy

For years now we’ve been hearing about the wonders of electric vehicles (EVs). Enormous amounts of money have been spent by governments to entice people to buy them, from subsidies to free charging stations.

Here in Canada, the Trudeau Liberals have already subsidised EVs at a cost of $1 billion. Another $680 million in the next five years will go toward the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP) to build an entire new infrastructure of charging stations.

In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government are ready “to become a North American hub for the next generation of electric vehicles,” and Ford’s PCs have recently committed to matching a $295 million investment from the Trudeau’s Liberals to retool the Ford Oakville Assembly Complex to become a global hub for battery electric vehicle production.

Electric vehicles are held up as the great green alternative to gas-powered vehicles. In fact, the federal government has set a mandatory target for all new light-duty cars and passenger trucks to be zero-emission by 2035 [read: electric and not gas-powered]. This is even more ambitious than their previous goal of 100% sales by 2040.

And, it seems, virtually the entire Canadian political class has either embraced or surrendered to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of EVs.

Well, here’s an interesting twist. Just the other week it was revealed that the Swiss government is considering legislation that would make it illegal for people to drive EVs over the winter except when it’s “absolutely necessary”.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Swiss government is discouraging people – to the point of making it illegal! – from driving their electric cars.

Why? Simple: there is not enough energy supply in Switzerland to power them.

Confused? How can this be?

Let me explain.

During the summer months, Switzerland gets around 60 percent of its energy from hydropower. But in the winter, hydro can’t produce enough energy, so the country imports a lot of electricity from France and Germany – both of which have long been dependent on Russian oil and gas imports.

Now that those “fossil fuels” have largely been cut off, these various European countries – not just Switzerland – are facing severe energy shortages this winter. This means that there won’t be enough electricity for people to charge their EVs. This move highlights the obvious flaw in this push towards electrification, especially EVs. While EVs don’t burn fuel, you need to charge the battery which, of course, requires energy.

Still confused? Right – perhaps you have never stopped to consider where the “energy” comes from that powers the EV charging stations?

Or did you just think that it was “magic” that powered the EVs?

Almost everywhere in the world, the charging stations are getting a lot of their power from oil and gas – the very same “fossil fuel” energy that EVs were supposed to replace. In many places, the power is coming from coal.

So to be clear, most countries typically need coal or oil or gas as a source of energy to power the charging stations, the very charging stations upon which many EV owners “power” their smug virtue signalling.

Some EV owners think, and even say out loud, that they are more concerned about the environment than you are. How can they say this? Well, this is because they have an electric vehicle, while you drive a gas-guzzling vehicle that is destroying the planet.

All the while, their very same electric vehicle most likely gets its energy, ultimately, from the same sort of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel that you do.

Ahem. (There are many other issues with EVs including the very expensive batteries with materials mined out of the earth, which is hardly a “zero emission” activity, or the reliability of the vehicles in our northern climate. More on that in another post.)

Consider too that here in Canada, the Trudeau government is pushing hard for us to move away from fossil fuels which provide reliable base power to our grid, towards renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which are unreliable and intermittent.

Now imagine how this could play out over the next decades. If governments follow through on their plans to ban traditional gas-powered vehicles, it is their stated hope that everyone will have to drive an EV.

But, at the same time, governments want to shut down the traditional energy sector which – for the foreseeable future –provides most of the energy supply that powers EVs. If we’re forced to get all our power from wind and solar, that just means most people will never be able to drive anywhere.

We should consider what is happening in Switzerland as a warning shot. Our energy grids simply cannot provide enough power for electric vehicles, and this move towards EVs for everyone will fail. The Trudeau government is promoting a short-sighted, virtue-signalling policy that will cause significant societal harm along the way.

Maybe the disastrous situation in Europe this winter will lead to some long-overdue second thoughts about EVs, and the whole climate change agenda.

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Dan McTeague

Carney launches his crusade against the oilpatch

Published on January 22, 2025

Dan McTeague

Well, he finally did it.

After literally years of rumours that he was preparing to run for parliament and being groomed as Justin Trudeau’s successor.

After he, reportedly, agreed to take over Chrystia Freeland’s job as Finance Minister in December, only to then, reportedly, pull back once her very public and pointed resignation made the job too toxic for someone with his ambitions.

After he even began telegraphing, through surrogates, an openness to joining a Conservative government, likely hoping to preserve some of his beloved environmentalist achievements if and when Pierre Poilievre leads his party into government.

After all that, Mark Carney has finally thrown his hat into the ring for the position of Liberal leader and prime minister of our beloved and beleaguered country.

And, as I’ve been predicting, the whole gang of Trudeau apologists are out in force, jumping for joy and saying this is the best thing since sliced bread. Carney is a breath of fresh air, a man who can finally turn the page on a difficult era in our history, a fighter, and — of all things! — an outsider.

Hogwash!

This narrative conveniently ignores the fact that Carney has been a key Trudeau confidant for years. As Pierre Poilievre pointed out on Twitter/X, he remains listed on the Liberal Party’s website as an advisor to the Prime Minister. He’s godfather to Chrystia Freeland’s son, for heaven’s sake!

Outsider?! This man is an insider’s insider.

But, more importantly, Carney has been a passionate supporter and promoter of the Trudeau government’s agenda, with the job-killing, economy-hobbling Net Zero program right at its heart. The Carbon Tax? He was for it before he was against it, which is to say, before it was clear the popular opposition to it isn’t going away, especially now that we all see what a bite it’s taken out of our household budgets.

Even his course correction was half-hearted. In Carney’s words, the Carbon Tax “served a purpose up until now.” What on earth does that even mean?

Meanwhile, EV mandates, Emission Caps, the War on Pipelines, tax dollars for so-called renewables, and all of the other policies designed to stifle our natural resources imposed on us by the activists in the Trudeau government? They’re right up Carney’s ally.

Plus his record at the Banks of Canada and England, his role as the U.N.’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and his passion projects like the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), and its subgroup the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), point to a concerning willingness to achieve his ideological goals by even the most sneaky, underhanded routes.

Take, for instance, the question of whether we need to “phase out” Canada’s oil and gas industry. Politicians who want real power can’t just come out and endorse that position without experiencing major blowback, as Justin Trudeau found out back in 2017. Despite years of activist propaganda, Canadians still recognize that hydrocarbon energy is the backbone of our economy.

But what if oil and gas companies started having trouble getting loans or attracting investment, no matter how profitable they are? Over time they, and the jobs and other economic benefits they provide, would simply disappear.

That is, in essence, the goal of GFANZ. It’s what they mean when they require their members – including Canadian banks like BMO, TD, CIBC, Scotiabank and RBC – to commit to “align[ing] their lending and investment portfolios with net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century or sooner.”

And Mark Carney is their founder and chairman. GFANZ is Mark Carney’s baby.

In truth, Mark Carney is less an outsider than he is the man behind the curtain, the man pulling the strings and poking the levers of power. Not that he will put it this way, but his campaign pitch can be boiled down to, “Trudeau, but without the scandals or baggage.” Well, relatively speaking.

But the thing is, it wasn’t those scandals – as much of an embarrassment as they were — which has brought an unceremonious end to Justin Trudeau’s political career. What laid him low, in the end, was bad policy and governmental mismanagement.

To choose Mark Carney would be to ask for more of the same. Thanks, but no thanks.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

Dan McTeague

Mark Carney would be bad for Canada

Published on January 18, 2025

Dan McTeague

By Dan McTeague

Carney is a champion of ESG, and the founder and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ,) which seeks to harness the might of global finance to bring about a Net-Zero global economy

Whether Carney will actually throw his hat in the ring is hard to predict. He did announce that he will “be considering this decision closely with my family over the coming few days.” But his years-long flirtation with electoral politics suggests that Carney is politically ambitious. And in the tradition of the politically ambitious, he’s lining up his constituents. At this very moment he’s busy making calls, and promises, to Liberal MPs looking for their support. Over the next several days we will hear an unending stream of praise for Carney, that he’s a ‘breath of fresh air,’ that he’s ‘just what Canada needs,’ and on and on.

Well don’t you believe it. Because one thing is for certain — Canada does not need another uber-elite, WEF hobnobbing, Green Agenda-pushing leader at the helm of any political party.

Let’s not forget who Carney is.

The former Governor of the Banks of Canada and England, Carney currently runs the megafirm Brookfield, whose offices he recently moved from Canada to the U.S., and serves as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Leadership and Finance.

Rich, established, and part of the green elite: that is Mark Carney.

I warned about Carney during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when he — along with climate activist and Trudeau-whisperer Gerald Butts — was pushing hard for what he called a ‘green recovery.’ At the time Carney was framing the economic and health crisis as an opportunity to ‘leapfrog’ into a new economy. Four years later and we have all experienced first hand the real meaning of this utopian green vision — soaring energy costs which have made it harder to heat our homes, gas up our cars and buy groceries.

Conservatives call him “Carbon Tax Carney,” a nickname which his apologists have started to say is unfair, since after years of championing the Carbon Tax, he has recently distanced himself from it.

Well, of course he has! Support for the Carbon Tax has cratered across the country, and Carney is just one of many long-time supporters jumping ship in the hope that their reputation — and their wider agenda — doesn’t get sucked down with it.

Carney has been, and continues to be, a carnival barker for interventionist policies and regulation to control carbon emissions. When it comes to action on the environment and the economy Carney is of the “just do what we smart people say” school. He constantly talks of an impending climate crisis, and supports his alarmist fellow travellers like climate doomster Greta Thunberg, whom he has praised for her “many positive contributions.”

Carney has persistently advocated for strict controls on corporate governance to direct support — that is, money — towards his favored fuels and technologies. In fact, his apparent “about face” on the Carbon Tax (he said it “served a purpose up until now”) came about in the context of his Senate testimony in favor of Bill S-243, the “Climate-Aligned Finance Act,” which seeks to make it nearly impossible for banks to invest in, or loan money to, oil and gas projects in Canada, and tries to force financial institutions to appoint board members ideologically opposed to hydrocarbon energy.

Carney is a champion of ESG, and the founder and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ,) which seeks to harness the might of global finance to bring about a Net-Zero global economy. After a lot of initial excitement and acclaim (at least from the Davos-brigade), GFANZ has had trouble coping with the difficult economic times which Carney’s preferred policies have contributed to bringing about, not to mention the potential for antitrust litigation from the U.S. Department of Justice, which seems increasingly likely. Some of the group’s biggest members — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — have dropped out of the alliance just in the past month.

That might mean that GFANZ is not long for this world, but even so it should remain as a black mark on Carney’s résumé. It demonstrates that his economic instincts, whichsome are praising, are always towards more control, by the likes of him, over how the rest of us live our lives. And its downfall likely foreshadows what a Prime Minister Carney would do to Canada’s economy.

On energy and the environment, Carney is Trudeau with Wall Street and central bank experience: a green ideologue, but a more sophisticated one.

Canadians are fed up with green ideologues, polished or otherwise. Their ideas undermine our economic well-being, by making energy a lot more expensive. Ultimately, a Liberal Party under Mark Carney’s leadership would represent more of the same green grifting policies we saw under Justin Trudeau.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.