From Canadians for Affordable Energy

 Written By Dan McTeague

For years now we’ve been hearing about the wonders of electric vehicles (EVs). Enormous amounts of money have been spent by governments to entice people to buy them, from subsidies to free charging stations.

Here in Canada, the Trudeau Liberals have already subsidised EVs at a cost of $1 billion. Another $680 million in the next five years will go toward the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP) to build an entire new infrastructure of charging stations.

In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government are ready “to become a North American hub for the next generation of electric vehicles,” and Ford’s PCs have recently committed to matching a $295 million investment from the Trudeau’s Liberals to retool the Ford Oakville Assembly Complex to become a global hub for battery electric vehicle production.

Electric vehicles are held up as the great green alternative to gas-powered vehicles.  In fact, the federal government has set a mandatory target for all new light-duty cars and passenger trucks to be zero-emission by 2035 [read: electric and not gas-powered]. This is even more ambitious than their previous goal of 100% sales by 2040.

And, it seems, virtually the entire Canadian political class has either embraced or surrendered to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of EVs.

Well, here’s an interesting twist. Just the other week it was revealed that the Swiss government is considering legislation that would make it illegal for people to drive EVs over the winter except when it’s “absolutely necessary”.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Swiss government is discouraging people – to the point of making it illegal! – from driving their electric cars.

Why? Simple: there is not enough energy supply in Switzerland to power them.

Confused? How can this be?

Let me explain.

During the summer months, Switzerland gets around 60 percent of its energy from hydropower. But in the winter, hydro can’t produce enough energy, so the country imports a lot of electricity from France and Germany – both of which have long been dependent on Russian oil and gas imports.

Now that those “fossil fuels” have largely been cut off, these various European countries – not just Switzerland – are facing severe energy shortages this winter. This means that there won’t be enough electricity for people to charge their EVs.  This move highlights the obvious flaw in this push towards electrification, especially EVs. While EVs don’t burn fuel, you need to charge the battery which, of course, requires energy.

Still confused?  Right – perhaps you have never stopped to consider where the “energy” comes from that powers the EV charging stations?

Or did you just think that it was “magic” that powered the EVs?

Almost everywhere in the world, the charging stations are getting a lot of their power from oil and gas – the very same “fossil fuel” energy that EVs were supposed to replace. In many places, the power is coming from coal.

So to be clear, most countries typically need coal or oil or gas as a source of energy to power the charging stations, the very charging stations upon which many EV owners “power” their smug virtue signalling.

Some EV owners think, and even say out loud, that they are more concerned about the environment than you are. How can they say this?  Well, this is because they have an electric vehicle, while you drive a gas-guzzling vehicle that is destroying the planet.

All the while, their very same electric vehicle most likely gets its energy, ultimately, from the same sort of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel that you do.

Ahem. (There are many other issues with EVs including the very expensive batteries with materials mined out of the earth, which is hardly a “zero emission” activity, or the reliability of the vehicles in our northern climate. More on that in another post.)

Consider too that here in Canada, the Trudeau government is pushing hard for us to move away from fossil fuels which provide reliable base power to our grid, towards renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which are unreliable and intermittent.

Now imagine how this could play out over the next decades. If governments follow through on their plans to ban traditional gas-powered vehicles, it is their stated hope that everyone will have to drive an EV.

But, at the same time, governments want to shut down the traditional energy sector which – for the foreseeable future –provides most of the energy supply that powers EVs. If we’re forced to get all our power from wind and solar, that just means most people will never be able to drive anywhere.

We should consider what is happening in Switzerland as a warning shot. Our energy grids simply cannot provide enough power for electric vehicles, and this move towards EVs for everyone will fail.  The Trudeau government is promoting a short-sighted, virtue-signalling policy that will cause significant societal harm along the way.

Maybe the disastrous situation in Europe this winter will lead to some long-overdue second thoughts about EVs, and the whole climate change agenda.

It is amazing, with ever increasing energy costs in Canada and throughout the world, that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to promote the extreme Green Agenda that will destroy Canada’s energy industry.

The latest example? Just the other week, the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) released a study that describes how the Trudeau government’s proposed Emissions Cap for the energy sector would “cost the Canadian economy between $44.8 billion and $79.3 billion a year” and would “cause substantial losses, without achieving any net reduction in global emission.” You can read the study here.

In case you’ve not heard about Trudeau’s new way to destroy our economy, let me take a step back and explain.

The Trudeau government is proposing an Emissions Cap to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the oil and gas sector by 42 percent by 2030. This policy is another piece in their larger, foolish plan to try to achieve “Net Zero” GHG emissions by 2050.  Keep in mind Canada contributes only 1.5% of global emissions, so this plan, if even achievable, would reduce only 0.45% of global emissions.

One of the options proposed to achieve this “Net Zero” craziness is a cap-and-trade system. According to Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault “one of the advantages of a cap is emissions reduction certainty.”

Another certainty that Guilbeault failed to mention is that companies will think twice about investing their money in Canada.

Canadians need to consider that. The oil and gas sector is the single largest revenue provider for the Canadian government, generating $45 billion a year in annual economic activity, and  contributes $170 billion a year to the GDP. The economic consequences of this plan are significant, and they will mean a dramatic drawback in social programs in this country. How are we going to pay for our hospitals, our education system? How are we going to pay for our roads and our infrastructure?

As the MEI study found, this emissions cap will result in “substantial losses without achieving any net reduction in global emissions.” Why? Because whether this government likes to admit it or not, there is an increasing global demand for oil and gas. We can either produce those resources here or get them from another country that has no environmental, much less labour standards, such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

And here’s the rub. This cap on emissions would apply only to the oil and gas sector. This emissions cap would not apply to the concrete industry, the automotive industry, or the mining industry. And it certainly won’t apply to the jet building industry in Montreal. These must have better lobbyists than the oil and gas industry.

For that reason, an emissions cap, layered on top of carbon taxes, layered on top of a Clean Fuel Standard, layered on top of pipeline blockages, layered on top of Bills C-48, C-69, preventing oil from being shipped from other parts of the world — is clearly a vendetta against the sector that provides over 500,000 jobs to Canadians and contributes billions to our economy. And it is ultimately a vendetta against our pocketbooks, the interests of our society, and the Canadian way of life.