Canada's Green Agenda Is Ridiculous | Premier Danielle Smith

The radical left have indicated very, very clearly their willingness to sacrifice the poor to the planet, right? This shocked me, actually, you know, because I could see a tension developing between the low energy prices that were clearly necessary to continue lifting the world's poor out of poverty. Which you would think would be the primary concern of the left, right? In principle, they stand for the marginalized and oppressed, and in principle, perhaps primarily along the economic dimension at least. That was the classic left that we had contended with, dealt with for, you know, a century in the West.

But now we saw on the energy and environment front that the nature worship that's characteristic of the followers of Eric, let's say, will trump any concern whatsoever for the inhabitants of Africa, to point to one place in particular. Right? Because the Africans are energy poor, as are the Indians and, to some degree, the Chinese, although they're rectifying that very, very rapidly. So it seems to me that there's an unbelievable opportunity for the classic liberals who are willing to divorce themselves from the idiot progressives and the conservatives to say, "No, look, if you want a real policy to alleviate poverty, there isn't anything that you can do that even comes close to the provision of cheap energy by whatever means."

Now you want to keep the pollution under control, but if it is actually the case that increasing wealth at the bottom decreases environmental load, which seems to be the case, or at least you can make that argument credibly, then that's a pretty, that's a win-win solution for everyone. No more poverty and a wiser populace with regards to environmental issues from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's a good vision, and so it's an excellent vision.

I'd add one more on top because it actually improves the planet from an environmental point of view. You'd mentioned Bjorn Lomborg, and I think Michael Shellenberger has done good work on this as well, but one of the things that I have heard as I've gone out talking about the value proposition that Alberta has to offer is I'm told that if we don't provide that secure supply of LNG so that they can be using it for their energy needs, they're actually quite worried in places like the Asian countries and in India.

If we can't provide them with whether it's ammonia or LNG or some kind of hydrogen carrier, that they're just going to have to keep on developing coal-fired power. Of course they will! And coal has advantages; you can stockpile coal like mad. All you have to do is put it in a pile; it's pretty straightforward. So of course, they're going to turn to coal. Why? Because there's absolutely no way that these developing countries, where most of the people are, are going to be able to withstand the pressure from the population with regards to the necessity of economic growth.

And we already saw this, Premier Smith. We saw this in Germany. The Germans took this demented tilt towards green environmentalism, and all that's happened is that their electricity is five times as expensive as it should have been, and they pollute more. Not least because they have to burn lignite—that's how it's turned out. Lignite, for God's sake, the most polluting form of coal! They shut their nuclear power plants down, which was utterly insane.

So what's happened in Germany is they are more dependent on, like, Putin, for example; their energy costs have spiraled out of control. They're de-industrializing as a consequence, and they pollute more. The only way that's a victory is if all you wanted to do to begin with was cause as much havoc and disruption as possible.

You know, it's funny you should say that because one of my MLAs in the legislature, and just listening to what our opponents in the New Democratic Party have to say, he came up with this formula that the progressives have: They identify a problem, and then they identify a solution that will make things worse. Then they criticize conservatives who have solutions that are actually a lot more practical and may work and try to demonize the solutions that we take.

But you're absolutely right that there's this—maybe sort of a—it's plausible that the approach that they would take would work. It's plausible that if you built out an economy based on nothing but wind and solar and batteries, that everybody would have free electricity, and it would drive prices down, and it would be unlimited because the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere.

If you just interconnect it enough, then it should work. I think that that plausible lie has been at the heart of why we’ve had such dysfunctional policy around how we develop our energy sector. You need to have reliable power; that should be number one. It shouldn't go without saying that a fuel source that only works 10% of the time, in the case of sun in our market, or 30% of the time in the case of wind, is not something that you can power an industrialized economy on.

And then on top of that, if you try to add everything onto the power grid so that all of your industrial use has to come from electricity, all your heating has to come from electricity, all your transportation has to come from electricity, at some point it gets absurd, and it's obvious that it is unachievable. But I think there’s this aspirational approach that they put out there that people want it to be true, and so they continue to endorse policies that are completely incapable; it's impossible to be able to implement them.

And it's our job as conservatives to understand where that aspiration comes from because I think people are good-hearted. They actually want to have less impact on the planet. We all enjoy our beautiful outdoor spaces, and so we want to make sure that we're not doing anything that's going to impact biodiversity. So I think that there is a human need to be in touch with nature that they're able to, I think, take advantage of to propose policies that simply won't work.

So we have to make sure we understand where that human motivation is coming from and say, "Look, we can achieve that a different way," and then we have to propose what that different way is, and that's what we're trying to do in Alberta.

Well, there's also a shadow side to that, just like there was a shadow side to the fossil fuel industry's presumption that if they marketed themselves in a green way, that that would be a net economic advantage to them. All presumed that the people that you're contending with are playing a fair game, and I actually don't believe that that's the case with much of the environmental nonsense. I feel that way, for example, when I go into a hotel and I see signs everywhere telling me that they're only going to do laundry every two days because they're saving the planet.

And that isn't why they're not doing laundry; they're not doing laundry because it saves money. Fair enough, but they can cover that with this claim of environmental virtue. And so many of the people who signal on the environmental side, and this is particularly true in the political realm on the left, are doing that not because they care for the environment in the least. Not if it came to actually making personal sacrifices for doing something about it; they want to be seen to be the saviors of the planet without doing any of the work, any of the background work, any of the research, any of the industrial innovation that would be necessary to carry it out.

They want to be seen as experts without noting, for example, "Well, how the hell are you going to interconnect all the world's power grids together? Where are you going to get the wire? Where are you going to get the metal?" Isn't it a problem not only that wind works 10% of the time, but when it doesn't work, you have to have a parallel energy system in place? And if that's not nuclear, it has to be fossil fuels.

So then instead of having just a fossil fuel grid, let's say, for the electrical for our electrified economy, you have to have a wind and a solar grid plus a fossil fuel grid. Well, how in the world could anyone with any sense whatsoever think that that constituted an improvement? Especially when you also decide, let's say, to take nuclear out of the equation, which is the last thing you’d do if you actually cared about carbon dioxide production.

For me, it's mostly—it’s not even there is an element of care with regards to environmental sustainability, but there's a much larger element of being seen to be seen praying in public, to put it bluntly, to be seen virtue signaling with no effort. And so the NDP in particular are good at that.