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November 19th 2024
Feature story

Meet the new face of global climate skepticism

It would be easy to overlook Chris Wright. The fracking company CEO, tapped this week by the Trump administration as its nominee for energy secretary, doesn’t have anywhere near the same public profile or reputation as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Matt Gaez, Tulsi Gabbard, or some of Donald Trump’s other controversial selections. His nomination will almost certainly get approved by the Senate without much controversy or consternation. But when it comes to his potential impact on (and in) the rest of the world, he should not be overlooked. 

Wright’s company, after all, is no mere fracking operation. Liberty Energy is an unapologetic proselytizer for the glory and virtue of fossil fuels, and its mission extends well beyond the borders of the United States. In a glossy 180-page treatise released this year, Liberty makes the case that fossil fuels are central to our prosperity and quality of life, and that they can — no, must — be used to lift up the billions of people who still live in less fortunate circumstances. “Our mission,” Wright says, “is to better human lives.”

Wright’s manifesto is a masterclass in fig leaf creation. It talks earnestly about the challenges in the developing world and the human cost that poverty inflicts on those living there. His “Bettering Human Lives Foundation” is led by a nurse-midwife with decades of experience in humanitarian aid and assistance in the developing world. Heck, he even name checks Vaclav Smil, the professor emeritus in the University of Manitoba’s faculty of environment who counts Bill Gates among his biggest fans, as “our greatest living energy scholar.”  

Most importantly, his manifesto does not deny the existence of man-made climate change or the underlying scientific realities. Instead, it simply brushes all of it aside and suggests there are other, more pressing issues that deserve our attention. “We cannot achieve this aggressive climate goal without exacerbating widespread suffering and limiting opportunity for everyone. The narrow focus on Net Zero 2050 threatens immediate life-saving interventions. The cure is far worse than the disease.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is essentially the same thesis that Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has been advancing for more than two decades now, one that seeks to deprioritize climate change as an issue rather than deny its existence. Indeed, Wright cites Lomborg repeatedly in his manifesto, hitting on some of his favourite talking points. More people dying of extreme cold than extreme heat? Check. Disaster-related deaths down nearly 90 per cent compared to a century ago? Check. 

But Wright’s argument has a level of political polish — and, now, power — that Lomborg could never summon as a mere gadfly. It transforms the transparently self-interested tactic of endless delay on climate action into an apparent act of virtue. The climate slow-walkers here in Canada now have a powerful ally with a potent message, one they will almost certainly begin deploying with more frequency and volume in their own efforts to push climate policy as far into the future as possible. If you thought Danielle Smith was hard to stomach before, I’d suggest stocking up on Tums.

Now, it’s easy to poke holes in this argument if you know where to look. For all the gloss in Wright’s presentation, it doesn’t take much scratching of the surface to reveal the tinfoil underneath. In a recent LinkedIn post he described climate change as “the new North Star of leftism,” one he compared to the Soviet Union. On the same platform last year he shared a video in which he proclaimed that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

His tender concern for the lives and wellbeing of people in the developing world starts to look decidedly less noble when you realize his solution revolves around increasing exports of the products he gets paid to extract. It’s the 21st century version of a 1990s-era landline company CEO suggesting that only wired telephones can give people in the developing world the same access to telecommunications that we enjoy in North America.

Mobile phones, of course, came along and made those landlines we all relied upon largely moot — with poorer countries leapfrogging directly into the mobile era for communications and banking. The same is almost certainly going to be true of renewable energy, given the massive improvements in their cost and the clear preference most developing countries would have for developing their own wind and solar rather than paying to import someone else’s oil and gas. 

As a recent report from RMI (formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute) noted, “the global south controls 70% of global solar and wind resources and 50% of critical minerals.” That same report also underscored the fact that in many parts of the developing world new wind and solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels — and it will only get cheaper as things like battery storage technology continue to scale.  

Ironically, Wright’s new boss might be the biggest impediment standing in the way of his plan to export fossil-fueled prosperity to the developing world. If President-elect Donald Trump hits China with the massive tariffs he’s promised, China will be heavily incentivized to turn its own economic attention to the rest of the world. That will mean expanding influence in the global south by selling technologies like low-cost electric vehicles, wind and solar — market segments that China already dominates. The more America turns inwards, the more China will look past it. 

In time, and maybe not that much of it, those low-cost EVs and solar installations will obliterate the demand growth that fossil fuel companies like Wright’s treat as their own divine right. In the meantime, those who care about good climate policy will have to reframe their own efforts away from a scarcity mindset and towards one defined by abundance and optimism. They — we — have to remind people that renewable energy is a pathway to more human flourishing, not just less human suffering. The enemies of climate action have leveled up. The rest of us have to as well. 

 

There are no fiscal conservatives left in Canada

“Fix the budget.” It’s one of Pierre Poilievre’s patented “verb-the-noun” formulations for what he’d do as Canada’s next prime minister, and it remains an article of faith among many conservatives in Canada. But like most acts of faith, this is far more about belief than reality. For all their talk about being fiscally prudent, Conservative politicians in Canada have more or less abandoned the idea of balancing the budget.  

Take Ontario’s Doug Ford, whose government has added $86 billion to the province’s debt since it was first elected in 2018. Even if you strip out the debt associated with COVID-19, his government has still added $66.5 billion to the provincial debt, which is $22.5 billion more than Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals during their five years in power. Even conservative think tanks are getting nervous: as the Fraser Institute noted earlier this year, Ford’s government has overseen the second- and third-highest years of per-person (inflation-adjusted) spending in Ontario’s history, and that’s true even if you strip out COVID-related spending. “At every turn,” Jake Fuss and Grady Munro wrote, “the Ford government has demonstrated that it’s an irresponsible steward of Ontario’s finances.”

As if to really prove that point, the Ford government recently decided to spend $48 million ripping up bike lanes in Toronto in order to deliver what city staff describe as “minor” improvements in traffic. It also dedicated $100 million to a new program that will bring SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet system to 15,000 households and businesses in rural Ontario at a per-unit cost of more than $6,600. “The province will cover equipment and installation costs, but not monthly fees,” the Globe and Mail noted

Here’s the odd part: Starlink is already available to everyone in Ontario, and they could buy the equipment themselves for as low as $500 as their local Home Depot, Walmart, or Best Buy (who, of course, also sell it online). As PC Mag’s Brian Westover wrote in a recent how-to about the service, “Wherever you live in North America (and much of the world), Starlink is available and ready to provide speedy service.” The installation, meanwhile, is hardly worth the extra $6,000 — you simply put it somewhere with unobstructed views of the sky and plug it in. In rural Ontario, I doubt that’s much of a challenge. 

This is hardly the behaviour of a fiscal conservative. But Ford isn’t the only Conservative premier governing like a spendthrift. In Alberta, Danielle Smith’s UCP spent $71.2 billion in its most recent budget, or 20 per cent more than predecessor Jason Kenney did before he left office in 2022. And when it comes to the previous NDP government that was routinely criticized by Smith and other Conservatives for failing to balance the budget, the contrast is even more striking. As the CBC’s Jason Markusoff noted earlier this year, “Smith hiked provincial spending in two years by more than the Notley government did in four years, between her final $56.2-billion budget in 2018 and the last one by the PCs.”

It’s a similar story in Saskatchewan, where the province’s debt has nearly tripled to $21.1 billion since 2015 under the Saskatchewan Party government. As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Gage Haubrich argued in a recent op-ed, “since becoming premier in 2018, Moe has balanced exactly one provincial budget. And that one balanced budget wasn’t the result of some newfound financial genius or a reduction in spending, but rather a huge increase in resource prices that drove provincial revenues to record-highs.”

If there was a fiscally conservative premier in this country, it was probably New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs. But voters clearly didn’t care much about that when the provincial cheque book was getting balanced on the back of their healthcare system and other social spending. His government’s recent electoral defeat was a reminder of something that Justin Trudeau’s team realized back in 2015 — deficits simply don’t matter to most people. 

Progressive politicians would do well to remember that, I think. Unless or until voters actually start punishing governments for their failure to balance budgets, they shouldn’t be tripping over themselves to please the tiny constituency of fiscal conservatives in the country. Instead, they should be focused on delivering the services Canadians want and finding fair and just ways to pay for them. 

 

Canada’s immigration crisis is a test of our values  

For millions of Americans, and especially its young children, the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services is a looming nightmare. For Canada’s post-secondary institutions, public health research community and life sciences sector, it’s the biggest opportunity in a generation. They could, in theory, poach some of the best talent in their field, as American researchers look for a less hostile environment in which to do their work. 

Alas, timing is everything here as well. Canada is in the midst of a massive retrenchment on immigration, one that will see the federal government aggressively curtail the number of people it’s looking to bring here at a time when all eyes are on Canada as an immigration destination. Our post-secondary institutions are bracing for the impact of this change on their bottom lines, and are therefore unlikely to have the resources required to effectively recruit dispirited American academics and researchers. 

The same is true of talented foreign students and entrepreneurs, who may be far less willing to test the waters in America now that a crackdown on immigrants is imminent. Here, too, Canada could benefit from a massive transfer of human capital if only we hadn’t spent the last few years turning large portions of the public against immigration. Unless and until we truly get the housing crisis under control, it’s unlikely that the public will look favourably upon any significant increase in newcomers. That’s especially true of immigrants with the means to add even more pressure on our overheated housing market. 

This is a major missed opportunity for our country. And it’s one we can still theoretically find ways to avert, although that seems well beyond the grasp of both the current federal government and the party poised to replace it. Even then, it risks distracting us from the other immigration-related test that a Trump 2.0 administration will put us to: how will we respond to an influx of non-Canadians who aren’t leading scholars or entrepreneurs? 

That’s where things could get really ugly. That’s where we’ll find out just how sincerely we’re committed to the idea of embracing diversity, welcoming new people, and resisting the sort of reflexive nativism that has long defined the United States — and differentiated it from Canada. I am reminded of one of the Joker’s better lines from The Dark Knight: “When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other. You’ll see. I’ll show you.” 

That is, in a way, one of Trump’s most toxic political talents: showing what other people are really made of, and how far they’re willing to go (or not) to defend their values. Now, maybe there’s a way that Canada could use all of this as a bargaining chip with his administration. Maybe Canada could increase its intake of the so-called “illegal” migrants that America wants to deport in exchange for a relaxation on the tariffs Trump intends to levy on our exports. And maybe, just maybe, we could reach a consensus in our country about the importance of doing this.

But I’m not holding my breath here. If anything, I’m expecting the worst. As we’ve seen with Trump, that tends to be the most likely outcome. 

 

Odds and Sods 

Over at The Economist, they just published a useful piece on why the energy transition will not be as expensive as many people on both the climate left and the fossil fueled right want to pretend: 

The cost of a transition away from fossil fuels is consistently exaggerated. This is no coincidence: climate sceptics and climate activists both have reason to talk up the expense. The sceptics can use alarming numbers as a reason not to bother; the activists can deploy them to demand more spending. In fact, climate change is neither the end of the world nor an expensive hoax. It is a real and difficult problem, but one that can be curbed affordably.

Why are the estimates so much higher than what we’re likely to actually pay? In part it’s because they’re geared to a 1.5°C warming target that’s no longer feasible, and would therefore be prohibitively expensive to reach. In part it’s because the estimates of future economic growth embedded in these estimates are excessively optimistic, and fail to account for things like declining birth rates and the impact they’ll have on economic activity. And in part it’s because we’re just really bad at forecasting the impact of new technologies and the pace of their adoption. 

The bigger challenge here is that any cost feels politically untenable right now, especially when it’s being paid to address a problem that will be felt most acutely decades into the future. As I’ve said and written many times before, the Achilles heel of climate policy is the way in which our imperfect brains weigh long-term benefits against near-term costs. We are wildly, almost irresponsibly selfish in that respect. Alas, the facts won’t be able to change those feelings. 

But hey, maybe $405 million can! As my colleague Darius Snieckus reported last week, a group of philanthropists have dedicated that remarkable sum to the largest climate initiative in Canadian history. “The Climate Champions initiative will provide funding for innovative projects to drive climate action and the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy, the partners said in a joint statement.” Bravo, folks. 

As most of you surely noticed, former BC Premier John Horgan died recently. Over at The Tyee, Victoria bureau chief Andrew MacLeod has a wonderful piece on Horgan’s political legacy, one that’s a direct function of his capacity for kindness and human connection. He was, in so many respects, the best of us — and an obvious source of inspiration for other elected officials. 

And if there’s someone in your life who continues to believe that Canada — and especially Alberta — can somehow export its climate responsibilities to other countries, the International Institute for Sustainable Development just published a useful corrective. As the IISD’s Aaron Cosbey points out, there is no realistic universe in which LNG exports from Canada relieve us of our responsibilities under the Paris Accord. “Almost all proposals for Canada to get Article 6 credits for its LNG exports ignore some basic realities, including that it would be practically impossible to pass the essential test of additionality—proving that Canada’s LNG exports actually caused emissions reductions abroad….it is past time to put this conversation to bed.”