From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

You’ve probably heard by now the blockbuster news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest people to ever walk the planet, has had a change of heart on climate change.

For several decades Gates poured billions of dollars into the climate industrial complex.

Some conservatives have sniffed that Bill Gates has shifted his position on climate change because he and Microsoft have invested heavily in energy intensive data centers.

AI and robotics will triple our electric power needs over the next 15 years. And you can’t get that from windmills.

What Bill Gates has done is courageous and praiseworthy. It’s not many people of his stature that will admit that they were wrong. Al Gore certainly hasn’t. My wife says I never do.

Although I’ve only once met Bill Gates, I’ve read his latest statements on global warming. He still endorses the need for communal action (which won’t work), but he has sensibly disassociated himself from the increasingly radical and economically destructive dictates from the green movement. For that, the left has tossed him out of their tent as a “traitor.”

I wish to highlight several critical insights that should be the starting point for constructive debate that every clear-minded thinker on either side of the issue should embrace.

(1) It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate policies. This includes improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

(2) Countries should be encouraged to grow their economies even if that means a reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas. Economic growth is essential to human progress.

(3) Although climate change will hurt poor people, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease.

I would add to these wise declarations two inconvenient truths: First: the solution to changing temperatures and weather patterns is technological progress. A far fewer percentage of people die of severe weather events today than 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago.

Second, energy is the master resource and to deny people reliable and affordable energy is to keep them poor and vulnerable – and this is inhumane.

If Bill Gates were to start directing even a small fraction of his foundation funds to ensuring everyone on the planet has access to electric power and safe drinking water, it would do more for humanity than all of the hundreds of billions that governments and foundations have devoted to climate programs that have failed to change the globe’s temperature.

Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green and Elmira Aliakbari

The Carney government tabled its first budget, which includes major new spending initiatives to promote a so-called “green economy,” and maintains greenhouse gas (GHG)-emission extinction as a central operating principle of Canadian governance.

The budget leaves untouched most of the legislative dampers on Canada’s fossil fuel sector (oil, gas, coal) of the last 10 years, while pouring still more money into theoretically “green” projects such as additional (and speculative new types) of nuclear power, electrical transmission to service “green” energy production, continued tax credits for alternative fuels such as hydrogen, and more. Adding insult to injury, the budget discusses “enhancing” (read: likely increasing) the carbon tax on industrial emitters across Canada, and tightening controls over provinces to ensure they meet new federal tax targets.

Over the past decade, Ottawa introduced numerous regulations to restrict oil and gas development and again accelerate the growth of the green sector. Key initiatives include Ottawa’s arbitrary cap on GHG emissions for the oil and gas sector, which will restrict production; stricter regulations for methane emissions in the oil and gas industry, which will also likely restrict production; “clean electricity” regulations that aim to decarbonize Canada’s electricity generation; Bill C-69 (which introduced subjective ill-defined criteria into the evaluation of energy projects); and Bill C-48, known as the oil tanker ban on the west coast, which limits Canadian exports to Asian and other non-U.S. markets.

At the same time, governments launched a wide range of spending initiatives, tax credits and regulations to promote the green economy, which basically includes industries and technologies that aim to reduce pollution and use cleaner energy sources. Between 2014/15 and 2024/25, federal spending on green initiatives (such as subsidizing renewable power, providing incentives for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, funding for building retrofits, and support for alternative fuels such as hydrogen, etc.) went from $0.6 billion to $23 billion—a 38-fold increase. Altogether, since 2014, Ottawa and provincial governments in the country’s four largest provinces (Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta) have spent and foregone revenues of at least $158 billion to promote the green sector.

Yet, despite the government’s massive spending and heavy regulation to constrain the fossil fuel industry and promote the green sector, the outcomes have been extremely disappointing. In 2014, the green sector accounted for 3.1 per cent of Canada’s economic output, and by 2023, that share had only slightly grown to 3.6 per cent. Put simply, despite massive spending, the sector’s contribution to Canada’s economy has barely changed. In addition, between 2014 and 2023, despite billions in government spending to promote the green sector, only 68,000 new jobs were added in this sector, many of them in already established fields such as waste management and hydroelectric power. The sector’s contribution to national employment remains small, representing only 2 per cent of total jobs in the country.

Not surprisingly, this combination of massive government spending and heavy-handed regulation have contributed to Canada’s economic stagnation in recent years. As documented by our colleagues, Canadian living standards—measured by per-person GDP—were lower in the second quarter of 2025 than six years earlier, suggesting we are poorer today than we were six years ago.

But for Prime Minister Carney, apparently, past failures do not temper future plans, as the budget either reaffirms or expands upon the failed plans of the past decade. No lessons appear to have even been considered, much less learned from past failures.

There had been some hope that Carney’s first budget would include some reflection of how badly the natural resource and energy policies of the Trudeau government have hurt Canada’s economy.

But other than some language obfuscation—“investment” vs. “spending,” “competitiveness” of GHG controls (not economy), and the “green” energy economy vs. the “conventional” energy economy—this is a Trudeau-continuance business-as-usual agenda on steroids. Yes, they will allow some slight deceptive rollbacks to proceed (such as rolling the consumer carbon tax into the industrial carbon tax rather than eliminating it), and may allow still more carbon taxes to render at least one onerous Trudeau-era regulation (the oil and gas cap) to be rendered moot, but that’s stunningly weak tea on policy reform.

The first Carney budget could and likely will, if passed, continue the economic stagnation plaguing Canada. That does not bode well for the future prosperity of Canadians.