Economy
The wall of death for western economies

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it
When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses.Ā Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.
In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautifulĀ craftedĀ family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees.Ā Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.
What the hell happened?
I didnāt fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70ās, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoplesā lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.
The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial āfarmhousesā owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.
Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired. I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadnāt had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people canāt afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the āfreeā health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.
A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so canāt communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually dieĀ ā autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldnāt kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.
The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.
It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesnāt produce and doesnāt āsave moneyā and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. Thatās before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.
The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.
Letās be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now Iām in āpublic serviceā.Ā Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it,Ā raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.
The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.
In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? Thatās right, tech.
Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08.Ā Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent.Ā Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.
According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states,Ā the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.
This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off.Ā They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.
The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.
Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. Itās not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit.Ā The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.
That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production,Ā the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.
The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,
Itās the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We wonāt even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.
The Play
Earlier this year, AmericanĀ Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for theĀ financializationĀ of Americaās national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden administration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.
The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of Americaās lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. TheĀ April 22, 2024, Fact SheetĀ notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30Ć30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.
So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people canāt make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.
American StewardsĀ reportedĀ the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House
āThe Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishingĀ five new national monumentsĀ andĀ restoring protections for three more; creatingĀ four new national wildlife refugesĀ andĀ expanding five more; protecting theĀ Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nationās most visited wilderness area; safeguardingĀ Bristol BayĀ in southwest Alaska; and withdrawingĀ Chaco CanyonĀ in New Mexico andĀ Thompson DivideĀ in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.ā
Next, they unveiled a new website,Ā conservation.govĀ that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30Ć30 including the protected status of the landsĀ as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.ā
This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because thatās where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.
As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the āNational Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental ā Economic Statistics.ā Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.
There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.
The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.
In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizensā land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.
The Pilot National Air Emissions Account āmeasures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.ā And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.
Ten years ago I sat in a rancherās house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I donāt know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.
No baby, we werenāt wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.
And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.
In my next article, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trumpās economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. This series starting today, points out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious, is driving the worldās economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.
Elizabeth NicksonĀ is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessedĀ here.Ā Ā Follow her on SubstackĀ here.Ā Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchasedĀ here.
Bjorn Lomborg
How Canada Can Respond to Climate Change Smartly

From the Fraser Institute
At a time when public finances are strained, and Canada and the world are facing many problems and threats, we need to consider policy choices carefully. On climate, we should spend smartly to solve it effectively, making sure there is enough money left over for all the other challenges.
A sensible response to climate change starts with telling it as it is. We are bombarded with doom-mongering that is too often just plain wrong. Climate change is a problem but itās not the end of the world.
Yet the overheated rhetoric has convinced governments to spend taxpayer funds heavily on subsidizing current, inefficient solutions. In 2024, the world spent a record-settingĀ CAD$3 trillionĀ on the green energy transition. Taxpayers are directly and indirectly subsidizing millions of wind turbines and solar panels that do little for climate change but line the coffers of green energy companies.
We need to do better and invest more in the only realistic solution to climate change: low-carbon energy research and development.Ā StudiesĀ indicate that every dollar invested in green R&D can prevent $11 in long-term climate damages, making it the most effective long-term global climate policy.
Throughout history, humanity has tackled major challenges not by imposing restrictions but by innovating and developing transformative technologies. We didnāt address 1950s air pollution in Los Angeles by banning cars but by creating the catalytic converter. We didnāt combat hunger by urging people to eat less, but through the 1960s Green Revolution that innovated high-yielding varieties to grow much more food.
In 1980, after the oil price shocks, the rich world spent more than 8 cents of every $100 of GDP on green R&D to find energy alternatives. As fossil fuels became cheap again, investment dropped. When climate concern grew, we forgot innovation and instead the focus shifted to subsidizing existing, ineffective solar and wind.
In 2015, governments promised to double green R&D spending by 2020, but did no such thing. By 2023, the rich world still wasnāt back to spending even 4 cents out of every $100 of GDP.
Globally, the rich world spends just CAD$35 billion on green R&D ā one-hundredth of overall āgreenā spending. We should increase this four-fold to about $140 billion a year. Canadaās share would be less than $5 billion a year, less than a tenth of its 2024Ā CAD$50 billionĀ energy transition spending.
This would allow us to accelerate green innovation and bring forward the day green becomes cheaper than fossil fuels. Breakthroughs are needed in many areas. Take nuclear power. Right now, it is way too expensive, largely because extensive regulations force the production of every new power plant into what essentially becomes a unique, eye-wateringly expensive, extravagant artwork.
The next generation of nuclear power would work on small, modular reactors that get type approval in the production stage and then get produced by the thousand at low cost. The merits of this approach are obvious: we donāt have a bureaucracy that, at a huge cost, certifies every consumerās cellphone when it is bought. We donāt see every airport making ridiculously burdensome requirements for every newly built airplane. Instead, they both get type-approved and then mass-produced.
We should support the innovation of so-called fourth-generation nuclear power, because if Canadian innovation can make nuclear energy cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone in the world will be able to make the switchānot just rich, well-meaning Canadians, but China, India, and countries across Africa.
Of course, we donāt know if fourth-generation nuclear will work out. That is the nature of innovation. But with smarter spending on R&D, we can afford to focus on many potential technologies. We should consider investing in innovation to grow hydrogen production along with water purification, next-generation battery technology, growing algae on the ocean surface producing COā-free oil (a proposal from the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter), COā extraction, fusion, second-generation biofuels, and thousands of other potential areas.
We must stop believing that spending ever-more money subsidizing still-inefficient technology is going to be a major part of the climate solution. Telling voters across the world for many decades to be poorer, colder, less comfortable, with less meat, fewer cars and no plane travel will never work, and will certainly not be copied by China, India and Africa. What will work is innovating a future where green is cheaper.
Innovation needs to be the cornerstone of our climate policy. Secondly, we need to invest in adaptation. Adaptive infrastructure like green areas and water features help cool cities during heatwaves. Farmers already adapt their practices to suit changing climates. As temperatures rise, farmers plant earlier, with better-adapted varieties or change what they grow, allowing the world to be ever-better fed.
Adaptation has often been overlooked in climate change policy, or derided as a distraction from reducing emissions. The truth is itās a crucial part of avoiding large parts of the climate problem.
Along with innovation and adaptation, the third climate policy is to drive human development. Lifting communities out of poverty and making them flourish is not just good in and of itself ā it is also a defense against rising temperatures. Eliminating poverty reduces vulnerability to climate events like heat waves or hurricanes. Prosperous societies afford more healthcare, social protection, and investment in climate adaptation. Wealthy countries spend more on environmental preservation, reducing deforestation, and promoting conservation efforts.
Focusing funds on these three policy areas will mean Canada can help spark the breakthroughs that are needed to lower energy costs while reducing emissions and making future generations around the world more resilient to climate and all the other big challenges. The path to solving climate change lies in innovation, adaptation, and building prosperous economies.
Business
Net Zero by 2050: There is no realistic path to affordable and reliable electricity

Ā By Dave Morton of the Canadian Energy Reliability Council.
Maintaining energy diversity is crucial to a truly sustainable future
Canada is on an ambitious path to ādecarbonizeā its economy by 2050 to deliver on its political commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although policy varies across provinces and federally, a default policy of electrification has emerged, and the electricity industry, which in Canada is largely owned by our provincial governments, appears to be on board.
In a November 2023Ā submission to the federal government,Ā Electricity Canada, an association of major electric generators and suppliers in Canada, stated: āEvery credible path to Net Zero by 2050 relies on electrification of other sectors.ā In a single generation, then, will clean electricity become the dominant source of energy in Canada? If so, this puts all our energy eggs in one basket. Lost in the debate seem to be considerations of energy diversity and its role in energy system reliability.
What does an electrification strategy mean for Canada? Currently, for every 100 units of energy we consume in Canada, over 40 come to us as liquid fuels like gasoline and diesel, almost 40 as gaseous fuels like natural gas and propane, and a little less than 20 in the form of electrons produced by those fuels as well as by water, uranium, wind, solar and biomass. In British Columbia, for example, the gas systemĀ delivered approximately double the energy of the electricity system.
How much electricity will we need? According to a recentĀ Fraser Institute report, a decarbonized electricity grid by 2050 requires a doubling of electricity. This means adding the equivalent of 134 new large hydro projects like BCās Site C, 18 nuclear facilities like Ontarioās Bruce Power Plant, or installing almost 75,000 large wind turbines on over one million hectares of land, an area nearly 14.5 times the size of the municipality of Calgary.
Is it feasible to achieve a fully decarbonized electricity grid in the next 25 years that will supply much of our energy requirements? There is a real risk of skilled labour and supply chain shortages that may be impossible to overcome, especially as many other countries are also racing towards net-zero by 2050. Even now, shortages of transformers and copper wire are impacting capital projects. The Fraser Institute report looks at the construction challenges and concludes that doing so āis likely impossible within the 2050 timeframeā.
How we get there matters a lot to our energy reliability along the way. As we put more eggs in the basket, our reliability risk increases. Pursuing electrification while not continuing to invest in our existing fossil fuel-based infrastructure risks leaving our homes and industries short of basic energy needs if we miss our electrification targets.
TheĀ IEA 2023 Roadmap to Net ZeroĀ estimates that technologies not yet available on the market will be needed to deliver 35 percent of emissions reductions needed for net zero in 2050.Ā It comes then as no surprise that many of the technologies needed to grow a green electric grid are not fully mature. While wind and solar, increasingly the new generation source of choice in many jurisdictions, serve as a relatively inexpensive source of electricity and play a key role in meeting expanded demand for electricity, they introduce significant challenges to grid stability and reliability that remain largely unresolved. As most people know, they only produce electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines, thereby requiring a firm back-up source of electricity generation.
Given the unpopularity of fossil fuel generation, the difficulty of building hydro and the reluctance to adopt nuclear in much of Canada, there is little in the way of firm electricity available to provide that backup. Large āutility scaleā batteries may help mitigate intermittent electricity production in the short term, but these facilities too are immature. Furthermore, wind, solar and batteries, because of the way they connect to the gridĀ donāt contribute to grid reliability in the same wayĀ the previous generation of electric generation does.
Other zero-emitting electricity generation technologies are in various stages of development ā for example, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) fitted to GHG emitting generation facilities can allow gas or even coal to generate firm electricity and along with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) can provide a firm and flexible source of electricity.
What if everything canāt be electrified? In June 2024, aĀ reportĀ commissioned by the federal government concluded that the share of overall energy supplied by electricity will need to roughly triple by 2050, increasing from the current 17 percent to between 40 and 70 percent. In this analysis, then, even a tripling of existing electricity generation, will at best only meet 70 percent of our energy needs by 2050.
Therefore, to ensure the continued supply of reliable energy, non-electrification pathways to net zero are also required. CCUS and SMR technologies currently being developed for producing electricity could potentially be used to provide thermal energy for industrial processes and even building heat; biofuels to replace gasoline, diesel and natural gas; and hydrogen to augment natural gas, along with GHG offsets and various emission trading schemes are similarly
While many of these technologies can and currently do contribute to GHG emission reductions, uncertainties remain relating to their scalability, cost and public acceptance. These uncertainties in all sectors of our energy system leaves us with the question: Is thereĀ anyĀ credible pathway to reliable net-zero energy by 2050?
Electricity CanadaĀ states: āEnsuring reliability, affordability, and sustainability is a balancing act ⦠the energy transition is in large part policy-driven; thus, current policy preferences are uniquely impactful on the way utilities can manage the energy trilemma. The energy trilemma is often referred to colloquially as a three-legged stool, with GHG reductions only one of those legs. But the other two, reliability and affordability, are key to the success of the transition.
Policymakers should urgently consider whether any pathway exists to deliver reliable net-zero energy by 2050. If not, letting the pace of the transition be dictated by only one of those legs guarantees, at best, a wobbly stool. Matching the pace of GHG reductions with achievable measures to maintain energy diversity and reliability at prices that are affordable will be critical to setting us on a truly sustainable pathway to net zero, even if it isnāt achieved by 2050.
Dave Morton, former Chair and CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC), is with the Canadian Energy Reliability Council.Ā
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