German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (L) talks with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (R) during a walk on the second day of the three-day G7 summit at Schloss Elmau on June 27, 2022 near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. (Photo by Christinan Bruna – Pool/Getty Images)
Commentary
When Justin Trudeau said there was no business case for shipping Canadian natural gas to Europe, the obvious retort is that of the umpire who, when a free-swinging slugger protested a call saying “that was never a strike,” sneered “How would you know?” Nothing in Trudeau’s record, before or after entering politics, suggests the slightest acquaintance with the basic principles either of economics or of accounting. But alas in this case he knows exactly what he’s saying, because he’s the guy in charge and he’s going to call three strikes on every major energy project until they all go away.
It’s quite extraordinary the extent to which many people, including energy executives, think all this talk of Net Zero is just for “domestic consumption,” as they used to put it when foreign tyrants made scary threats. That dictators didn’t have to worry about “domestic consumption” of ideas never seemed to faze such commentators back then. Nor does it faze them now that nothing in Trudeau’s record (or that of outgoing British PM Boris Johnson, or indeed until very recently of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz) indicates that he worries about domestic consumption of energy.
In case you lack Trudeau’s business acumen, I should mention that energy prices in Europe are “smashing” records, Britain faces unrest over devastating soaring costs, and Scholz just visited and said hübsch bitte send us some of that gas of which you are the world’s fifth-largest producer. And Canada has a severely advanced economy with amazing technological engineering capabilities and could make a fortune shipping gas to Europeans so they wouldn’t buy the stuff from Vladimir Putin, freeze in the dark, or both.
In ridiculing Trudeau’s claim in the National Post, Tristin Hopper said, “At current prices, even just one Canadian port exporting liquid natural gas could be adding nine figures to the Canadian GDP each day.” Sounds like a business case to me. But what do I know? I’m not a politician.
They have different insights. Thus Todd Smith, the “Conservative” energy minister in Ontario, just asked the “Independent Electricity System Operator” (IESO) whether it would be cool to put a moratorium on new natural gas generation in the province so as to meet Net Zero.
If you think Ontario’s energy sector is performing so brilliantly, with transparent governance and fees, successful retirement of stranded debt, and such a surplus of reliable, affordable energy that they can sit around all day pondering which to dump first, you too should run for office. (And if you lose perhaps try Germany, where they’re cheerfully switching off nuclear plants because boo yuck radiation.) Whereas if you’re thinking an “Independent” operator might talk sense to Smith, you definitely should not.
See, IESO is the Orwellian name for an outfit whose board is appointed by the same government that also appoints the board of the self-proclaimed “independent” Ontario Energy Board that sets the IESO’s fees and licence terms. And 144 people at the Ontario Energy Board make more than the “Sunshine list” cutoff of $100K per year, like a staggering 710 at the IESO. So they know which side their bread is buttered on. But just in case, Smith explained to reporters that he’d demanded an answer from IESO in a matter of weeks about “whether or not we actually need more natural gas” so he could go ahead with his moratorium, and for added clarity continued: “I don’t believe that we do.”
Smith also said, “The cost of wind and solar is much lower than gas.” No, sorry, that was the Ontario Green Party leader. But it could have been any of them, including the head of the B.C. Liberal Party, in that province the supposedly free-enterprise right-wing option, who just fired a caucus member for retweeting a factually accurate climate statement from Patrick Moore. Or Trudeau, who thinks there’s a great business case for shipping hydrogen to Europe after generating it from wind power. Just don’t ask him some fiddly technical question like “Isn’t hydrogen corrosive?” or “What’s it going for per foot-pound?”
Or “Would there be a business case for Canadian LNG to Europe if people like you weren’t forever strangling energy projects with regulations and legislation while turning a blind eye to lawbreaking by your kind of protestors?” Because if you do, he will eject you from the stadium.
A great many people, especially in Canada’s conventional energy industry, seem to believe Net Zero just means doing some carbon sequestration or offset jiggery-pokery to be allowed to keep playing. But the game they’re actually in has very different rules.
Basically their problem is that the guy calling balls and strikes is on the other team. So it’s one two three strikes you’re O-U-T. With no case for an appeal according to the neutral arbiter which is, um, him again.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.