This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Pat Murphy

Generous social programs come with trade-offs. Pretending otherwise is political fiction

Nordic societies fund their own benefits through taxes and cost-sharing. Canadians expect someone to foot the bill

Like Donald Trump, one of my favourite words starts with the letter “T.” But where Trump likes the word “tariff,” my choice is “trade-off.” Virtually everything in life is a trade-off, and we’d all be much better off if we instinctively understood that.

Think about it.

If you yield to the immediate pleasure of spending all your money on whatever catches your fancy, you’ll wind up broke. If you regularly enjoy drinking to excess, be prepared to pay the unpleasant price of hangovers and maybe worse. If you don’t bother to acquire some marketable skill or credential, don’t be surprised if your employment prospects are limited. If you succumb to the allure of fooling around, you may well lose your marriage. And so on.

Failing to understand trade-offs also extends into political life. Take, for instance, the current fashion for anti-capitalist democratic socialism. Pushed to explain their vision, proponents will often make reference to the Nordic countries. But they exhibit little or no understanding of how these societies actually work.

As American economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey notes, “Sweden is pretty much as ‘capitalistic’ as is the United States. If ‘socialism’ means government ownership of the means of production, which is the classic definition, Sweden never qualified.” The central planning/government ownership model isn’t the Swedish way.

What the Nordics do have, however, is a robust social safety net. And it’s useful to look at how they pay for it.

J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest is a man who knows his way around data. He puts it this way: “Copy the Nordic model if you like, but understand that it entails a lot of capitalism and pro-business policies, a lot of taxation on middle-class spending and wages, minimal reliance on corporate taxation and plenty of co-pays and deductibles in its health care system.”

For instance, take the kind of taxes that are often derided as undesirably regressive—sales taxes, social security taxes and payroll taxes. In Sweden, they account for a whopping 27 per cent of gross domestic product. And some 15 per cent of health expenditures are out of pocket.

Charles Lane—formerly with the Washington Post, now with The Free Press—is another who pulls no punches: “Nordic countries are generous, but they are not stupid. They understand there is no such thing as ‘free’ health care, and that requiring patients to have at least some skin in the game, in the form of cost-sharing, helps contain costs.”

In effect, Nordic societies have made an internal bargain. Ordinary people are prepared to fork over large chunks of their own money in return for a comprehensive social safety net. They’re not expecting the good stuff to come to them without a personal cost.

Scandinavians obviously understand the concept of trade-offs, a dimension that seems to be absent from much of the North American discussion. Instead of Nordic-style pragmatism, spending ideas on this side of the Atlantic are floated on the premise of having someone else pay. And the electorally prized middle class is to be protected at all costs.

In the aftermath of Zohran Mamdami’s New York City win, journalist Kevin Williamson had a sobering reality check: “Class warfare isn’t how they roll in Scandinavia. Oslo is a terrific place to be a billionaire—Copenhagen and Stockholm, too … what’s radically different about the Scandinavians is not how they tax the very high-income but how they tax the middle.”

Taxation propensities aside, Nordic societies are different from the United States and Canada.

Denmark, for instance, is very much a “high-trust” society, defined as a place “where interpersonal trust is relatively high and ethical values are strongly shared.” It’s often been said that it works the way it does because it’s full of Danes, which is broadly true—albeit less so than it was 40 years ago.

Denmark, though, has no interest in multiculturalism as we’ve come to know it. Although governed from the centre-left, there’s no state-sponsored focus on systemic discrimination or diversity representation. Instead, the emphasis is on social cohesion and conformity. If you want to create a society like Denmark, it helps to understand the dynamics that make it work.

Reality intrudes on all sorts of other issues. For example, there’s the way in which public discourse is disfigured on the question of climate change and the need to pursue aggressive net-zero policies.

Asked in the abstract, people are generally favourable, which is then touted as evidence of strong public support. But when subsequently asked how much they’re personally prepared to pay to accomplish these ambitious goals, the answer is often little or nothing.

If there’s one maxim we should be taught from childhood, it’s this: there are no panaceas, only trade-offs.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Rashid Husain Syed

The peak-oil narrative has collapsed, and the IEA’s U-turn marks a major strategic win for Alberta

After years of confidently predicting that global oil demand was on the verge of collapsing, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has now reversed course—a stunning retreat that shatters the peak-oil narrative and rewrites the outlook for oil-producing regions such as Alberta.

For years, analysts warned that an oil glut was coming. Suddenly, the tide has turned. The Paris-based IEA, the world’s most influential energy forecasting body, is stepping back from its long-held view that peak oil demand is just around the corner.

The IEA reversal is a strategic boost for Alberta and a political complication for Ottawa, which now has to reconcile its climate commitments with a global outlook that no longer supports a rapid decline in fossil fuel use or the doomsday narrative Ottawa has relied on to advance its climate agenda.

Alberta’s economy remains tied to long-term global demand for reliable, conventional energy. The province produces roughly 80 per cent of Canada’s oil and depends on resource revenues to fund a significant share of its provincial budget. The sector also plays a central role in the national economy, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributing close to 10 per cent of Canada’s GDP when related industries are included.

That reality stands in sharp contrast to Ottawa. Prime Minister Mark Carney has long championed net-zero timelines, ESG frameworks and tighter climate policy, and has repeatedly signalled that expanding long-term oil production is not part of his economic vision. The new IEA outlook bolsters Alberta’s position far more than it aligns with his government’s preferred direction.

Globally, the shift is even clearer. The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook, released on Nov. 12, makes the reversal unmistakable. Under existing policies and regulations, global demand for oil and natural gas will continue to rise well past this decade and could keep climbing until 2050. Demand reaches 105 million barrels per day in 2035 and 113 million barrels per day in 2050, up from 100 million barrels per day last year, a direct contradiction of years of claims that the world was on the cusp of phasing out fossil fuels.

A key factor is the slowing pace of electric vehicle adoption, driven by weakening policy support outside China and Europe. The IEA now expects the share of electric vehicles in global car sales to plateau after 2035. In many countries, subsidies are being reduced, purchase incentives are ending and charging-infrastructure goals are slipping. Without coercive policy intervention, electric vehicle adoption will not accelerate fast enough to meaningfully cut oil demand.

The IEA’s own outlook now shows it wasn’t merely off in its forecasts; it repeatedly projected that oil demand was in rapid decline, despite evidence to the contrary. Just last year, IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the Financial Times that we were witnessing “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” The new outlook directly contradicts that claim.

The political landscape also matters. U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House shifted global expectations. The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, reversed Biden-era climate measures and embraced an expansion of domestic oil and gas production. As the world’s largest economy and the IEA’s largest contributor, the U.S. carries significant weight, and other countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have taken steps to shore up energy security by keeping existing fossil-fuel capacity online while navigating their longer-term transition plans.

The IEA also warns that the world is likely to miss its goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 °C over pre-industrial levels. During the Biden years, the IAE maintained that reaching net-zero by mid-century required ending investment in new oil, gas and coal projects. That stance has now faded. Its updated position concedes that demand will not fall quickly enough to meet those targets.

Investment banks are also adjusting. A Bloomberg report citing Goldman Sachs analysts projects global oil demand could rise to 113 million barrels per day by 2040, compared with 103.5 million barrels per day in 2024, Irina Slav wrote for Oilprice.com. Goldman cites slow progress on net-zero policies, infrastructure challenges for wind and solar and weaker electric vehicle adoption.

“We do not assume major breakthroughs in low-carbon technology,” Sachs’ analysts wrote. “Even for peaking road oil demand, we expect a long plateau after 2030.” That implies a stable, not shrinking, market for oil.

OPEC, long insisting that peak demand is nowhere in sight, feels vindicated. “We hope … we have passed the peak in the misguided notion of ‘peak oil’,” the organization said last Wednesday after the outlook’s release.

Oil is set to remain at the centre of global energy demand for years to come, and for Alberta, Canada’s energy capital, the IEA’s course correction offers renewed certainty in a world that had been prematurely writing off its future.

Toronto-based Rashid Husain Syed is a highly regarded analyst specializing in energy and politics, particularly in the Middle East. In addition to his contributions to local and international newspapers, Rashid frequently lends his expertise as a speaker at global conferences. Organizations such as the Department of Energy in Washington and the International Energy Agency in Paris have sought his insights on global energy matters.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.