I couldn’t help myself, had to peek at the news. A headline said that Trudeau had installed Steven Guilbeault in charge of the climate portfolio, so I rubber-necked on over to see the car wreck. Of more interest, frankly, was where the man he was replacing, Jonathan Wilkinson, was going. Wilkinson, a two-decade green-tech exec, had shown zero interest in the world’s primary and utterly dominant energy system while in the Environment/Climate Change seat, and had brought the trademark Trudeau thoughtless zeal to the portfolio – that is, converting UN verbiage directly into Canadian policy. No thought was required for the portfolio, as we saw when Trudeau jumped into a conference call this past spring to announce that Canada’s “old” target of a 30 percent emissions reduction by 2030 would now fall by “40-45 percent” in the same timeframe. (Wilkinson explained the double-down thusly: “Canada’s Strengthened Climate Plan [the old one] put us on track to not just meet but to exceed our 2030 emissions goal – but we were clearly aware that more must be done.” The stupidity inherent therein is impressive even by political standards; the feds had no clear path as to how to get to even the first target (picking an end goal is not a plan). Given the stakes – Canada’s economic future – and the foolishness of these meanderings, I wondered where Wilkinson would land, presumably some culturally imperative wasteland like the Department of Culture or some such political nursing home.
Hoo boy, was I wrong again. Just as last week I whined about how badly I’d missed the speed of the looming energy crisis, I misjudged Trudeau’s infatuation with putting climate activists in places of maximal destructive impact. Wilkinson, as you all know, now heads up the Natural Resources department. We now have the Skipper and Gilligan in charge of Natural Resources and Environment/Climate Change, trying to get off the island by building a submarine out of coconuts after declaring the Professor irrelevant. You may wish to head for the exit, although more on that in a second.
Putting Guilbeault on the climate emergency file makes sense; in order to lead the fight against zombies, one must believe in them. Guilbeault’s Greenpeace indoctrination checks that box like a nuclear warhead; it makes him the perfect person to lead the crusade. Greenpeace training involves bringing down things that don’t meet their approval, then offering academic doctrine as the solution. There is no doubt he will excel at it.
Wilkinson’s appointment as Resource Minister is more interesting and is likely to create two seemingly contradictory outcomes. First, based on his typically energy-ignorant views as climate minister (not singling him out unduly; there is no evidence anywhere in the federal government of any inkling of how the global energy system works, or any interest in learning (interesting side note: a reader sent me a link to a European climate change conference in which one of the Brussels powers-that-be explained how the ‘energy transition’ will only happen successfully by engaging in ‘systemic thinking’. While this is absolutely true, the Europeans, and our federal government, have an odd view of ‘systemic thinking’ – they pretend the existing system, the one that works quite well to feed/heat/develop 8 billion people, doesn’t exist. They refuse to acknowledge its presence unless to point that it is dying rapidly. They cannot contemplate saying a word in defence of the value that hydrocarbons provide to the world, even though the evidence is pervasive and omnipresent and irrefutable. They refuse to talk about the fact that hundreds of millions of lives are at stake this coming winter due to possible shortages of hydrocarbons. They are, energy-wise, lobotomized. Their view of systemic thinking is to cut out the lower 15 feet of a tree trunk so that children will be able to reach the fruit more easily next year.)), he will no doubt seek to undermine the ‘old resource sector’ at every chance. The second outcome will be a very pleasant pricing future for that same sector, more on that in a sec as well.
A few years ago, appointments like these would have sent shivers down the spine of energy producers, because the hand of Ottawa is very heavy indeed, and handing the energy keys to a pair of reliable-energy-haters does not instil confidence. Maybe the appointments gave you a sinking feeling as well. But consider the bigger picture.
Wilkinson, Guilbeault, Trudeau, et al are under the assumption that the renewable revolution is forever sidelining hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon demand. They can do this through good old Soviet-style thought processes; if we say it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Catherine McKenna, the predecessor to both these activists, made that clear (“just say it louder and louder and eventually they believe you”).
T/W/G are so focused on making a splashy COP26 entrance that they have not noticed the world crumbling around them. Countries from Moldova to China to Brazil are either declaring outright states of emergency over a lack of hydrocarbon availability or are acting in an emergency manner without saying it out loud for fear of panicking people. Even Britain, home of COP26, is facing an energy crisis, with failing electricity providers creating shock waves that will impact British consumers’ pocketbooks for years.
And that’s not all. The world is running short of: copper, magnesium, zinc, natural gas, coal, oil (soon), spare parts for nearly everything, latex gloves, and pretty much everything in between. Supply chains are imperilled and the very structure that brings us everything always and on-demand is wobbling. It is a true global emergency that is here now, as opposed to the one they like to talk about that might possibly appear in 30 years. Consider this quote from the head of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset manager that has ironically thrown its weight into the green machine (in the rabid and successful pursuit of another form of green): “We have these visions we could go from a brown world and we could wake up tomorrow there’d be a green world. That is not going to happen…We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy,..when that happens you’re going to get very unhappy people around the world, in the emerging markets in particular.”
Major social unrest is coming, but an oblivious Trudeau placed these even more oblivious Glimmer Twins in the portfolios that have the most devastating ability to hobble Canada’s resource sector and prevent it from providing the very commodities the world is desperate to acquire. T/W/G are still dedicated to 2019’s (and Gondek’s) ’climate emergency’, which is a very faint distant candle indeed compared to the volcano that is today’s hydrocarbon-shortage emergency.
So, what may hold you back from heading for Canada’s exit? With that trio at the helm, translating Greenpeace literature into legislation, surely there is no hope for a resource-driven economy?
Not so fast. Look no further than commodity price markets. The prices of oil, natural gas, copper, agricultural products, aluminum, nickel, and even coal – all of which Canada produces – are skyrocketing. Canada’s resource/agriculture sector may enjoy a period of strong and broad-based pricing not seen in a very long time, all at the same time that the world’s climate police drive investment out of resource extraction and into the arms of wind/solar (which require resource extraction, but second-order thinking is not on the agenda at COP26).
We will see a bizarre situation unfold: the natural resource sector will generate massive profits at the same time the federal government will be seeking to bury it. The world is and will be desperate for everything Canada produces, yet this clown trio will, as with their European soul mates, be focused on a certain form of ‘systemic thinking’ that pretends the existing system doesn’t exist.
That dogmatic tunnel vision, borne of decades of indoctrination/preaching/lecturing that human nature prevents one from retracting, is not unprecedented. We saw it a few decades ago, ironically, coming from the US far right – the war on drugs. Anti-drug systematic thinking was constricted in an eerily similar manner to that of activists. The war on drugs was waged on two fronts: strangle supply, and relay to users a dimwitted message of ‘just say no’. We see the exact same playbook unfolding with the likes of T/W/G: strangle supply, and tell hydrocarbon users to stop using. Worse, drug use is recreational and therefore 100 percent optional, and that war failed worse than a dozen Vietnams; hydrocarbon use is 100 percent life-sustaining, and neither usage nor supply will be strangled. Dented if they are lucky, but that’s it. The anti-hydrocarbon war will fail even more spectacularly because of that difference. But their tactics of attacking supply will lead to some spectacular prices, which is I suppose the industry’s consolation prize. It’s not a bad one.
Back in Ottawa, things will not go well for this trio once they return and come down from the jet-exhaust-euphoria of Glasgow. We will get to witness this group decide what to do with TMX – kill it, or invalidate everything they’ve said for years? Do W/G continue their war against hydrocarbons as the world begs for more? Will they find some clever way to walk back all that they claimed to be deliriously worried about at COP26 in order to keep the roof from falling in? Perhaps Europe’s (and much of the world’s) looming disaster will hand them a new sheet to preach from. Regardless, the monkeys are no longer dancing on the sidelines – we now get to see what Greenpeace ideology looks like from the driver’s seat. It won’t be pretty, but they can no longer hide behind slogans and empty-headed demands. It’s showtime.
It seems unfathomable to yearn for the days of Seamus O’Regan, but at least he was from Newfoundland and understood the value of natural resources. (Wilkinson allegedly spent time in Saskatchewan, but if so he absorbed nothing; he is as grounded as a cirrus cloud.) Not content with blindly following UN advice, Trudeau has handed our resource sector to Greenpeace affiliates. The joke is on them though: the world is begging for Canada’s natural resources, all of them, irrespective of how hard this trio tries to pretend otherwise.
Pull up a stump folks, the energy world is about to get interesting. A cage match between activist ideology and reality, only one walks out of the cage. To understand how we got here, pick up “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks for the support.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.