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Canadian Energy Centre

COP28 should be the last COP

Published

18 minute read

From Energy Talking Points

CIP By Alex Epstein

COPs are immoral because they deprive billions of the energy they need to prosper. They should be replaced by energy freedom conferences.

Myth: UN COP climate conferences have been a force for good, but COP 28 must lead to far more “climate action.”

Truth: These conferences are immoral because they deprive billions of the energy they need to prosper.

They should be replaced by energy freedom conferences.

Introduction

  • The leadup to the COP 28 climate conference has had a consistent theme: previous COPs have done an okay job of restricting fossil fuels in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this one needs to restrict fossil fuel use far faster so as to reach net-zero by 2050.

    This is 180° wrong.1 COP quotes

  • COP 28’s net-zero agenda—i.e., rapid elimination of fossil fuels—is unnecessary, and pursuing it faster would be catastrophic because
    1. Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate.
    2. Even barely implementing COP’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous.

Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate

The justification of COP 28’s net-zero agenda is that fossil fuel use is causing an escalating “climate crisis.”

But if we factor in fossil fuels’ many climate benefits and carefully weigh fossil fuels’ climate side-effects, the opposite is true.

  • Factoring in fossil fuels’ “climate mastery benefits”

    One huge benefit we get from fossil fuels is the ability to master climate danger—e.g., fossil-fueled cooling, heating, irrigation—which can potentially neutralize fossil fuels’ negative climate impacts.

  • Example of fossil-fueled climate mastery overwhelming negative impacts: Drought.

    Any contribution of rising CO2 to drought has been overwhelmed by fossil-fueled irrigation and crop transport, which have helped reduce drought deaths by more than 100 times over 100 years as CO2 levels have risen.2 Drought deaths

  • Even though we obviously need to factor in fossil fuels’ climate mastery benefits, our designated experts totally fail to do this.

    E.g., the UN IPCC’s multi-thousand-page reports totally omit fossil-fueled climate mastery! That’s like a polio report omitting the polio vaccine.

  • Carefully weighing fossil fuels’ climate side-effects

    With rising greenhouse gasses we must be even-handed, considering both negatives (more heatwaves) and positives (fewer cold deaths). And we must be precise, not equating some impact with huge impact.

  • Even though we obviously need to factor in both negative and positive impacts of rising CO2 with precision, most designated experts ignore big positives (e.g., global greening) while catastrophizing negatives (e.g., Gore portrays 20 feet sea level rise as imminent when extreme UN projections are 3 feet/100years).3
  • Every report you hear about fossil fuels having made climate more dangerous commits at least one of 2 fallacies: ignoring the enormous climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels or wildly exaggerating negative climate side-effects of fossil fuels. Here’s how the prestigious IPCC does both.4

    Alex Epstein – The IPCC’s perversion of science

    The IPCC's perversion of science

  • If we do factor in fossil fuels’ enormous climate mastery benefits and carefully weigh their climate side-effects, we find that fossil fuels are a tremendous climate net-positive and will remain so in the future.
  • Myth: We are more endangered than ever by climate because of fossil fuels’ CO2 emissions.

    Truth: We have a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths due to our enormous fossil-fueled climate mastery abilities: heating and cooling, infrastructure-building, irrigation, crop transport.5 Climate deaths

  • Myth: Climate-related disaster X shows that fossil fuels are making climate unlivable.

    Truth: If we look at trends, not anecdotes, the drastic decline in extreme weather deaths shows that fossil fuels have made our naturally dangerous climate more livable than ever.6 Storm deaths

  • Myth: Even if climate-related disaster deaths are down, climate-related damages are way up, pointing to a bankrupting climate future.

    Truth: Even though there are many incentives for climate damages to go up—prefs for riskier areas, government bailouts—GDP-adjusted damages are flat.7 Weather disaster losses

  • Myth: Even if we’re safe from climate now, we can expect future emissions to lead to disaster.

    Truth: Since today’s unprecedented safety exists after over 100 years of rising CO2, and with ~1° C warming, we should be skeptical that further CO2 rises will somehow overwhelm us.

  • Myth: Mainstream science shows that rising CO2 is an “existential threat” that will soon cause global catastrophe and then apocalypse.

    Truth: Mainstream science shows that rising CO2 levels will lead to levels of warming and other changes that we can master and flourish with.

  • Myth: Future warming is ominous because heat-related death is already such a catastrophic problem.

    Truth: Even though Earth has gotten 1°C warmer, far more people still die from cold than heat (even in India)! Near-term warming is expected to decrease temperature-related mortality.8 Heat and cold deaths

  • Myth: Future warming is ominous because it will be worst in hot areas.

    Truth: The mainstream view in climate science is that more warming will be concentrated in colder places (Northern latitudes) and at colder times (nighttime) and during colder seasons (winter). Good news.9 Temperature projections

  • Myth: Future warming will accelerate as CO2 levels rise.

    Truth: Mainstream science is unanimous that the “greenhouse effect” is a diminishing effect, with additional CO2 leading to less warning.

    Even IPCC’s most extreme, far-fetched scenarios show warming leveling off.10

  • Myth: We face catastrophically rapid sea level rises, which will destroy and submerge coastal cities.

    Truth: Extreme UN sea level rise projections are just 3 feet in 100 years. Future generations can master that. (We already have 100 million people living below high-tide sea level.)11 Sea level projections

  • Myth: Hurricane intensity is expected to get catastrophically higher as temperatures rise.

    Truth: Mainstream estimates say hurricanes will be less frequent and between 1-10% more intense at 2° C warming. This is not at all catastrophic if we continue our fossil-fueled climate mastery.12 Warming and hurricanes

  • Myth: Science says that if we hit 1.5 or 2° C warming since the 1800s we face catastrophe followed by apocalypse.

    Truth: The 1.5-2° C number is activist fiction. The mastery abilities that have made life far better through 1° C warming will continue to keep us safe.13

Even barely implementing the net-zero agenda has been disastrous.

While COP 28 leaders bemoan how slow their restriction of fossil fuel use in pursuit of net-zero has been, even “slow” restriction has caused a global energy crisis. “Aggressive climate action” = global catastrophe.

  • Myth: Net-zero policies are new and exciting.

    Truth: Net-zero policies have caused catastrophic energy shortages even with minuscule implementation. Just by slowing the growth of fossil fuel use, not even reducing it, they have caused global energy shortages advocates didn’t warn us of.

  • Minuscule net-zero policies causing huge problems:
    • US: frequent power shortages (and some disastrous blackouts) after shutting down fossil fuel power plants. E.g., CA
    • EU: deadly fossil fuel dependence after restricting domestic fossil fuel industry
    • Poor nations: can’t afford fuel due to global restrictions14 Bangladesh blackout
  • The “net-zero” movement, led by UN COPs, is the root cause of today’s energy crisis because it has restricted
    1. fossil fuel investment
    2. fossil fuel production
    3. fossil fuel transport

    This has artificially suppressed fossil fuel supply, leading to high prices and shortages.

  • Suppressing fossil fuel investment

    For fossil fuel energy to remain low-cost requires sufficient investment. But the COP-led net-zero movement has used government and private entities, often under the banner of “ESG,” to punish and suppress it—meaning less fossil fuel supply.15

  • Suppressing fossil fuel production

    For fossil fuel energy to remain low-cost for billions of people requires that producers be free to produce it all around the world.

    The COP-led net-zero movement has opposed it throughout the world, often successfully, increasing prices.16

  • Suppressing fossil fuel transport

    For fossil fuels to remain low-cost for billions of people we need to be able to easily transport them from where they are produced to where they are used. But the COP-led net-zero movement has opposed transportation around the world.17

  • The “net-zero” movement has rationalized its opposition to fossil fuel investment, production, and transport with claims that solar and wind could rapidly replace fossil fuels.

    This has obviously not happened. Despite huge solar and wind subsidies fossil fuel demand has increased.

  • Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy, providing energy that’s low-cost, reliable, versatile, and scalable to billions of people.

    That’s why overall fossil fuel use is growing. E.g., China, despite its “net-zero” pledges, has 300 new coal plants in the pipeline.18 

  • There was never any reason to expect solar and wind to replace fossil fuels. The world needs far more energy—3 billion people still use less electricity than a US refrigerator—so there’s no reason to expect lower demand for any form of cost-effective energy, let alone ultra-versatile fossil fuels.19
  • Despite claims that solar and wind are rapidly replacing fossil fuels, they provide less than 5% of world energy—only electricity, ⅕ of energy—and, crucially, even that small percentage depends on huge subsidies and reliable (mostly fossil-fueled) power plants.20
  • Solar and wind’s basic problem is unreliability, to the point they can go near zero at any time. Thus they don’t replace reliable power, they parasitize it. This is why they need huge subsidies and why no grid is near 50% solar and wind without parasitism on reliable neighbors.21
  • The popular idea that we can use mostly or only solar and wind with sufficient battery backup is not being tried anywhere because it’s absurd. Batteries are so expensive that just 3 days of global backup using Elon Musk’s Megapacks would cost $570 trillion, about 6X global GDP!22 Tesla megapack costs
  • Scary fact: the “net-zero” movement has caused an energy crisis just by achieving a tiny fraction of its goals. While it has advocated rapidly reducing fossil fuel use, it has only succeeded globally at slowing the growth of fossil fuel use. And even that is catastrophic.
  • If just restricting the growth of fossil fuels in a world that needs far more energy is catastrophic, what would it mean to reduce CO2 emissions by the 50% many “climate emergency” advocates want by 2030 and the 100% they want by 2050?

    Global misery and premature death.

  • The net-zero movement led by COP is particularly dangerous to Africa and other poor regions.

    Consider: ⅓ of the world uses wood and animal dung for heating and cooking. 3 billion use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator.

    Only fossil fuels can provide the energy they need to develop.23 Use of primitive biomass

  • Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels.

    No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive fossil fuel use.

    The reason is that development requires energy, and fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective, including scalable, source of energy.

  • Africa is the world’s poorest region. Most Africans want rapid development and with it, prosperity.

    This is absolutely achievable. But only by using the proven practices every once-poor place has used to develop and prosper.

    One such practice is large-scale fossil fuel use.

  • In recent decades China and India have used large amounts of low-cost, reliable energy from fossil fuels to rapidly develop.

    Since 1980, India’s fossil fuel use has increased by >700% and China’s by >600%.

    India’s life expectancy increased by 17 years and China’s by 14!24 Development China & India

  • Fossil fuels are so uniquely good at providing low-cost, reliable energy for developing nations that even nations with little or no fossil fuel resources have used fossil fuels to develop and prosper. E.g. South Korea (83% fossil fuels), Japan (85% fossil fuels), Singapore (99% fossil fuels).25 Global FF use
  • The obvious path for African development and prosperity is to use fossil fuel whenever it’s the most cost-effective option, which is most of the time, and certainly to responsibly produce the significant fossil fuel resources that exist in Africa.

    Yet COP tells Africa to forego fossil fuels.

  • Given that every prosperous place on Earth has depended on and continues to depend on massive fossil fuel use, and that attempts to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind are failing, the push for Africa to adopt net-zero—aka fossil fuel elimination—is a death sentence for African development.

The alternative to the unnecessary and destructive COPs: energy freedom conferences

Instead of focusing on rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use, we should focus on rapidly liberating energy production and use of all kinds of energy via energy freedom policies.

  • What are “energy freedom policies”?

    Government actions to protect the ability of producers to produce all forms of energy and consumers to use all forms of energy, so long as they don’t engage in reasonably preventable pollution or endangerment of others.

  • Energy freedom policies include:
    • Protecting the freedom to develop fossil fuels and other forms of energy. E.g., deep geothermal development.
    • Protecting the freedom to use fossil fuels and all other forms of energy. E.g., decriminalizing nuclear.
  • Energy freedom policies are more likely to lead to long-term emissions reductions, because they accelerate the rate at which nuclear and other alternatives become globally cost-competitive. (The only moral and practical way to reduce global emissions.)26 China & India using coal
  • Fact: the 2 biggest instances of CO2 reduction have come from energy freedom policies:
    • Nuclear: Freedom led to cost-effective and scalable nuclear power until the “green” movement virtually criminalized it.
    • Gas: Freedom led to significant substitution of gas vs. coal.
  • Alternative energy policy has been dominated by the “green energy” movement, which is an outgrowth of the anti-development green movement. This movement is hostile to all development because of development’s impact on nature, and therefore is hostile to every form of cost-effective energy.
  • COP’ leaders’ enthusiastic support for solar and wind is phony. Just as they oppose fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro for their impact, in practice they oppose the massive mining, construction, and transmission-line-building “green energy” requires.27
  • The obvious path forward for the world is energy freedom: the freedom to produce and use all cost-effective sources of energy—including, essentially, fossil fuels—which means rejecting all net-zero targets.

    We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

PS Here’s my friend Jusper Machogu’s message to COP.

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Alberta

Alberta extracting more value from oil and gas resources: ATB

Published on

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Will Gibson

Investment in ‘value-added’ projects more than doubled to $4 billion in 2024

In the 1930s, economist Harold Innis coined the term “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to describe Canada’s reliance on harvesting natural resources and exporting them elsewhere to be refined into consumer products.

Almost a century later, ATB Financial chief economist Mark Parsons has highlighted a marked shift in that trend in Alberta’s energy industry, with more and more projects that upgrade raw hydrocarbons into finished products.

ATB estimates that investment in projects that generate so-called “value-added” products like refined petroleum, hydrogen, petrochemicals and biofuels more than doubled to reach $4 billion in 2024.

Alberta is extracting more value from its natural resources,” Parsons said.

“It makes the provincial economy somewhat more resilient to boom and bust energy price cycles. It creates more construction and operating jobs in Alberta. It also provides a local market for Alberta’s energy and agriculture feedstock.”

The shift has occurred as Alberta’s economy adjusts to lower levels of investment in oil and gas extraction.

While overall “upstream” capital spending has been rising since 2022 — and oil production has never been higher — investment last year of about $35 billion is still dramatically less than the $63 billion spent in 2014.

Parsons pointed to Dow’s $11 billion Path2Zero project as the largest value-added project moving ahead in Alberta.

​​The project, which has support from the municipal, provincial and federal governments, will increase Dow’s production of polyethylene, the world’s most widely used plastic.

By capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions and generating hydrogen on-site, the complex will be the world’s first ethylene cracker with net zero emissions from operations.

Other major value-added examples include Air Products’ $1.6 billion net zero hydrogen complex, and the associated $720 million renewable diesel facility owned by Imperial Oil. Both projects are slated for startup this year.

Parsons sees the shift to higher value products as positive for the province and Canada moving forward.

“Downstream energy industries tend to have relatively high levels of labour productivity and wages,” he said.

“A big part of Canada’s productivity problem is lagging business investment. These downstream investments, which build off existing resource strengths, provide one pathway to improving the country’s productivity performance.”

Heather Exner-Pirot, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s director of energy, natural resources and environment, sees opportunities for Canada to attract additional investment in this area.

“We are able to benefit from the mistakes of other regions. In Germany, their business model for creating value-added products such as petrochemicals relies on cheap feedstock and power, and they’ve lost that due to a combination of geopolitics and policy decisions,” she said.

“Canada and Alberta, in particular, have the opportunity to attract investment because they have stable and reliable feedstock with decades, if not centuries, of supply shielded from geopolitics.”

Exner-Pirot is also bullish about the increased market for low-carbon products.

“With our advantages, Canada should be doing more to attract companies and manufacturers that will produce more value-added products,” she said.

Like oil and gas extraction, value-added investments can help companies develop new technologies that can themselves be exported, said Shannon Joseph, chair of Energy for a Secure Future, an Ottawa-based coalition of Canadian business and community leaders.

“This investment creates new jobs and spinoffs because these plants require services and inputs. Investments such as Dow’s Path2Zero have a lot of multipliers. Success begets success,” Joseph said.

“Investment in innovation creates a foundation for long-term diversification of the economy.”

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Banks

The Great Exodus from the Net Zero Banking Alliance has arrived

Published on

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Gina Pappano

Next, we need a Great Exodus from net zero ideology

In 2021, all of Canada’s Big Five Banks – TD, CIBC, BMO, Scotiabank and RBC – signed onto the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).

U.N.-sponsored and Mark Carney-led, GFANZ is a sector-wide umbrella coalition whose goal is to accelerate global decarbonization and the emergence of a worldwide net zero global economy.

But now, in the first month of 2025, four of Canada’s Big Five Banks – TD, CIBC, BMO and Scotiabank – have announced their decision to exit the NZBA.

This came on the heels of similar announcements by six of the biggest U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo as well as the investment firm BlackRock leaving the Asset Management subgroup of the GFANZ.

That group, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, has now suspended operations altogether, and the GFANZ and all of its subgroups are falling like a house of cards.

At InvestNow, the not-for-profit that I lead, we’re considering these developments a victory and a vindication of our work.

In November of 2024, we submitted shareholder proposals to Canada’s Big Five banks asking them to leave both the NZBA and the GFANZ. As of this writing, all but one of them have done just that.

But this is only a partial victory.

When they signed on to the NZBA, the banks pledged to align their lending, investment and banking activities with decarbonization goals, including achieving net zero emissions by 2050. They pledged to focus on higher emitting sectors first and foremost. In practice, this means they would be setting their sights on Canada’s natural resource sector.

That’s because the net zero ideology motivating these groups requires the drastic reduction of oil and gas production and use over a comparatively short period of time.

That is a serious threat to Canada since we’ve been blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Hydrocarbon energy has become the backbone of our economy, and the war being waged against it has already made our lives harder and more expensive. Left unchecked, these difficulties will compound, with ruinous results.

In joining the NZBA, the Big Five Banks agreed to divest from oil and gas, eliminating projects and companies from the investment pool simply because of the sector they work in, as part of a long-term goal of totally decarbonizing the economy.

Presumably, having left the Alliance, those banks could now change course, increasing investment in and lending to oil and gas firms with an eye toward increasing the return on investment for their shareholders.

Except the banks have stressed that they have no intention of doing so. In the press releases and articles about leaving the NZBA, each bank emphasized that this move should not be interpreted as them abandoning net zero itself. All of these banks remain committed to aligning their activities with decarbonization, no matter the cost to Canada, the Canadian economy or the good of its citizens.

This means we still have work to do. While we applaud the banks for exiting the NZBA, we will continue to work to get them to leave behind the net zero ideology as well. Then, and only then, will we claim a full victory.

Gina Pappano is the former head of market intelligence at the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange and executive director of InvestNow , a non-profit dedicated to demonstrating that investing in Canada’s resource sectors helps Canada and the world. Join the movement and pass the InvestNow resolution at investnow.org.

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