Renewable opportunity from carbon pricing setback
In her column “U.S. bombshell need not be a curse for Trudeau”, Chantal Hebert had examined cross-border opportunities and challenges such as having to rethink carbon pricing in Canada.
She overlooked a potential for increased Canadian competitiveness from sustainable economies during a Donald Trump presidency.
Carbon pricing has a track record of subsidizing fossil expansions and for framing a status quo to slow down long-overdue renewable infrastructure initiatives.
Let’s not be fooled and oiled by the good cop, bad cop routine of carbon pricers, like Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson or B.C. Premier Christy Clark and their support crew of Flat-Earthers, climate deniers.
We should have stepped out of carbon price magical thinking already and put the shoulder to the wheel of profitable renewable energy production and export such as from wind power.
Suppressed rights and freedoms, as well as deeply wounded economic and ecological justice, have a way of reasserting themselves destructively.
The resentment that brought Trump into the White House has a regressive flavour beyond the frequent confederate flags at his rallies, harkening back to another troubled changeover in energy economies.
Borrowing from Leonard Cohen’s title for his poetry collection The Energy of Slaves, Calgary journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk named his book on the political unpleasantries of petro-oriented economies like Canada The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the new Servitude.
Staying in Nikiforuk’s analogy, we can use for a moment the Mason-Dixon line along the Ohio River that once had separated northern states from a South where slavery was legal, to better visualize modern divisions between outdated and appropriate energy initiatives.
French writer Alexis de Tocqueville travelled widely in the U.S., and his observations from 1831 deliver a warning from history:
“On the north bank of the Ohio, everything is activity, industry. Labour is honoured, there are no slaves.
“Pass to the south bank and there appear changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world. The enterprising spirit is gone.”
Canada can push back economic weakness and lower emissions, without B.C.-type carbon accounting fraud, and thrive with resilience as industrial society.
With the Trumpists in charge of the White House, Congress, Senate and soon the U.S. Supreme Court, the opening Canadian opportunity is logically not in unconventional oil and gas expansion, but in renewable development.
Perhaps this means energizing the 49th parallel not as wall but as quasi Mason-Dixon-inspired demarcation of Canadian independence going hand-in-hand with sustainable players in North America and beyond.
Peter Becker
Energy consultant
Whitehorse
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