It has been a rough autumn for the Trudeau government. First, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down significant parts of the federal Impact Assessment Act (also known as Bill C-69), ruling the act to be broadly unconstitutional and finding that the government had made the review process ambiguous and overly broad while intruding on provincial authority. Then last week, Canada’s Federal Court struck down the Trudeau government’s ban on single-use plastics finding the government’s classification of “plastic manufactured items” (PMI) as toxic materials under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to be unsound.
And yet, the Trudeau government has already signalled the next stage in its crusade against plastics. Having banned a limited set of plastics-of-convenience (straws, cutlery, etc.), it plans to ban plastic films and containers used up and down the food chain to keep foods isolated from contamination, protected from pests and destructive oxidation, and cold, which is critical to preventing microbial contamination and spoilage.
One can hope that this second court strike will lead the government to reconsider and preferably scrap its entire “Zero Plastic Waste by 2030” plan, which is deeply flawed. As I showed in a 2022 study published by the Fraser Institute, Canada does not have a significant plastic waste problem. Less than 1 per cent of plastics used in Canada end up as waste in the environment while 99 per cent is safely buried in landfills, recycled or incinerated. Canada is not a measurable part of the world’s plastic pollution problem.
Moreover, the government’s own analysis suggests that pursuing this war on plastics will ultimately lead to greater waste of alternative materials, raising concerns among environmentalists. Even if the Trudeau government’s “Zero Plastic” plan were to work, it would produce an undetectable reduction in the growth of global plastic pollution of three thousandths of one per cent. Remember, this is by the government’s own admission.
And even that small reduction in environmental harm will likely be offset by increased environmental harms due to replacements for the plastic products banned by the government. Again, per the government’s own analysis, “Zero Plastic” regulations are expected to increase the waste generated from substitutes by almost 300,000 tonnes in 2024 and by around 2.9 million tonnes over the full life of the plan (2023 to 2032), mainly driven by paper substitutes.
Bottom line—the Trudeau government’s anti-plastic regulations would keep about 1.5 million tonnes of plastics from entering the waste stream over the course of the program, but would add about 2.9 million tonnes of other materials to the waste stream from the use of substitutes. And increase the costs of waste management in Canada.
The government should take a hint from the two recent court rulings—which found two of its signature environmental initiatives unconstitutional, unreasonable and ill-founded—and take both the Impact Assessment Act and the “Zero Plastic Waste by 2030” plan back to the drawing board. Of course, given federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling—basically, the government doesn’t think it’s doing anything wrong and does not intend to change course—this government is unlikely to make serious efforts at compliance with the new court ruling on plastics. Serious reform will likely have to wait for a change in government.
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Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions.
The Biden administration has just signed an economic suicide pact that would require the United States and six other Western democracies to shut down its coal power plants by 2035, while China, India and the rest of the world currently have more than 1,000 new coal power plants in the planning or construction phase. The no-coal pact allows all nations but the Suicidal Seven to continue using as much affordable coal power as they like.
Climate activists often point to China as a climate role model, noting that China manufactures more wind and solar power equipment than any other nation. China, however, isn’t stupid enough to use much of that equipment. Realizing that conventional energy – and especially coal power – is more affordable and reliable than wind and solar power, China manufactures wind and solar equipment, sells the equipment to America and Western Europe, and then powers its own economy primarily with coal power.
In America, government intervention has already caused the shutdown of many coal power plants and the construction of expensive wind and solar projects. In more than half the states, renewable power mandates require a certain percentage of electricity in the state to come from wind or solar. Federal laws and regulations punish coal power at nearly every step of coal mining and utilization. Massive subsidies for wind and solar allow wind and solar providers to charge substantially reduced prices for their product at taxpayers’ expense.
Even with government tipping the scale so heavily in favor of wind and solar power, the so-called green transition is coming with an enormous price tag. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there was a 21 percent increase in wind and solar power since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 through the end of 2023. At the same time, electricity prices also rose by 21 percent. Prior to Biden taking office, the long-term electricity price trend was an increase of approximately 1 percent per year. The green transition has increased the pace of electricity price inflation by 700 percent. And that doesn’t account for all the wind and solar subsidies that are hidden in our tax bills.
There is little reason to believe we are on the verge of a climate crisis. A good resource documenting this good news is ClimateRealism.com. Yet, even if a climate crisis were imminent, unilateral coal disarmament is a foolish way for America to approach carbon dioxide emissions.
Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions. Even if the United States and the rest of the Suicidal Seven could somehow eliminate all of their emissions, it would have little impact on the global trend.
Ultimately, Biden’s pact to eliminate American coal use will further ramp up inflation. After all, energy is an important cost component in almost every product bought and sold in the economy. In addition to the inflation impact, Biden’s pact will force American businesses into a major competitive disadvantage versus businesses in China, India, and the rest of the world, which will be paying substantially lower energy costs than American businesses.
Under Biden’s plan, we will end up sinking vast economic resources into eliminating coal power and as much carbon dioxide as possible from the American economy. Even then, we will still be looking at global emissions continuing to rise. At that point, Biden’s plan is for America to assume the lion’s share of global “climate reparations” and financial bribes to induce China, India, and the rest of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. After sabotaging our own economy with higher energy prices, we will literally borrow money from China in order to then bribe China to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.
It would be hard to think of a crazier domestic energy policy.
James Taylor ([email protected]) is president of The Heartland Institute.
Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.
For more on the U.S. electric power system, click here.
When the wind blows too much, natural gas plants are forced to shut down because they can’t underbid wind producers that can bid zero or negative. But when the wind doesn’t blow when it is needed, wind generators can afford the loss of revenue because they earn so much from tax subsidies.
It’s been all quiet on the electric grid front for a few months — but don’t get your hopes up. Over the last month, electricity prices came near the $5000/MWh regulatory cap three separate times because the wind wasn’t blowing enough when the sun went down.
You may hear from the drive-by media that the problem is unseasonably warm temperatures, or that there are a lot of power plants down for maintenance. But high 80s in April and low 90s in May are not unusual, and the Texas grid used to manage these weather changes with no problems. From 2014 to 2016, real-time prices only went over $1000/MWh twice, but it’s happened three times already this year.
If the grid is already on shaky ground, with many weeks to go before blistering triple-digit temperatures shoot electric demand through the roof, all signs are pointing to an unpleasant summer.
The problem with the Texas grid is so simple it’s infuriating: Relying too heavily on unpredictable wind and solar, without enough reliable reserve capacity, means higher volatility — leading to higher prices and increasing need for expensive interventions by ERCOT to avoid outages. This is why your electric bill is going up and up even though wind and solar are supposed to be cheap.
While Texas certainly has a lot of sun, peak solar output almost never aligns with peak electric usage. The Lone Star State also has plenty of wind, but wind generation is wildly unpredictable — by nature. It’s not unusual for a wind generator’s output to swing 60 percentage points or more in a single week.
Take last month, for example. On Tuesday, April 16, electricity prices reached their cap because ERCOT’s day-ahead wind forecast was off by 50%. Five gigawatts of wind we were counting on to power Texas as the sun went down didn’t show up. That was the equivalent of simultaneously shutting down 10 large natural gas units, or all of the state’s nuclear capacity. If the latter occurred, the news media would be up in arms (and rightfully so). But because the culprit was the political darling of both the left and the right, no one heard about it.
ERCOT hasn’t been the best at predicting wind output, and the problem isn’t entirely its fault. Wind veers so wildly between extremes it’s nearly impossible to plan a sustainable grid around its fickleness — yet wind makes up 26% of our generating capacity.
It’s all because lucrative tax breaks and subsidies at the state and federal level, combined with flaws in ERCOT’s market design, make it almost impossible for wind to lose money — and harder than ever for natural gas to compete, even though it’s far more reliable and affordable. When the wind blows too much, natural gas plants are forced to shut down because they can’t underbid wind producers that can bid zero or negative. But when the wind doesn’t blow when it is needed, wind generators can afford the loss of revenue because they earn so much from tax subsidies.
Imagine trying to open a restaurant when your competitor next door is paying its customers to eat there. It’s no wonder natural gas capacity in ERCOT has barely grown over the past decade, and not enough to make up for losses of coal plants, while demand has been steadily increasing.
All those subsidies are hurting our most reliable, affordable energy producers and putting our economy at risk — leaving you and me, the taxpayers on the hook.
While most political issues are far more complex and nuanced than brazen attack ads and headlines would lead you to believe, in this case, it really does boil down to one simple problem.
And it would be easy to solve — if lawmakers are willing to go against the grain of political correctness and set a clear reliability standard for the wind and solar generators that want to connect to our grid.
Unfortunately, that’s a gargantuan “if.”
As a former lawmaker, I understand the pressures our legislators are under to toe the line on alternative energy. Major utilities embracing World Economic Forum- and United Nations-aligned “energy transition” policies that seek to redefine what’s “clean” and what’s “pollution” are making matters worse. And the incessant misinformation from their well-funded lobby that promise rural “economic development” and “cheap energy” sound too good to be true, because they are.
Elected officials don’t serve the lobby. They serve Texans — or, at least, they should.
And Texans want a reliable, affordable grid. They want to not have to worry about losing power in the heat of the summer or the dead of winter. The Legislature must put a stop to these market-distorting subsidies and make reliability, not popularity, the priority for our electric grid.
Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter on July 6, 2021 to members of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) directing them to “take immediate action to improve electric reliability across the state.” The second directive was to “Allocate reliability costs to generation resources that cannot guarantee their own availability, such as wind or solar power.” Unfortunately, the PUC hasn’t acted on this directive or even studied it. The costs of scarcity on the grid are estimated to have exceeded $12B in 2023, which is equal to two-thirds of the property tax relief passed in the 88th Legislature, all paid for by ratepayers.
“Unfortunately for Texans, the ERCOT grid is moving from a single grid with gas and coal power plants running efficiently all day to two grids: one for wind and solar and one for expensive backup power that fills in the gaps when there is not enough wind and sun,” says Dr. Brent Bennett, policy director for Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Every time these scarcity events occur, whether due to real scarcity or artificial scarcity created by ERCOT’s operating policies, ratepayers are shelling out tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for backup power. It is the most expensive way to operate a grid, and Texans will feel the bite as these costs are absorbed over time.”
The Californication of our grid is unfolding before our eyes. If the Legislature and the PUC don’t act fast, the Texas miracle won’t last.
The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives
