Ottawa’s carbon capture obsession is making Alberta oil more expensive for customers who aren’t asking for it

Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Alberta’s oil industry to spend tens of billions of dollars on carbon capture before Ottawa will fully embrace new pipeline projects. The problem? The evidence suggests customers aren’t demanding “decarbonized” oil in the first place.

A new Fraser Institute study concludes that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) faces enormous technical and economic hurdles. Despite decades of investment, large-scale projects have routinely fallen short of expectations, often capturing less carbon than promised while costing far more than initially projected.

The study also notes that scaling CCUS across the energy sector would require building an entirely new network of pipelines and storage infrastructure comparable to today’s oil and gas system itself.

In other words, politicians are asking Alberta to construct a second energy industry just to support the first.

That wouldn’t matter if customers were demanding it. But there is little evidence they are.

Instead, buyers continue to purchase Canadian crude because it is reliable, competitively priced and comes from one of the world’s most politically stable energy producers.

The Canada Energy Regulator reports Canadian crude exports reached record levels following the Trans Mountain expansion, with Alberta supplying more than 90 per cent of Canada’s exports. New customers in Asia have rapidly increased purchases, not because Canada branded its oil as “decarbonized,” but because they wanted dependable supply from a democratic country.

Reuters has also reported that the Carney government is linking future pipeline approvals to large-scale carbon capture commitments and net-zero requirements, effectively making Alberta producers absorb billions in additional costs before projects can move ahead.

The theory behind this policy is that customers will reward lower-carbon oil. Yet commodity markets have rarely worked that way.

History offers an uncomfortable but revealing example. During its control of territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS financed much of its terrorist operation by selling oil through black-market networks. Buyers still purchased that oil despite knowing where it came from because oil markets are driven overwhelmingly by price, availability and logistics.

No one is comparing Alberta producers to ISIS. The point is the opposite: if even oil produced by one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations found buyers, it demonstrates that commodity markets are driven primarily by economics, not moral branding.

That reality raises an obvious question. Where is the evidence that refiners are willing to pay a significant premium simply because Canadian oil has a lower carbon intensity?

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Air Conditioning Bans Are Latest Example Of Climate Alarmism Damaging Lives

Germany’s public broadcaster ARD has recently rolled out an “anti-AC campaign,” alarming citizens about the supposed “dangers” of air conditioning. This initiative seems particularly misguided as Europe grapples with a severe heat wave that has compelled governments to close schools, shut down iconic tourist sites, reduce business hours, and, most tragically, led to dozens of fatalities.

What’s happening in Europe is the grim outcome of two decades steeped in climate dogma: minor inconveniences have transformed into rigid policies and cultural norms that prioritize emission reductions over human survival.

For the past 20 years, we have been told that climate change poses the greatest existential threat to humanity. We have been urged to take immediate action, even if it means sacrificing comfort and convenience, to avert catastrophe. The initial proposed solutions included silly but manageable changes, such as banning plastic grocery bags and paper straws. However, the demands have escalated to campaigns  aimed at drastically reducing meat consumption, increasing calls to restrict gas stoves, and government mandates encouraging drivers to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles.

Many of these measures have caused daily inconveniences. We’ve learned to sip drinks quickly before paper straws dissolve. Others have raised the cost of living: electric stoves are typically more expensive than gas ones, and EVs can lose significant range in extreme heat or cold — as seen in viral videos of “dead” vehicles stranded at Chicago charging stations during subzero winters. We also face higher electricity bills and rolling blackouts as utilities shutter coal and gas plants in favor of intermittent solar and wind. In one case, a utility company even remotely took control of smart thermostats for thousands of Colorado households during peak summer heat, leaving homeowners powerless to intervene.

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“We’re Running Out of Oil”: The Lie Used to Support the Green Energy Agenda

In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the nation’s leading oil producer, warned that the U.S. had only four years of oil remaining. Forty years later, in 1914, when oil still hadn’t run out, the federal government said the U.S. had only a ten-year supply remaining. In 1940, the government announced that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half.

An article published on August 3, 1966, reported that “a geologist stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States’ oil supplies Tuesday and estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years,” placing the projected date of U.S. exhaustion at 1976. The most widely cited doomsday prediction came in 1972, when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report calculated that global petroleum reserves, growing at then-current consumption rates, would be exhausted within 20 years, implying oil would run out by 1992.

For the past several decades, the claim that oil will run out has been used to promote the green energy transition, framing the use of solar and wind power as necessary to preserve human life. However, the people and institutions promoting the “oil is running out” narrative are the same people and institutions advancing the climate crisis narrative. As with other forms of propaganda, new vocabulary had to be invented, including the term “peak oil.

Peak oil is the theory that global oil production rises to a maximum point and then declines irreversibly as a finite resource is depleted. Yale Environment 360 reported that Rystad Energy expects natural gas production to peak and decline as renewables take over, and that the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021 called on oil companies to immediately end oil prospecting and pull back on production as part of a net-zero pathway explicitly grounded in the “peak oil” framing.

The context of the Yale report, and the peak oil claim in general, is somewhat dishonest. If they really believed the world was running out of oil, they wouldn’t need to warn anyone or demand that we stop looking for or producing oil. Instead, they could simply wait ten or twenty years, or whatever the latest prediction is, until oil runs out naturally. At that point, the world would transition to green energy out of necessity, and the climate advocates would win. The fact that they continue pushing the issue suggests they don’t really believe oil is running out.

Cambridge University Press academic text states plainly that the peak oil belief is a myth, “at least for the next decades,” and warns that peak oil framing can backfire on climate advocates because the oil industry echoes the peak oil argument to convince governments to approve, and even assist with, new fossil fuel projects whenever prices spike. Effectively, the article presents circular logic. It suggests that the peak oil argument should be abandoned to prevent the oil industry from drilling for new oil, which would prevent the world from running out of oil.

All of the peak oil predictions had a common flaw: they made straight-line mathematical projections, assuming that no alternatives or solutions would be found. Each treated known reserves and existing extraction methods as fixed, when, in practice, both variables continued to change simultaneously.

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REPORT: George Soros Family Buying Up Tons of Land in Exclusive Waterfront Community on Long Island, NY

Far left billionaire George Soros and members of his family are buying acres upon acres of land on Shelter Island, a small and exclusive community on the eastern end of Long Island in New York.

Isn’t it fascinating how the people who push climate change the hardest also happen to love buying waterfront properties?

Other people who live on the island fear that the Soros family is eventually going to price them all out and that the Soros properties, including a dormitory they built for all of their servant employees, are going to ruin their home values.

The Soros family even bought the only pharmacy on the island that fills prescriptions and shut it down, further angering locals.

The New York Post reported:

George Soros and family buy 18 plots of land in exclusive Hamptons enclave, squeezing locals: ‘Ruining the island’

George Soros and his family have been on a property buying spree, scooping up homes and prime parcels of land in an idyllic Hamptons enclave, angering local residents who worry the billionaire land grab is already upending the tight-knit community, The Post has learned.

The family now control nearly 120 acres of property on Shelter Island, which is only accessible by ferry, making the Soroses — billionaire Hungarian-American investor George, 95, his sons Alex, 40, and Gregory, 38 — the largest private landowner in the community.

The 18 properties they have bought were purchased through myriad shell companies, according to public records reviewed by The Post.

“We never really figured out what their purpose in buying so much land could be,” said a former resident who sold their property to the family a few years ago. “But because you can only get here by ferry, we thought they might be building a bunker, away from everyone.”…

In addition to the Soros family, real estate developer Stefan Sovoliev recently purchased some of the key businesses on the island, including the historic Chequit Hotel and the Shelter Island Heights Pharmacy, then angering locals by promptly shutting down its prescription service — the only one on the island…

The Soros land grab came to light in the last year after the family purchased a 63.6-acre horse farm on Smith Street and erected a deer fence around the property without the proper authorization from the island’s zoning board.

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Officials urge WHO to declare climate change a global health emergency

Climate change should now be treated as a global health emergency comparable to Ebola and mpox, European ministers and health officials have told the WHO. 

The Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, an independent group of experts convened by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge, urged governments to speed the shift to clean renewables to help avert millions of deaths in a new report.

The group said the WHO should declare the climate crisis a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC), a high-level alert most recently activated for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as for mpox.

The experts said the move was critical since even temperate European countries are warming rapidly, driven largely by fossil fuel combustion. According to the report, fossil fuel subsidies in 12 European countries amounted to more than 10% of their public health budgets.

Kluge, who supported the call, said that “climate change is a security threat, a health emergency and an economic time bomb, all rolled into one.” 

He previously told Euractiv that climate change will have to become a much bigger priority for the European region, explaining that “for the first time in history, Iceland has mosquitoes.”

The experts pointed to several health concerns linked to climate change in the report: extreme heat, vector-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, air pollution-related deaths, and water contamination from flooding. 

The experts’ prognosis was not entirely grim, however, adding that there’s still a window of time to act.

For healthcare systems, they suggested setting up greener procurement standards to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, creating more resilient systems to shocks like floods, as well as training staff around climate awareness.  

EU governments, on top of phasing out fossil fuel use, should invest in public transit, create more low-emission zones, and switch away from resource-heavy red meat consumption, they added. 

The bloc’s recent progress has fallen short of both UN climate targets and its own ambitions. Most countries are still far from reaching tougher pollution targets by 2030 under the bloc’s revised air quality rules.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that air pollution is behind around 350,000 deaths in Europe every year.

EU officials are currently in Geneva for the WHO’s annual assembly, where the commission launched its report. 

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AC Feudalism: EU Headquarters Only Kept Air Conditioning on For Floors With Top Eurocrats

The governing body of the European Union has been accused of holding a neo-feudalist mindset after it was reported that only certain areas of its building in Brussels kept air conditioning running during last week’s record-breaking heatwave.

According to a POLITICO report, the EU Commission’s Berlaymont building in Brussels turned off air conditioning on floors one through seven last week “due to extreme weather conditions”.

However, the outlet claimed that air conditioning remained on for floors eight through 13, where EU President Ursula von der Leyen and her 26 commissioners work.

This led to accusations that the unelected Eurocrats were prioritising their own comfort over the working people who staff the building.

One official who works on the bottom floors remarked, “It’s like feudalism,” while another employee said that it was a “disgrace”.

However, one staffer on the eighth floor claimed they did not fare much better, saying temperatures on the floor still reached 25.7°C (78.26°F) on Friday.

Nevertheless, the report has sparked criticism for the Commission, including from a left-wing Member of the European Parliament for Belgium, Marc Botenga, who said that the “contempt” shown for its own civil servants illustrates an overall “lack of respect for workers”.

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Even Einstein Admitted He Was Wrong… We Apparently Can’t Expect As Much From Al Gore

When it comes to scientific theories, even some of history’s most respected and renowned people and institutions have graciously admitted when they were wrong when confronted with irrefutable evidence.

It took 359 years, but eventually the Catholic Church conceded in 1992 that the church was wrong and Galileo Galilei was right – the Earth revolves around the sun.

Throughout the 18th century, chemists widely believed that a substance called phlogiston was released when materials were burned. But when Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated that many metals often became heavier when burned – the opposite of the phlogiston theory – his contemporaries humbly admitted their error and praised his experiments.

And when scientists, including Edwin Hubble in 1929, demonstrated that the universe is expanding rather than remaining static, as Albert Einstein had theorized, even the revered Einstein readily admitted he was wrong, calling it “my biggest blunder.”

Twenty years ago, in 2006, former Vice President Al Gore released his film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which included ominous and even hysterical warnings about a coming climate apocalypse if mankind did not dramatically change its ways. In the two decades since its release, the film’s most dire warnings have proven to be inaccurate.

Examining Gore’s film on the anniversary of its release, several writers have pointed out its most glaring errors. For instance, writing for Newsweek, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, notes several calamitous predictions in the film that time has proven wrong: deaths from climate-related disasters have actually plummeted; hurricane frequency and intensity have declined; globally, areas burned by wildfires have decreased over the past quarter century; and the supposedly endangered polar bear population – a memorable visual from the Gore film – has more than doubled from the 1960s to today.

Gore’s apocalyptic climate predictions have aged poorly,” Lomborg concludes.

Over the years, countless critics have pointed out the errors both in Gore’s film and in his ensuing personal crusade as, like Don Quixote, he continues tilting at windmills (while ironically advocating for their proliferation).

Faced with the overwhelming preponderance of evidence refuting his original hypotheses, one might assume that Gore – like the Catholic Church, the chemists of the 18 th century, and even the great Albert Einstein – would humbly concede his mistakes.

One would be wrong.

In a recent interview marking the anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore found an uncritical partner in the form of ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee, who couldn’t have presented the former vice president in a more heartwarming light if she had somehow commissioned the late Norman Rockwell to paint his portrait.

Despite the obvious numerous mistakes and shortcomings in his film, Gore insisted that he and the scientists he relied upon have been right all along – while simultaneously demonstrating that his penchant for hyperbole remains unabated.

The scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it,” Gore insisted, adding that “it really is insane that we are continuing to use the sky as an open sewer and we’re trapping so much heat every day it’s equal to the amount that would be released by 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the earth.”

Huh? Would you repeat that please?

It’s “equal to the amount that would be released by 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the earth.”

Thanks.

It is little wonder that Gore finds himself so easily mocked. Gore’s atomic bomb analogy originated from climate alarmists who have been using it for years, adding a few hundred thousand to the estimate of bombs every so often.

But for anyone remotely familiar with history, the claim conjures images of people dropping like flies every day because of global warming, since the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 instantly killed more than 100,000 people. Such over-the-top depictions are why so many find it so hard to take seriously the kind of climate change threats that come from the radical left.

Unfortunately for the average citizen – both in the U.S. and worldwide – the far-left (formerly mainstream) media’s enthusiasm for propping up Gore and the climate craze have real-world consequences. Despite mountains of conflicting evidence, the media provides cover for leftwing government types who, when in power, throw billions of dollars toward scientifically unsupported efforts to replace our most affordable and reliable energy resources with defective “alternatives” made feasible only because of taxpayer subsidies.

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Al Gore Hit with Major Reality Check After Making this Wild Boast About ‘Climate Change’ During Interview Touting His Infamous Propaganda Film 

Former Vice-President Al Gore emerged out of hiding to tout his so-called ‘prescience’ regarding global warming and it quickly backfired.

On Wednesday, Gore sat down with ABC ‘News’ to reflect on the 20th anniversary of his environmental propaganda film “An Inconvenient Truth” and the current state of the planet.

As TGP readers know, Gore made a series of wild predictions about global warming in the film and in public that have not come to fruition. These included announcing in 2006 that the Arctic sea ice would completely disappear in ten years.

It’s now 2026, and plenty of Arctic ice remains.

But Gore remains unencumbered by facts. During the interview, Gore boasted that the scientists were “dead right” regarding all of the predictions about the warming of the planet.

This caused the interviewer to inquire what was wrong with his ‘documentary.’

“If scientists were dead right, why has so much been made about this documentary and what was wrong?” the interviewer asked.

“Uh, well, they cherry-picked a few little…About how many years the Arctic is ice-free, the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro,” Gore replied. “The main elements the scientific community has confirmed are right.”

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Biden Judge Orders Trump Administration to Restore Slavery, Climate Change Displays at National Parks

A left-wing activist federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to restore propagandistic signs and exhibits related to slavery, climate change, and other contentious historical topics at America’s national parks and monuments across the country.

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, a Joe Biden appointee, issued a preliminary injunction requiring the Interior Department to reinstall the displays within 21 days after ruling that the removals likely violated federal law.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of conservation, historical, and scientific organizations, including the National Parks Conservation Association and the American Association for State and Local History.

In her ruling, Kelley said the administration had removed materials that “do not align with its preferred narrative,” and claimed that doing so undermined the integrity of the national park system.

“Removing these signs not only undermines the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” Kelley wrote.

The dispute stems from a March 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump directing federal agencies to eliminate what the administration described as “false revision of history” in parks, monuments, and memorials.

The White House pointed out that the exhibits portrayed the United States as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed” and ordered a review of educational materials displayed at federal sites.

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Government facing up to $5 billion bill over carbon credits, Treasury reveals

The Prime Minister has doubled down on his insistence that the government will not spend billions of dollars offshore to meet New Zealand’s climate commitments.

Treasury estimates it could cost up to $5 billion to pay for the overseas carbon credits New Zealand needs to honour its Paris Agreement commitments.

An additional $1.6 billion may also be needed to pay for credits to meet a subsequent commitment, due by 2035.

The government was “gonna do everything we can” to honour the country’s Paris Agreement pledge to halve emissions by 2030, Christopher Luxon said.

“But just reassuring everybody, we ain’t shutting down farms and we certainly aren’t sending billions of dollars offshore.”

The Green Party said it was impossible for the government to meet the target with domestic climate policies alone.

It was time for Luxon be honest about whether the government was still committed to the Paris Agreement, and – if so – to explain how it would do that, co-leader leader Chlöe Swarbrick said.

“Are we genuinely, honestly going to meet the [target], do they genuinely, honestly commit us to doing that? Because if so, the reality is we will need to pay for offshore mitigation.”

New Zealand has the option of meeting its pledge to halve net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 entirely with domestic policies.

However, the most recent analysis from the Ministry for the Environment showed that there was a shortfall of 84 million tonnes of emissions, that would need to be made up by paying other countries to offset their emissions instead.

Treasury has identified the potential cost of offshore credits to make up the gap as a specific fiscal risk to the government’s finances for several years now.

However, it has never put an official figure on the government books, because there was “no legal obligation” to meet the target and successive governments had not committed to any purchases.

A previous one-off analysis it prepared in 2023 put the cost at anywhere from $3 billion to $24 billion.

Last year, Treasury secretary Iain Rennie gave Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick an undertaking to update that analysis.

The new estimate narrows the range to $4.4b-$5 billion to meet the 2030 pledge, and $0.2-$1.6 billion to meet New Zealand’s next pledge to lower emissions by 51-55 percent by 2035.

That was based on the Ministry for the Environment’s 2025 emissions projections, with and without extra policies to reduce emissions.

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