GOLDSTEIN: Sell our oil and natural gas to pay for a clean economy

In the real world, a green energy economy can only be financed through the strategic sale and use of fossil fuel power.

The memorandum of understanding between Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney on building a new bitumen pipeline to B.C. with the goal of selling our oil to Asian markets — as opposed to at a perpetual discount to the U.S., where 97% of all sales now go — recognizes this.

Implicit in the MOU is an acknowledgment that the only way to pay for the enormous costs of converting our economy to green energy — including the massive increase in electricity that will be needed to achieve it — is to use the tax and economy-boosting revenues from the sale of fossil fuels.

We’re fortunate that we have some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and natural gas to do this, but not if we keep cutting our own economic throats by refusing to export them globally, unlike other countries such as the U.S.

Opposing Trudeau’s original strategy

Liberal holdovers from the Justin Trudeau era who oppose the Carney/Smith MOU are in reality opposing Trudeau’s original strategy to turn Canada into an energy superpower, before his government succumbed to radical environmentalism.

As Trudeau put it soon after he was elected in 2015, to pay for a clean energy economy, “we need to make smart, strategic investments in clean growth and new infrastructure, but we must also continue to generate wealth from our abundant natural resources to fund this transition to a low-carbon economy.”

That’s also Carney’s strategy so why some Trudeau-era Liberals oppose it is inexplicable, unless it’s because they don’t understand how energy is produced and actually believe the nonsense spouted by former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault.

China is the best example of this.

It leads the world in critical mineral processing, key to the manufacture of cleaner energy sources of power such as wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium batteries — all using China’s coal-fired electricity to produce them.

Long way to go

That approach by the world’s largest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases is beginning to level off its emissions, as new forms of energy transmission take hold in China, although it still has a long way to go.

The advantage we have over China is that most of our electricity is powered by non-emitting or low-emitting energy sources such as hydro, nuclear power and natural gas, as opposed to coal.

Using fossil fuel energy will be key to developing Ontario’s ring of fire, an 8,000-sq.-km area of mineral-rich deposits 500 km northeast of Thunder Bay, valued at up to $90 billion.

Among other minerals, it contains chromite, copper, nickel, platinum, titanium, cobalt and lithium, many used in the production of or infrastructure related to green energy, and key to the success of a sustainable EV industry in Canada.

The use of fossil fuel energy will be crucial to building the infrastructure needed to get these minerals out of the ground and to market, if we’re ever going to be serious about achieving true energy independence.

A sensible Canadian energy policy will use conventional energy sources, including fossil fuels, to generate the revenues needed to power us toward a low-carbon economy over time.

The nonsensical one we’ve had for too long is to set impossible-to-achieve emission reduction targets while arguing the only way to get there is to keep our fossil fuels in the ground, and make everyone poorer in the process.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO