Economy
Trump’s Promise Of American Abundance, Fueled By ‘Liquid Gold’

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
One of the brightest nuggets of policy in Donald Trump’s July 18 acceptance speech to the Republican convention in Milwaukee was his ode to “liquid gold.” That is, oil.
As part of his inflation-fighting plan, Trump offered a gleaming solution: increase energy production, thereby decreasing energy prices. “By slashing energy costs,” Trump declared, “we will in turn reduce the cost of transportation, manufacturing and all household goods.”
He continued: “We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far. We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy.”
Indeed. According to the Institute for Energy Research (IER) technically recoverable oil resources in the U.S. total 2.136 trillion barrels. At the current price of around $80 a barrel, that’s some $171 trillion. And so, Trump concluded, “we will reduce our debt, $36 trillion.”
As former Alaska governor Sarah Palin would say, “You betcha.” In Palin’s Alaska, oil is so abundant, relative to the population, that everyone gets a check from the state. Last year, it was $1,312. For a family of four, that’s more than $5000. Our goal should be that every American gets such an energy dividend.
Moreover, the abundance of America’s carbon fuels is not limited to oil. According to IER, we have 3.391 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s worth $165 trillion.
To be sure, these staggering dollar totals can’t be counted directly against the national debt—or in support of some future tax cut. Yet every dollar of our energy assets would contribute to the economy, and if even 10 percent of the humongous total could be available to the public, we could, in fact, pay off the national debt.
Moreover, thanks to fracking and other enhanced recovery techniques, we keep finding more energy: Human ingenuity has upended old beliefs about energy shortages, ushering in an almost Moore’s Law-ish surge in production.
Indeed, there’s so much oil and gas (and coal) that an emerging school of thought holds that carbon fuels aren’t “fossil” at all, but rather, the product of earth’s vulcanism. The core of this earth, after all, is the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Perhaps all that heat is cooking something.
In any case, we keep finding more oil, and not just in the U.S.
So how, exactly, do we take advantage of this planetary cornucopia? As Palin said, as Trump said, and as the convention crowd chanted, “drill, baby, drill.”
Okay, but what about climate change? Most Republicans don’t worry too much about that, but if Democrats do, they should be reassured that we can capture the carbon and so take it out of the atmosphere. Trees and other green vegetation have been capturing carbon for eons; the element is, in fact, vital to their very existence. Similarly, the human body is 18 percent carbon. Yes, all of us ourselves are carbon sinks.
So we, being smart, can capture vastly more carbon — capturing it in everything from wood to cement, from plastics to nanotubes. These in turn can be landfill, construction materials — maybe even a space elevator.
We can, in fact, establish a a circular carbon economy: carbon fuels extracted, burned, and then recycled back into feedstocks. By this reckoning, carbon fuels are renewable. Such creative thinking can power all those energy-hungry data centers on which Big Tech and AI depend. So there’s the makings of a bipartisan “Grand Carbon Bargain,” uniting mostly blue-state tech with mostly red-state energy. More energy + more tech = more wealth for all.
In Milwaukee, Trump spoke of American “energy dominance,” and that’s great. But with all the energy we can produce and consume, we can speak of economic abundance — and that’s even greater.
James P. Pinkerton served in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is the author, most recently, of “The Secret of Directional Investing: Making Money Amidst the Red-Blue Rumble.”
Business
Overregulation is choking Canadian businesses, says the MEI

From the Montreal Economic Institute
The federal government’s growing regulatory burden on businesses is holding Canada back and must be urgently reviewed, argues a new publication from the MEI released this morning.
“Regulation creep is a real thing, and Ottawa has been fuelling it for decades,” says Krystle Wittevrongel, director of research at the MEI and coauthor of the Viewpoint. “Regulations are passed but rarely reviewed, making it burdensome to run a business, or even too costly to get started.”
Between 2006 and 2021, the number of federal regulatory requirements in Canada rose by 37 per cent, from 234,200 to 320,900. This is estimated to have reduced real GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points, employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points, according to recent Statistics Canada data.
Small businesses are disproportionately impacted by the proliferation of new regulations.
In 2024, firms with fewer than five employees pay over $10,200 per employee in regulatory and red tape compliance costs, compared to roughly $1,400 per employee for businesses with 100 or more employees, according to data from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Overall, Canadian businesses spend 768 million hours a year on compliance, which is equivalent to almost 394,000 full-time jobs. The costs to the economy in 2024 alone were over $51.5 billion.
It is hardly surprising in this context that entrepreneurship in Canada is on the decline. In the year 2000, 3 out of every 1,000 Canadians started a business. By 2022, that rate had fallen to just 1.3, representing a nearly 57 per cent drop since 2000.
The impact of regulation in particular is real: had Ottawa maintained the number of regulations at 2006 levels, Canada would have seen about 10 per cent more business start-ups in 2021, according to Statistics Canada.
The MEI researcher proposes a practical way to reevaluate the necessity of these regulations, applying a model based on the Chrétien government’s 1995 Program Review.
In the 1990s, the federal government launched a review process aimed at reducing federal spending. Over the course of two years, it successfully eliminated $12 billion in federal spending, a reduction of 9.7 per cent, and restored fiscal balance.
A similar approach applied to regulations could help identify rules that are outdated, duplicative, or unjustified.
The publication outlines six key questions to evaluate existing or proposed regulations:
- What is the purpose of the regulation?
- Does it serve the public interest?
- What is the role of the federal government and is its intervention necessary?
- What is the expected economic cost of the regulation?
- Is there a less costly or intrusive way to solve the problem the regulation seeks to address?
- Is there a net benefit?
According to OECD projections, Canada is expected to experience the lowest GDP per capita growth among advanced economies through 2060.
“Canada has just lived through a decade marked by weak growth, stagnant wages, and declining prosperity,” says Ms. Wittevrongel. “If policymakers are serious about reversing this trend, they must start by asking whether existing regulations are doing more harm than good.”
The MEI Viewpoint is available here.
* * *
The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
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 it’s 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-setting CAD$3 trillion 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. Studies 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 didn’t address 1950s air pollution in Los Angeles by banning cars but by creating the catalytic converter. We didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 — one-hundredth of overall “green” spending. We should increase this four-fold to about $140 billion a year. Canada’s share would be less than $5 billion a year, less than a tenth of its 2024 CAD$50 billion 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 don’t have a bureaucracy that, at a huge cost, certifies every consumer’s cellphone when it is bought. We don’t 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 switch—not just rich, well-meaning Canadians, but China, India, and countries across Africa.
Of course, we don’t 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 CO₂-free oil (a proposal from the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter), CO₂ 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 it’s 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 — 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.
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