Shockingly, just to reduce emissions to supposedly stop climate change, the city of Ottawa, Canada is following the lead of Germany, Australia, and California that now have among the highest costs for electricity because of their decarbonization efforts.
Ottawa is prepared to bankrupt the city and risk the safety of its most vulnerable citizens to put their plans in place to achieve its “net-zero by 2050” target, regardless of its impact on the lifestyles of its citizens.
The City is totally in sync with the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investments that are all the rage on Wall Street these days. Political leaders like Al Gore, billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, and more than 180 CEOs signed the Business Roundtable corporate purpose statement supporting ESG goals to divest from all 3 fossil fuels of coal, natural gas, and crude oil, just to reduce emissions.
The domino effect of tinkering with the supply chain of fossil fuels is supply shortages and soaring prices for not only electricity, but for the thousands of products that support the entire medical industry, all branches of the military, airports, electronics, communications, merchant ships, container ships, and cruise liners, as well as asphalt for roads, and fertilizers to help feed the world.
What’s Ottawa’s motivation for encouraging deterioration of the oil infrastructure that is guaranteed to inflict irreparable harm to the supply chain of crude oil to refineries that manufacture oil products for the world’s infrastructures and it’s 8 billion people?
Who knows, but efforts to cease the use of crude oil would be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change. It would result in billions of fatalities from disease, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths. Imagine the cold, misery, and loss of life under a scenario where cities attempt to generate 100 percent of their electricity from breezes and sunshine.
The ESG factors apparently driving Ottawa’s agenda and that of the banking industry are an attempt to bring us back to a world like that in the 1800’s when the world was truly “decarbonized.” Back then, life was hard and dirty, and most people never traveled more than 100-200 miles from where they were born. With no coal or natural gas power plants, life expectancy was short and we had not discovered that crude oil could be manufactured into so many of the vitally important products that we take for granted today.
Indeed, the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for the generation of electricity, but to manufacture derivatives and fuels which are the ingredients of everything needed by our economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper. Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media, most of whom demonstrate a pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage, start to understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization movement.
Read the rest of this piece at CFACT.org.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
Photo credit: courtesy CFACT.org
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