Tag: natural resources

Canada Just Admitted Justin Trudeau’s Climate Agenda Was A Scam

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave Canada a lost decade. A key contributor to the country’s stagnation was the Liberal government’s obsession with climate change and its ushering in of green energy policies that were disastrous for a nation rich in natural resources. To make Canada great again, Prime Minister Mark Carney is abandoning climate alarmism and embracing what made the country wealthy in the first place: crude oil.

Canada Loves Oil Again

On June 30, the prime minister published a 17-minute YouTube video, focused exclusively on his predecessor’s climate agenda. He used words like “expensive” and “divisive” to describe Trudeau’s environmental endeavors. Carney essentially admitted that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives were right.

For right-wing political pundits, this was a rare win for the incumbent. Indeed, in a bid to resuscitate the ailing Canadian economy, Carney is trying to make the country fall back in love with fossil fuels – and appease Alberta – despite years of climate doomerism.

Ottawa announced earlier this month a new West Coast pipeline that will ship up to one million barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta to Asian markets. The federal government gave its blessing to a new west-east crude oil pipeline that will run from Alberta to Ontario. This comes as the Carney Liberals begin to expand liquefied natural gas exports, scrap the consumer carbon tax, and remove the cap on the oil and gas sector’s pollution levels.

Carney already accepted that Canada’s emissions will be higher in the coming years, a fact that was inevitable. Various models currently indicate that the Great White North has been missing its emissions targets, even before the current government’s reforms. Canada lags behind other G7 countries in emissions reductions, and even the United States is outperforming its northern neighbor.

“The certainties of the world of 2015 are long gone. Our neighborhood hasn’t been this hostile since Canada was founded,” the prime minister said. “The world hasn’t been this unstable geopolitically since the end of the Second World War.”

Of course, skepticism is warranted because Carney has spent much of his tenure just talking with his elbows up. From housing to pipelines, it has been all talk and no action. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany surprisingly sprang into action and constructed Floating Storage and Regasification Units (FSRUs) to import seaborne liquefied natural gas in fewer than 200 days.

The prime minister has been in office for 15 months with nothing to show for it. Still, capital might be optimistic about Canadian energy moving forward, having been hesitant to invest in various projects across the country over the last 11 years.

What About America?

America’s decision last week not to renew the USMCA could be a major blow to the Canadian economy. The post-NAFTA trade deal will now be subject to annual reviews as the United States raises grievances over production quotas, supply management, rules of origin, and other provisions.

Despite Ottawa’s efforts to diversify its trade by importing more students from India and exporting more oil to Asia, the country still needs its southern neighbor. More than 90 percent of its energy is shipped to the United States, making it an extremely difficult market to replace, even if Canada desires to become an energy superpower.

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B.C.’s oil tanker ban exposed: Why U.S. oil gets a pass but Alberta doesn’t

B.C.’s oil tanker ban is once again under scrutiny as questions mount over why it restricts Alberta crude while allowing foreign oil shipments to pass through the province’s coast.

Drea Humphrey argued that Premier David Eby has emerged as the biggest winner from the latest pipeline discussions between Alberta and Ottawa. “He’s getting exactly what he wanted,” she said, pointing to billions in promised infrastructure spending while any potential pipeline benefits remain years away.

Humphrey also questioned the province’s opposition to transporting Alberta oil by tanker, noting that large foreign vessels already travel the same waters. “How is that any less of a risk to the North Coast?” she asked.

Sheila Gunn Reid argued the federal approach ignores what she sees as an obvious alternative. She noted that American tankers from Alaska are permitted to use the same coastal route, saying, “The tanker ban only applies to Alberta oil. It doesn’t apply to American oil.”

Rather than reviving the cancelled Northern Gateway route to Kitimat, Gunn Reid said the proposed pipeline would head south to Vancouver, making it “infinitely more expensive and inconvenient.”

“I refuse to see this as the win everybody is touting it as,” she added. “It’s likely never going to get built.”

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Canada Was A Liberal Paradise… Until The Liberals Took Over

There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

  • two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
  • five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

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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.

A 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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Appeals Court Upholds New York ‘Gas Stove Ban’ That Chuck Schumer Insisted Wasn’t Even Happening

A federal appeals court just upheld a New York state ban on gas stoves, which is very strange, considering the fact that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York insisted that the ban on gas stoves wasn’t even happening.

This has all been unfolding quietly in the background for about two years now.

Groups which are part of the gas industry challenged the ban but a federal court just sided with the state.

Just the News reports:

Federal appeals court upholds New York’s ‘gas stove ban’ amid legal challenge

New York could be moving ahead with a first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings after a federal appeals court rejected a challenge from industry groups.

The ruling issued Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit rejected a lawsuit by natural gas industry groups challenging a provision of New York’s All-Electric Buildings Act, which would ban gas hookups in new buildings under seven stories, among other restrictions.

A coalition of construction and trade groups sued to block the 2023 law, saying it conflicts with federal law under the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act and would drive up costs for businesses and energy consumers.

But the appeals court upheld lower court rulings that had determined federal law “does not preempt ” the state’s regulations on natural gas hook ups, and on Tuesday dismissed the industry lawsuit.

In 2023, when people started complaining about this, Chuck Schumer treated it like a conspiracy theory and condescendingly claimed no one is coming after gas stoves.

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California’s Self-Inflicted Squeeze

Energy Island

Long time readers may recall the many articles we wrote over many years highlighting the madness of California planners and policymakers. We were born and raised in the land of fruits and nuts and lived and worked there for over four decades.

About four years ago, we made our California exodus. At the time, we thought our coverage of the Golden State’s self-destruction would continue. We still have family and friends there who we visit from time to time. But, as we’ve found, without a front row seat to the big show we’re less inclined to gawk at the insanity. Articles on California have diminished to a slow trickle.

Today, however, following a recent conversation with a friend and California resident, we aim our sights at our former home state. Once again, California delivers a rich example of what happens when central planning outweighs economic reality. Here the specific example involves extreme intervention in oil and gas markets.

Policymakers in Sacramento, over many decades, have operated under the assumption that if petroleum production, refining capacity, and fuel consumption were made sufficiently difficult and expensive, the market would rapidly transition to their preferred alternatives. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been the principal vehicle for implementing this vision through increasingly stringent fuel regulations, emissions mandates, low-carbon fuel standards, permitting requirements, and compliance costs imposed upon refiners operating within the state.

Yet the result has not been the energy transition that was promised. Instead, California has become increasingly dependent on foreign suppliers for products it once produced itself. This trend is particularly problematic because California is effectively an energy island. Unlike much of the United States, California lacks extensive pipeline connections to the major refining centers along the Gulf Coast.

The state also requires unique fuel formulations that relatively few refineries outside California are equipped to produce. Consequently, California’s fuel market functions largely as a self-contained system. When local refining capacity disappears, replacement supplies cannot simply be redirected from Texas or Louisiana with the turn of a valve.

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China Eyes Iran’s Postwar Reconstruction In Bid To Lock Up Future Oil Supplies

Beijing is positioning itself to lead the post-war reconstruction effort in Tehran – a move analysts suggest could secure China long-term access to critical Iranian oil reserves.

The diplomatic groundwork was laid during a recent meeting in New Delhi between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, according to Nikkei Asia. The talks underscore China’s broader strategy to expand its economic and diplomatic footprint in the Middle East amid the vacuum left in the wake of one failed US regime change and occupation war after another.

According to the report, Wang signaled Beijing’s long-term commitment to the Islamic Republic in the wake of prior weeks of heavy US-Israeli bombing, stating that: “China will continue to provide assistance to Iran while supporting reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts in the region.”

To date, China’s official involvement has largely centered on humanitarian logistics – at least according to its public-facing narrative.

This includes an upcoming deployment of emergency medical supplies to Lebanon, following recent Israeli military strikes in the country. However, observers note that the transition from humanitarian relief to large-scale infrastructure development is a key mechanism for Beijing to solidify energy security.

Nikkei Asia has issued the following commentary on China’s long-term plans in the Middle East:

Some observers argue that the U.S.-Iran war has strengthened Beijing’s presence in the Middle East. Rumi Aoyama, a professor at Japan’s Waseda University specializing in Chinese diplomacy, called China a “central hub where information on the situation in the Middle East was concentrated.”

China has dialogue channels with both Washington and Tehran, and it enjoys friendly ties with mediator Pakistan as an arms supplier. The Iranian and Pakistani foreign ministers frequently visited China during negotiations on ending the war to report on the situation.

The Iran war may also have worked to Beijing’s advantage in its dealings with Washington. With the U.S. prioritizing that conflict, it has been forced to ease up its pressure on China with regard to security and trade.

Yet Beijing has still welcomed the memorandum of understanding toward ending the war because stability in the Middle East is crucial for its energy security. Higher fuel and material prices caused by the war have dealt a blow to the Chinese economy.

Tehran, facing severe economic devastation and isolation from Western markets, has welcomed the Chinese overtures. High-level Iranian officials have made it clear they view Beijing not merely as an investor, but as a strategic anchor – akin to how defense ties with Russia have rapidly improved.

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MP Materials’ Lawsuit Against USA Rare Earth Highlights Battle For America’s Future In Minerals

USA Rare Earth has dismissed a lawsuit filed by MP Materials, calling the claims “completely without merit” and arguing the case is an attempt to slow its growth. The company said it will deny all allegations that it improperly obtained confidential information from a former MP employee, according to Bloomberg.

The dispute underscores intensifying competition in the U.S. rare-earth sector, where both companies are racing to build domestic mining, processing, and magnet-production capabilities. USA Rare Earth said MP is trying to impede its progress as it develops the Round Top deposit in Texas and a magnet facility in Oklahoma.

Bloomberg writes that MP sued last month, alleging a coordinated effort by USA Rare Earth to recruit MP employees and misuse proprietary information. The lawsuit also questioned the viability of USA Rare Earth’s projects. MP declined to comment on the latest filing.

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Chevron Lands 20-Year Deal To Power Microsoft’s AI Expansion

Microsoft has signed a 20-year agreement with Chevron to power a massive new AI-focused data center campus in West Texas, underscoring the growing race among tech companies to secure reliable energy supplies, according to Bloomberg.

The project, known as Project Kilby, is expected to begin generating power in 2028 and eventually reach 2.67 gigawatts—enough electricity for more than 530,000 Texas homes.

Chevron is developing the project with Engine No. 1 and expects to make a final investment decision later this year. Despite the enormity of the deal and the inroads into powering AI directly, Chevron stock was little changed after the cash open.

Bloomberg writes that the site near Pecos, Texas, will use natural gas from the Permian Basin to fuel GE Vernova turbines and generate electricity directly for Microsoft’s planned data center campus. Because the facility will produce its own power, it will not draw from the grid.

“Consumers are concerned about and are already feeling the effect of power-demand growth,” said Jeff Gustavson, Chevron’s president of New Energies. “We specifically designed this, in this part of the country, to avoid any of that.”

The agreement comes as Microsoft accelerates its AI infrastructure buildout to compete with Alphabet and Amazon. The company has said it plans to double its data center footprint over the next two years, driving demand for large-scale, dependable power sources.

Chevron argues the project also creates a productive use for abundant Permian natural gas that is often wasted because pipeline capacity is limited. “This is the most abundant gas basin in the country, maybe the world,” Gustavson said.

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Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices

The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.

Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.

It’s also an important resource at a time when American electricity demand is increasing, leading to higher energy bills as the proliferation of data centers squeezes energy availability.

However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

As such, Burgum has done all he can to stop cheap and clean energy projects and to try to benefit dirty and expensive fossil fuels, to the detriment of Americans’ lungs and electricity bills.

Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service). His party suggested drastic new fees on wind farms, far in excess of the inspection fees on dirty oil projects.

But many of those efforts have been swiftly reversed by courts due to their illegality.

This hasn’t stopped Burgum from coming up with other illegal ideas to starve Americans of the energy they need.

The latest trend has involved a pattern of bribes given to oil companies from public coffers to convince them to stop development of offshore wind and instead refocus on gas projects.

It started with a nearly-$1B bribe from taxpayer coffers to French oil giant TotalEnergies in March, basically buying out its offshore wind lease in exchange for a commitment to put that money into fossil fuel projects.

Interior made up a fake national security reason for this agreement, even though it is clear that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense had signed off on these projects.

But it didn’t stop there. Interior has continued with similar near-billion-dollar bribes, with an $885 million deal in April, and another near-billion-dollar deal today.

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