What is the number one most essential resource in the world today?
Obviously, it is energy. Oil and gas and (yes, it’s making a return) coal during this fretful time have a value enhanced beyond their normal use. And considering that normal use is nothing less than powering the way of life of—literally—all of us, any “added” or enhanced value makes every energy source vital beyond value.
Mr. Putin’s wicked actions in Ukraine in addition to their cruelty have for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis thrown up the shadow of possible nuclear conflict. We may speculate forever, and it seems we have, on his psychology, on what goes on in that dark mind, and whether—due to pride or the deep ruthlessness of which he has given much evidence—he would indeed move to the ultimate terror.
The anxious truth is, we do not know. What we do know, and it is utterly unconnected with Putin’s mindset, is that he has been “allowed” or better still been given licence to act as he has acted because of his energy leverage over Europe. The European press is full of warnings and cautions about a possible energy shortage—it is already in evidence—for the coming winter.
The European Union, that tattered and failing project, gave Putin that leverage. Under the mesmeric fascination with global warming and the careless and even negligent pursuit of so-called green energy, the commitment to the industrial mirage of “net zero” goals, and tying their economies to the unproven (and by any logic unattainable) renewables such as solar and wind power—while maintaining their dependence on Russia for the proven resource—EU nations have made themselves vulnerable and weak. And so it comes to pass that in 2022, with all our magnificent technology, all our advances in a computer age, some of the greatest economies in the world are wondering if they can make it through the coming winter without tragedy.
The radical embrace of green thought and green ambitions by the most progressive of Western leaders may prove to be one of the most costly and incompetent moves in governance of the century. Those who pushed feverishly for the abandonment of the energy sources that have served well for the last 100 years and went on a rabbit’s chase for the folly and fantasy of net-zero carbon-dioxide-emitting energy supplies now see the grim harvest in the present crisis.
Will it wake them up? Will the desperate actions of continental governments (and ours and the United States) to underwrite fuel costs, pouring out money from already COVID-depleted treasuries, and soaring inflation finally alert them to how foolish and dangerous the lure of green energy has been?
I doubt it greatly. Very greatly indeed. The woke are the very last to awake. And for irrefutable evidence of that we may leave Europe and the UK and look at the sad and mad Canadian experience.
We have in abundance the most critical resource of all the world. Yet for the last seven years under the Trudeau administration, “climate change” has been both the official and number one priority policy of the Canadian government.
And as a marker of that policy, as a definitional illustration of how absurd it is, the increase of carbon taxes to $50 a tonne on April 1 (an unnoticed or deliberate choice of day) by Messrs. Guilbeault and Trudeau cannot be matched.
Except of course that same day’s sweet promise to raise them to $65 a tonne in 2023. And except again the even sweeter promise (please play the Hallelujah Chorus here) to $170 by 2030!
The world needs real energy supplies. Inflation is biting every lower-income Canadian severely. Gasoline prices are unreal. The economy is burdened by debt and huge deficits. Food prices flare upwards. The housing market is spinning.
And in defiance of reality, the facts of global geopolitics, the urgencies in Europe, and Putin’s uncontrollable rage, our country—which has in abundance a product that could provide real strength and benefit to us and half the world—is blunderingly piling on taxes to our greatest resource under an obsessive climate change government. And, not at all incidentally, aiming at Canadian agriculture at the same time. Hobble the oilfields, wound our agriculture—that seems to be the plan.
No sadder sentence could I find from that April announcement than this one: “Guilbeault says the government is not going to stall or move backward on its climate action plan, of which the carbon price is seen as a ‘cornerstone’ policy.”
Madness. It’s enough to make you want to climb some very tall building as a protest.
