Economy
Roadmap to Canadian energy superpowerdom
By Damjan Krnjević Mišković for Inside Policy
There is no getting around the fact that Canada’s energy superpowerdom must involve all fuels and technologies.
Transforming our country into an “energy superpower” requires treating hydrocarbons as an integral part of a comprehensive, single-standard, and non-discriminatory energy strategy. This means Prime Minister Mark Carney must adopt an explicit “all of the above” approach to energy: all fuels, all technologies, all systems, and more.
A majority of Canadians support this. But achieving it requires policy changes. Key necessary measures include repealing the Impact Assessment Act, the industrial carbon tax, the tanker ban, and the emissions cap. These counterproductive policies all stand in the way of affordable, efficient, and secure energy.
One reason these changes are needed is that the necessary investment to achieve energy superpower status simply will not materialize until industry is given two clear signals: that the government has understood Canada’s needs, and that it rightly views our abundant hydrocarbon resources as strategic national assets rather than liabilities.
Another reason these steps must be taken is because clear action on this front will strengthen Canadian sovereignty, unity, resilience, security, and prosperity. Like never before in Canada’s history, there is an unbreakable connection between nation-building and fast-tracking sensible energy projects. Carney says he wants to achieve both. However, many critics misunderstand a key point: such a path will also enable the prime minister to build on his climate action legacy, allowing him to reconcile raison d’état with raison de planète – all while upholding true Canadian values.
Canadians remember how Carney decisively shaped the private finance agenda at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021. At that time, Carney served concurrently as then-British prime minister Boris Johnson’s climate finance adviser and as the UN special envoy on climate action and finance. “The objective is simple,” said Carney. “Ensure that every financial decision takes climate change into account.”
Today, he can meet that objective by embracing the sensible logic of “policy blindness” regarding the means and technologies used to achieve domestic and international climate action policy preferences and obligations. This pragmatic principle is Canadian-made: it was first incorporated into international law in the Montreal Protocol for reducing chlorofluorocarbons in response to ozone depletion. By adopting a “whatever works” standard instead of doubling down on picking fuel or technology favourites, Carney would ensure Canadian energy and emissions reduction policies contribute to global climate action and accelerate sustainable economic development at home and around the world.
That’s why building Canada into an energy superpower must also have a foreign policy dimension. There are two key tracks of activity.
The first involves recalibrating the North American energy system, as part of the prime minister’s broader effort to realign our trade arrangements with the US on as favourable terms as possible by adopting a “grand bargain strategy.” The way forward is evidently fraught with peril, given bilateral tensions to date, but also the fact that the trade deals Japan, the EU, and others have already struck with the US mean that forming a coalition of affected advanced economies to push back against Washington is no longer an option. Canada is thus effectually on its own. Ottawa cannot afford to be reactive. “It has always fallen to Canada to draw America’s gaze to the benefits of continental co-operation and this time will be no exception,” said Macdonald-Laurier Institute Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley.
In these efforts, a point in Canada’s favour is that the highly-regarded US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has a deep understanding of the Canadian energy reality and is a champion of deepening continental energy ties. The strength of a continental energy alliance is not lost on the Trump Administration. And the enormous economic and strategic benefits to Canada should be evident to all.
The second activity track involves re-engagement with the developing world. This is where a “policy-blind” approach to climate action really comes into play. Canada’s UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) obligations and our Paris Climate Agreement commitments mean we are amongst a small number of countries that have assumed primary responsibility for managing this planetary challenge. At COP29 in Baku last November, the Trudeau government committed Canada to contribute an undefined portion of at least US$300 billion per year in cash-only transfer payments to developing countries for unspecified mitigation and adaptation measures on climate. This means that it is entirely within Canada’s sovereign prerogative to choose how to allocate these resources – and the recent non-binding advisory opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice takes nothing away from either the legitimacy or prudence of this approach. The key objective must be to move developing countries from inefficient, health-damaging fuel options (such as open fire coal, dung, wood, and crop residue) onto more efficient, better-performing options that, at a minimum, contribute to lower overall greenhouse gas emissions, measured against “do nothing” scenarios.
Ideologically driven climate maximalists reject this “whatever works” approach in favour of spending untold billions of Canadian taxpayer dollars exclusively on renewable solutions abroad. There are two basic problems with this alternative.
The first is that it’s immoral: it makes us complicit in impeding developing world poverty reduction. Generally, the higher the percentage of variable renewables in a country’s electricity mix, the higher the retail electricity price for consumers, especially when costly subsidies that distort the market are factored in; a corollary is that the lower a country’s per capita electricity consumption, the lower its per capita GDP. Here’s how Nigeria’s then-vice president Yemi Osinbajo put it a few years ago: “No country in the world has been able to industrialize using renewable energy, and we [Africa] have been asked to industrialize using renewable energy when everybody else in the world knows that we need gas-powered industries for business.” Even the controversial International Energy Agency admits in a recent report that the increased use of fossil fuels in Africa and, by extension, the rest of the developing world, is an integral part of the world’s lower emissions future. However, it falls short of explicitly concluding the obvious: not just Africa but the global majority needs more fossil fuels in its energy mix to achieve sustainable development. Canada is uniquely well-placed to be part of the solution.
The second reason we must not advocate that developing countries pursue exclusively renewable energy sources is because it’s not in our national interest. Canadian industry cannot benefit from financing most renewable solutions since our companies are neither global leaders in making the products involved nor do they own much of the underlying intellectual property. In essence, Canadian climate maximalists advocate for a foreign and energy policy that consists of giving away billions of our taxpayer dollars to developing countries and then instructing them to purchase solar panels and wind turbines manufactured in foreign countries – almost none of which share our values. This amounts to geopolitical and geoeconomic malpractice.
There is no getting around the fact that Canada’s energy superpowerdom must involve all fuels and technologies. By removing the barriers to help finance any fuel option – including the hydrocarbon resources with which we are so richly blessed – Canada can achieve five strategic objectives. One, we can meet our international climate finance pledges and contribute to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Two, we can further diversify our growing energy export markets. Three, we can ensure that the global majority has as fair a chance as possible to rise out of poverty. Four, we can restore our international reputation by demonstrating that we can be a dependable democratic energy partner. And five, we can push back decisively against our foreign competitors near and far while creating well-paying jobs for hard-working Canadians.
But it all starts with the prime minister making pragmatic yet definitive choices on the home front. How else can he hope to make our economy the strongest and most resilient in the G7?
Damjan Krnjević Mišković is professor of practice in geopolitics at ADA University (Baku) and director for policy research and analysis at its Institute for Development and Diplomacy. He is also a fellow at the Agora Strategy Institute (Berlin). He is a former senior UN and Serbian official and managing editor of The National Interest. The views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.
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.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The light of the global climate alarm movement has faded throughout 2025, as even narrative-pushing luminaries like Bill Gates have begun admitting. But that doesn’t mean the bitter clingers to the net-zero by 2050 dogma will go away quietly. No one serves more ably as the poster child of this resistance to reality than U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, who is preparing to host the UN’s annual climate conference, COP30, in Brazil on Nov. 10.
In a speech on Monday, Guterres echoed poet Dylan Thomas’s advice to aging men and women in his famed poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night:”
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Seeing that his own words have “forked no lightning,” Guterres raged, raged against the dying of the climate alarm light.
“Governments must arrive at the upcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil with concrete plans to slash their own emissions over the next decade while also delivering climate justice to those on the front lines of a crisis they did little to cause,” Guterres demanded, adding, “Just look at Jamaica.”
Yes, because, as everyone must assuredly know, the Earth has never produced major hurricanes in the past, so it must be the all-powerful climate change bogeyman that produced this major storm at the end of an unusually slow Atlantic hurricane season.
Actually, Guterres’ order to all national governments to arrive in Belem, Brazil outfitted with aspirational plans to meet the net-zero illusion, which everyone knows can and will never be met, helps explain why President Donald Trump will not be sending an official U.S. delegation. Trump has repeatedly made clear – most recently during his September speech before the U.N. General Assembly – that he views the entire climate change agenda as a huge scam. Why waste taxpayer money in pursuit of a fantasy when he’s had so much success pursuing a more productive agenda via direct negotiations with national leaders around the world?
“The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda…focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to the Guardian. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” she added.
The Guardian claims that Rogers’s use of the word “scam” refers to the Green New Deal policies pursued by Joe Biden. But that’s only part of it: The President views the entire net-zero project as a global scam designed to support a variety of wealth redistribution schemes and give momentum to the increasingly authoritarian forms of government we currently see cracking down in formerly free democracies like the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia and other western developed nations.
Trump’s focused efforts on reversing vast swaths of Biden’s destructive agenda is undoing 16 years of command-and-control regulatory schemes implemented by the federal government. The resulting elimination of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies is already slowing the growth of the electric vehicles industry and impacting the rise of wind and solar generation as well.
But the impacts are international, too, as developing nations across the world shift direction to be able to do business with the world’s most powerful economy and developed nations in Europe and elsewhere grudgingly strive to remain competitive. Gates provided a clear wake-up call highlighting this global trend with his sudden departure from climate alarmist orthodoxy and its dogmatic narratives with his shift in rhetoric and planned investments laid out in last week’s long blog post.
Guterres, as the titular leader of the climate movement’s center of globalist messaging, sees his perch under assault and responded with a rhetorical effort to reassert his authority. We can expect the secretary general to keep raging as his influence wanes and he is replaced by someone whose own words might fork some lightning.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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