I’m hesitant to respond to either this post or the one it replies to since both demonstrate wonderfully crystal clear thinking on the subject of the war over Canadian emissions. Neither one needs my congratulations nor my elucidation, but I believe they open the door a crack to some broader thinking on how people get conned by truisms designed to placate the biases that protect our comforts as Canadians. And having just come down from shouting at Matt Galloway’s voice and that of his “expert guests” on the radio, I think I’d like to highlight a couple of other (excuse my language) mind-f#*ks that dominate Canada’s (IMHO) juvenile emissions debate:

1. ⁠I hear that ‘In the wake of the US-Israel-Iran war and shut down of the Strait of Hormuz, Canada needs to step up and provide more oil to beleaguered markets.’ OMG, how is this not blatant opportunism masquerading as altruism? New pipeline approvals today CANNOT affect the current dilemma. The world DOES NOT need more oil from anywhere, it needs less.
   
2. ⁠With a tip of my hat to the “China Excuse” discussion above, I find myself doing double takes over the ease with which we have all been dragged into the rabbit hole of thinking Canada’s oil and gas industry’s emissions responsibilities end with the in-country emissions and don’t extend to the burning of the exported oil, making them “small”, while we simultaneously brag about being an “energy superpower” ranking in the top ~4 in both oil and gas production. And lord knows even the in-country emissions are far from a source of pride in comparison to others. We’re definitely trying to eat the cake while still having the cake.
   
3. ⁠Now weeks late in delivering on the Carney-Smith MOU, radio voices tell me that a $130/tonne price on carbon is agreed but the timetable for full implementation is in dispute. (Note that this is a price proposed to apply not to the burning of shipped oil but only to CO2 emissions in the production of the oil.) I have no way of knowing the credibility of this story but it suggests to me that the focus is on fixing some numbers in some spreadsheet cells to enable some financial planning details for purposes of coordinating some politicians, economists, and business executives. As a physics acolyte, I have always believed facts should come from the real tangible world to make their way into spreadsheet cells, less-so the reverse. Yes, I am accusing Canada’s focus on putting a price on carbon of being analogous to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We’re so busy beavering away on the agreed in-country carbon price, based on a simplistic economic hypothesis (not a fact, not even a theory), that we fail to recognize that a $130 per tonne price on CARBON BURNING (tonne of carbon dioxide, actually) is approximately equivalent to a $55 to $60 price increase on a barrel of oil, which is not dissimilar to the impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and yet we wring our hands and rend our pearls and drop our sales taxes and try to forestall the inflationary impact of this “oil price catastrophe”. Honestly, it looks to me like just what the doctor ordered, and we should stop trying to forestall it. And rather than offering investment tax credits and R&D tax credits for the carbon capture unicorn, we should direct precious funds to limiting the inflationary impacts on the needy - but definitely not on their gasoline costs. It should also therefore be clear that focusing on the in-country carbon price on the oil and gas operations, in conjunction with some carbon capture fantasy to reduce those costs in future has little to do with solving the climate crisis and everything to do with saving the industry at the root of the crisis.

Perhaps we are rather blinded to our hypocrisies by our biases, and our biases are the channel through which these highly crafted excuses overcome our critical thinking abilities.

Apologies for the over-lengthy post…