Joel Kotkin: Carney faces up to the reality of Trudeau's climate fantasies

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.

This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”

What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.

Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.

The shift gained more credibility when the magazine Nature recently retracted a 2024 study predicting economic collapse due to climate change. Reality has started to bite, even in my home state of California, a bastion of climate hysteria. Governor Gavin Newsom, an avid supporter of net zero, earlier this year basically fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations. He also kept the state’s last nuclear plant going.

As they shy away from climate catastrophism, resurgent progressives in the U.S. focus rightly on issues like cost of living, medical care, and jobs. They realize very few working class voters — now up for grabs in the next election — actually prioritize climate policy; in a recent Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (non-college) voters identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their families. Recent U.S. polling reveals that belief in predominately manmade climate change is now at 45 per cent, according to Pew, and enthusiasm for spending money on climate initiatives has plummeted.

Perhaps even more surprising, politicians in deep-green Europe are beginning to recognize that green obsessions undermine their own industries. Net-zero policies, notes a recent OECD study, have doubled the rate of job losses in high-carbon jobs, which traditionally paid higher salaries to mostly male, non-college educated workers than the retail, tourism and other low-end service jobs that replaced them. Virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are those with the strictest renewable policies — Germany, California, and the U.K. Overall, British, Italian and Germany industrial users pay roughly twice more for electricity than the U.S. or Canada.

So, here’s the reality: oil and gas remain the dominant source of energy, with even coal, a dirtier fuel than natural gas, making a comeback. Despite billions spent by governments — taxpayers — to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use, notes energy expert Robert Bryce, is not only thirty times larger than wind and solar combined, but is also growing faster. In the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar but 13,000 from fossil fuels.

Adding to the power grid is increasingly important with the rise of artificial intelligence. This appears to be leading to greater fondness among oligarchs and investors faced with a desperate need for reliable, affordable energy, which solar and wind are not. Now, some embrace nuclear power, long verboten among the green activists they so generously funded.

This shift away from tough climate policies will shape global politics for the next decade or more. Countries with ample fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Qatar will become richer and more influential. Other, more troubled oil producers, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela are able to survive, in the face of awful governance, only because they still have their share of “black gold.” The developing world, notably Africa and India, will either develop their own resources, or import huge quantities.

In this still fossil-fuel dominated world, Canada will have great cards to play and now may even be willing to play them. These are also Canada’s biggest exports; it is the world’s fourth largest crude exporter. Like the United States, the world’s leading energy producer, Canada’s influence will be tied to its natural resources.

Canada’s embrace of energy production also constitutes a way to work against fossil-fuel-funded malefactors like Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, and Russia. It is also a way to counter China, which emits more GHGs responsible for more than 30 per cent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share.

China, which lacks huge oil or gas resources, has seized on Western climate policies as a way to penetrate markets for solar panels and electric vehicles. This leads to praise from some greens, but the Middle Kingdom is not exactly abandoning fossil fuels; indeed, its EV and panel industries rest on power generated by its over 3,000 coal-power plants, which accounted for 64.4 per cent of global emissions in 2023.

In an ideal world, energy growth would be a common agenda in North America, faced with challenges from Russia, the Middle East and China. But Donald Trump’s misplaced idea of national interest makes such cooperation difficult for now. So, Canada will need to find other markets for crude and other commodities, precisely what proposed West Coast LNG and pipelines would address. Asia is a boom market for fossil fuels, and Canada could enrich itself hugely through this trade.

This is the moment for Canada to assert its economic power and tell us Yankees that you can play the “great game” of power politics, too. Carney’s shift also provides an opportunity — after a decade of disappointment — to get the country back on track and reassert itself as one of the world’s great liberal democracies.

National Post