Many bold promises have been made by all candidates in this 2025 election campaign in Canada. One group wants to restart projects like Energy East or Northern Gateway in order to gain tidewater access for oil and gas from Alberta for export markets, thus reducing our reliance on sales to the USA and potentially getting world market prices as well.
But the climate activist sector doesn’t want that at all.
They want an east-west power grid. They say fossil fuels are in decline and won’t be used anymore, once such a pipeline like Energy East could be built. Their common viewpoint is expressed in this article posted on Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives site, titled: “An east-west oil pipeline is a trap—Canada needs an east-west electricity grid.”
In the article, they claim that even the private sector “didn’t want” this pipeline, ignoring the massive ENGO anti-Energy East actions by the Tar Sands Campaign, many of which groups are foreign-funded.
Climate activists are good at dismissing reality but in doing so, they are deceiving people — greenwashing the public, in fact.
JP Morgan’s March 2025 report “Heliocentrism” by Michael Cembalist, delivers the point that the activists don’t get it, or don’t want to get it.
Cembalist is a ~35-year veteran energy analyst and he writes: “Yet after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year.”
In Canada, we are spending about $20 billion a year and one party wants us to spend $80 billion a year to reach net zero. Take note: without devastating our economy, there is zero chance of that happening. That’s thousands of dollar per year, from your pocket, to green crony capitalists, for no energy return on investment and no change in the climate.
On this subject, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg is definitive, in his book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
The point? There’s no energy transition happening. Trillions wasted, to not affect climate change at all.
Recent reports from the International Energy Agency and US EIA show that global demand for oil, gas and coal continues to rise, despite the proliferation of trillions of dollars of renewables.
How can this be? Vaclav Smil, energy expert and author of some 40 books on related issues stated it simply in 2016 in IEEE magazine. “To Get Wind Power You Need Oil.” Indeed, for any kind of manufacturing process you need oil, natural gas and coal and many of their by-products.
Consequently, even if you are making wind turbines, you will need more oil. If you are mining critical minerals for wind turbines or electric vehicles, you will need oil. Mining consumes 10% of the world’s energy!
Retired mining mechanic, John Lee Pettimore, frequently posts reality checks on X about the demands of behemoth mining equipment, their unquenchable thirst for diesel fuel and the relatively small amounts of minerals recovered from massive mines. Nothing is green about supposedly “clean, green energy.” Nothing.
Though activists claim an east-west power grid would generate thousands of jobs during construction, it will actually generate the most jobs in China, where renewables are made, using coal shipped from British Columbia. If such an east-west power grid were built, most of the components also come from China.
And once built, in contrast to a pipeline, we would not have a portable, exportable energy product like oil or natural gas, not to mention the potential stream of by-products made from oil and gas derivatives. Where would replacement revenues come from?
The Macdonald Laurier Institute has just issued a report by economist Ross McKitrick, the fourth in a series of “Canada at a Crossroads.” McKitrick discusses “Capital Ideas — Attracting Investment, Boosting Productivity.” Climate activists would argue their east-west power grid is an ideal fit. I would say the only investors who would be attracted to the east-west power grid would be those looking for government subsidies — crony capitalists. Those are not the kind of investors you want.
To get Canada back to prosperity, in my view, we’d have to go right back to the premise that greenhouse gases are pollutants and strike that legislation which was lobbied for by Elizabeth May while at the Sierra Club, thanks to a ~$250,000 USD grant from the Oak Foundation.
We’d have to restore the National Energy Board and its meticulous and fair methods of evaluating propositions for nationally important infrastructure projects, and get rid of the Impact Assessment Process, which is far too subjective.
We’d have to cancel Bill C-12, the Net Zero Accountability bill and the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act.
We’d have to have a government that stopped picking winners and losers and let the market decide.
We’d have to take the advice of PPHB Energy Bankers who wrote, in 2018, in their “Musings” newsletter about the time that Kinder Morgan stopped work on Trans Mountain, just before the federal government was forced into buying it: “For the federal government, its support of certain energy projects, while fighting others, has allowed itself to be positioned as both pro-energy and anti-energy. This split political personality is seen by the global energy industry as a sign Canada has evolved into a hostile location to do business. For an industry that operates with decades-long planning and development timetables, this hostile attitude could cause long-term damage to Canada’s economy, and, especially its Western provinces where the energy industry is centered. Energy hostility will also put the mining, timber and other extractive industries on notice that their growth may soon be challenged.”
That was before the implementation of UNDRIP, which now, many proponents claim gives Indigenous groups veto rights anywhere. Retired lawyer Andrew Roman disputes that perception based on legal arguments outlined on his blog, but unfortunately, perception is reality for investors and activists.
People seem to have entirely forgotten that there was and is a Tar Sands Campaign against Canadian oil and gas specifically, but also against logging, critical mineral development and the construction of deep-water ports.
In fact, if a person examines maps of Canada for recently imposed biodiversity or Indigenous Protected Conservation Areas, you’ll find that most optimal locations are now restricted or permanently frozen to development.
Canada has been checkmated in the Green Trade War chess match. Until we disable and dismember the Green Trade War army, we will never get to market. Ever.