Trans Mountain proves the business case for a West Coast pipeline - "The Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline celebrated its second birthday, and its gift to its owners, the taxpayers of Canada, is that it is already full. In industry speak, it was “apportioned” in June for the first time ever; the pipeline could not accommodate all the requests of oil shippers to use it. While the pipeline had an ignominious start—a $34 billion boondoggle—the ability to get Canadian oil to Pacific tidewater has proven to be priceless. This is all relevant, of course, because another pipeline to the West Coast will be proposed by Alberta by the end of the month. The professional naysayer class is already undermining its long term viability. The undeniable success of TMX makes their case difficult to make... Despite being approved by the federal regulator in 2016, TMX soon became a perfect storm of regulatory, political, and financial risk due to disputes over the pipeline between B.C. and Alberta and litigation from Burnaby, Vancouver, and First Nations... The pipeline was embroiled in challenges, delays, and cost overruns. The constitutional duty to consult and accommodate principle was tested, a pandemic erupted, and floods raged. At one point, work in one section was stopped for four months over the summer (also known in Canada as “construction season”) because some nests from a common hummingbird species were discovered. TMX did not go billions over budget; it went tens of billions over budget. Alongside the political rejection of the Northern Gateway pipeline in 2018, a red warning light flashed over Canada to any prospective proponent or investor: you cannot build pipelines here. The passing of the “no more pipelines” Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, and the “no more tankers” C-48 Oil Tanker Moratorium added insult to injury, and it was widely expected that TMX, which finally entered operations in May 2024, would be the last new oil pipeline to the West Coast in Canada, so poisoned was the well. But then Donald Trump came along and threatened to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. And the easiest way for Canada to diversify exports—building a million-barrel oil pipeline to reach Asian markets—became not only palatable, but popular. We were going to become an energy superpower. Some pockets of Canadians are still opposed, of course. Of their favourite arguments, a few are on repeat: there is no private proponent; we shouldn’t use taxpayer money for pipelines; and there is no demand/need. The case of TMX helps counter these. At the outset, let me say that of course it would be better if the West Coast pipeline had a private proponent and didn’t need government de-risking in the form of loans or equity. We have that, already, in the Enbridge Mainline Optimization (400,000 bpd) and the South Bow-Bridger pipeline on part of the old Keystone XL route (550,000 bpd), which have already attracted commitments from shippers. If we were satisfied with just sending more oil to the U.S., we could be laissez-faire. But we aren’t, and we shouldn’t be, because we sell oil into that market at a discount to global prices; because optionality is an asset, especially as wild cards like tariffs and Venezuelan heavy oil production come up; and because oil is a powerful tool for bolstering alliances and exerting soft power. So we need the pipeline on a route that goes through B.C. that is at risk of political and legal opposition, significant cost overruns, and—don’t forget—still has an oil tanker moratorium at the end of it. No private proponent is yet willing to take on that risk, and so, like the original Trans Mountain as well as its expansion, there is a need for governments to step up... One should not expect that Canadian taxpayers will lose out from the pipeline. Far from it. In the case of TMX, the pipeline is a profitable asset that the Crown owns and receives dividends from. In the first quarter of 2026, an aggregate of $448 million was paid to the Government of Canada, consisting of $148 million in interest payments and $300 million in cash dividends. Trans Mountain has returned $2.2 billion in cash to Canada since May 2024, and that number will rise as it receives higher tolls from expanded usage. The pipeline has not been bought with taxpayers’ money, but rather financed with the federal government’s AAA credit rating and paid for through the tolls from oil producers that use it. The pipeline’s exorbitant cost means it will take a few extra years than desired for those tolls to pay off the debt. But it will be paid off with revenues—not taxes."
Left wingers are deathly opposed to East-West pipelines, but they also claim they want to reduce dependence on the US. Ironic.
Left wing logic: throw in so much regulation that it's impossible for the private sector to undertake projects, then proclaim that the "free market" has spoken and that the government shouldn't "subsidise" projects (ironic, given that they keep demanding government expand its role in the economy, too, building housing, continuing to ban private healthcare etc)
Britain’s oldest sugar factory shuts because of sky-high energy costs - "Britain’s oldest sugar factory is to close because of sky-high energy costs. The site at Cantley, in Norfolk, was the first sugar-processing factory to open in the UK and has been operating since 1912. More than 100 people face losing their jobs as part of the closure. The shutdown of the plant, which is operated by British Sugar, could come as early as February 2027."
Climate change hystericists won't stop till all industry has been shut down
Scandal engulfs Britain’s electricity grid - "Neso has found itself thrust uncomfortably into the spotlight amid allegations of a cover-up concerning how secure the grid really is... Evidence of grid instability is being systematically hidden, they say, and corporate affairs staff have pressured control room engineers to avoid taking actions that would risk public embarrassment. The explosive claims – which remain unproven and are now being investigated – may sound technical but could not be more serious. They also come against a backdrop of increasing scrutiny of Neso because of the front-line role it plays in delivering Ed Miliband’s 2030 clean power targets. Speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, Coutinho reminded MPs that “life and death” decisions were being taken by Neso every day. “If they don’t get it right, we will have blackouts,” she said. “And in blackouts, people die.”... Within weeks of Miliband’s appointment as Energy Secretary, Neso staff were also handed a political hot potato as he commissioned them to advise on whether his plan to make the electricity system almost entirely “clean” by 2030 was feasible. In a report published in November 2024, the public company responded “yes” – giving Miliband the expert endorsement he wanted, albeit in heavily caveated form. Neso also backed Miliband’s highly contested claim that his green energy rollout would cut consumer bills in the same timeframe. Yet within days, the findings were being picked apart as critics argued the conclusions rested on a series of questionable assumptions and counter-factual scenarios. For instance, the Centre for Policy Studies criticised Neso’s “dubious” claim that Miliband’s clean power plan would be cheaper than the status quo. Coutinho and the Conservatives also highlighted the way Miliband’s department and his advisers had been repeatedly consulted during the drafting of Neso’s report. In emails first obtained by the Guido Fawkes website, Neso officials asked their government colleagues to comment on the “messaging, tone and structure” of the document as well as “anything that you think is missing and anything you strongly dislike or can’t live with!”. Another area where the grid operator faces scrutiny is in its annual “winter outlook” reports, which have continually asserted that the electricity system is becoming more secure each year – even as the public body resorts to more and more short-term measures to keep the lights on. On June 23, as they scrambled to cope with higher-than-expected electricity demand and low output from domestic wind farms, control room staff cut power exports to the Continent at short notice to help balance the system. Later that same week, they were also forced to issue two “electricity margin notices” – something never done before in summer – that urged all power plants with spare capacity to come forward. It was during this week that whistleblowers allege records were not properly kept and that particular as-yet-unnamed stabilising actions were eschewed to save Neso’s blushes."
Time to double down on renewables and net zero!
Millions of households could face threat of emergency blackouts - "Measures that came into effect this week give the National Energy System Operator (Neso) the authority to tackle electricity shortages with rolling power cuts around the country... Protected sites, such as hospitals, water treatment facilities and military bases, are not within the scheme’s scope. However, sceptics said the new rules underlined the difficulty grid bosses face managing fluctuating levels of wind and solar generation, which make up a growing share of the UK’s electricity mix."
Britain ‘risks winter fuel shortages’ without North Sea gas field - "Britain risks fuel shortages over the winter if Andy Burnham fails to approve a new gas project in the North Sea, its operator has said. Neil McCulloch, whose energy company Adura is preparing to drill for gas at the Jackdaw field, said the site would be crucial to securing gas supplies this winter. The project faced a legal challenge from environmental campaigners and was blocked after a court ruled that it had been approved illegally."
BP unveils fresh £750m blow from failed bet on net zero - "BP has revealed a fresh $1bn (£750m) hit from its botched net zero strategy, just days after its new chief executive promised to restore stability to the embattled oil giant. The FTSE 100-listed company said it expected to write down the value of its low-carbon and energy transition division by a further $1bn, on top of a $5bn write-down it booked earlier this year. It has been seeking to unwind a green energy strategy set out in 2020 under Bernard Looney, its former chief executive, to cut fossil fuel production and reach net zero emissions by 2050, following a backlash from shareholders. Mr Looney slashed oil output by 40pc and invested billions in green power projects before leaving in 2023 following a review of his personal relationships with colleagues. Murray Auchincloss, his successor, lasted less than two years in the top job amid investor impatience with the company’s net zero turnaround."
How ignorant. Don't they know that renewables are the future and they need to move Beyond Petroleum?!
How soon will world's oil supplies peak? (2005) - "If world crude-oil production hits its peak and then falls within the next five to 10 years, would America be ready? The answer is, almost certainly not. A debate unlike anything seen since the oil embargoes of the 1970s has erupted over the future of world petroleum supplies. A chorus of experts claims that the peak in production may be approaching, and that the impact of a peak and subsequent dropoff would be devastating to the world's economies."
Left wingers were claiming that 20 years ago, there weren't predictions of peak oil being 5 years away. Of course, now climate change hystericists claim that in 5 years time, fossil fuel demand will drop off, so building a pipeline is silly. Of course, at the same time they complain about greedy oil companies earning lots of profits for decades if the taxpayer acts as a backstop against self inflicted legal and regulatory risk. Left wing ideology at work again, working backwards from the conclusion
Meme - Jim Steele @JimSteeleSkepti: "There were more fires in Canada and the USA during the Little Ice Age. Blaming the fires on climate change is just more grifting alarmist propaganda!"
"Chavardes (2022) Converging and diverging burn rates in North American boreal forests from the Little Ice Age to the present." in International Journal of Wildland
Fig. 2. Burn rates and their standardised breakpoint probabilities over time for the 16 fire-history study sites in North American boreal forests."
Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless - "Panic, always a mistake, is most dangerous when the problem is real. And the ill-informed panic of the educated is worst of all, since it guarantees the selection of specious and even counterproductive remedies. The last 25 years of British energy policy is an extended demonstration of that principle... There is no question that the situation in France is grave, but one televised summer is not a firm foundation for energy policy stretching many decades into the future. However, let us concede the alarming premise, and move to the question that actually matters. If we must act, will the action proposed, renewable energy, really work? Here the scepticism of the Right, however crudely expressed online, is founded on something more than prejudice, firstly on physics, and also on decades of unusually well-documented failure. It is often said, and Tim Stanley repeats it, that “the renewables revolution” is already under way. But is it? Global energy consumption has tripled since the early 1970s, bringing vast advances in wellbeing, but virtually all of that growth has been supplied by oil, coal and gas. Renewables, including the traditional biomass on which a significant part of the world still cooks, accounted for some 12 per cent of primary energy in 1971. They account for about 15 per cent now, and much of that modest proportional gain is the result of heavy subsidy in the West, over £200bn in the UK alone since 2002, as well as intense market coercion favouring wind and solar and deprecating coal and gas. The cost has been large, yet the resulting renewables output is not only modest but still, after all these years, in need of subsidy. “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” The mountains laboured, and brought forth a ridiculous mouse... subsidised, zero-marginal-cost, weather-dependent generation has driven the firm generators that guarantee security of supply out of the energy market, and that plant must now be paid to exist. This is an indirect subsidy to renewables, and there are others. Overall, grid balancing costs ran at some £370m a year in the early 2000s, before wind and solar, but now amount to several billion annually. Transmission charges have also climbed as the grid is extended and reinforced to connect remote wind with centres of demand. Adding the direct and the indirect together, my colleague Lee Moroney and I at Renewable Energy Foundation estimate that the total renewables subsidy cost to consumers since 2002 stands at about £223bn in 2024 prices – near £8,000 per household – running now at roughly £25bn a year. Renewables subsidy accounts for something like 40 per cent of the total cost of electricity supply in this country. Most tellingly of all, the subsidy per megawatt hour of renewable electricity generated has not fallen but has actually risen by about half in real terms since 2005, to around £200. How can 20-plus years of lavish public support have been so unsuccessful? Physics. Electricity consumers do not buy energy pure and simple, they buy a steady rate of joules per second – power in the literal sense – available on demand and at a constant frequency and voltage. That is a low-entropy, high-quality product. Wind and sunlight supply energy in abundance, true, but in dilute, disordered, stochastic flows. The gap between what the consumer needs and what wind and solar can supply is no mere detail; it is a fundamental difference of thermodynamic quality, and it cannot be wished away. The necessary physical order has to be supplied by something, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is quite clear that order is never free. So the grid system provides the remedial correction – with gas turbines held in readiness, synchronous compensation, interconnectors, batteries, reinforced transmission, and a constant traffic of balancing actions by NESO, the system operator. That is the entropy correction, and it must be paid for. Consequently, the falling auction prices for renewables and the rising system costs are not in contradiction. The cost has been moved, not removed. These costs have consequences. Britain’s electricity consumption has already fallen by 23 per cent since 2005. This is not efficiency but price rationing, and total primary energy consumption is down by an alarming 30 per cent over the same period. The likely end of this experiment is not a serene glide into post-carbon uplands but a distressed retreat to unabated coal. When electricity, for air conditioning perhaps, becomes expensive and unreliable, populations will demand the cheapest on offer, and that is very likely to be coal, an excellent, low-entropy fuel in physical terms though high emitting. The green Left’s hostility to nuclear power was, as Tim Stanley said, foolish. But the enthusiasm for renewables that he shares has been even worse. It consumed capital, engineering talent and the political will which could have delivered a serious decarbonisation programme grounded in nuclear and high-efficiency gas. Instead it has built a costly yet fragile grid that is jeopardised by routine events that would have been shrugged off by the robust (and cheaper) system of the past."
Konstantin Kisin on X - "This is very worth reading because it beautifully lays out the faulty thinking that has given us suicidal economic policy that has also made no impact on climate change whatsoever. Characteristically, it pretends that those who oppose Net Zero do so because they deny that the climate is changing (no one sensible does), that outsourcing our emissions to poor countries, an accounting trick, is somehow green (it's not) and, most importantly, challenges the argument that the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions produced in the world today are emitted by countries that care about economic growth way more than they care about "saving the planet" (China, India etc) by citing Kenya whose entire annual emissions are roughly equivalent to what China emits in about 8 hours. The hoax is not climate change. The hoax is that we can stop it by making ourselves poorer."
We don't need to trash the economy to save the planet - "The Right has a “misplaced sympathy for the devil” over fossil fuels, according to Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley. It is a good line, but I plead not guilty. I have no romantic enthusiasm for coal, no shares in Shell, and no desire to see England turn to khaki dust. I do, however, have an attachment to British workers keeping their jobs, to pensioners affording their electricity bills, and to policies which are at least somewhat connected to generating economic growth. If that is diabolism, all I can say is the devil has become remarkably dull... we must remember that we have the power to change policy in this country only (though in fact we won’t even have that soon either, once the Government’s ghastly EU reset is in place). However desirable we might find it for other countries to look at the world as we do and come to the same conclusions, they don’t – and all our wailing and gnashing of teeth here in Britain is not going to change that. Look at the reality. In China, one-sixth of the global economy on its own, carbon emissions have gone up by more than 250 per cent since 2000. China’s energy consumption is around four times as much as in 2000 and electricity consumption has gone up even faster. Both are powered by coal, which China is using at its highest-ever levels. Coal is now about 70 per cent of China’s domestic energy production: solar and wind are just over 5 per cent. It’s not difficult to list similar figures for the other major developing economies. This isn’t surprising. These countries want to get rich and the best way of doing that is to increase energy output as fast as they can – and that mainly means coal and other fossil fuels. The few anecdotes Tim quotes don’t change this reality. It is a happy chance for Kenya if they have geothermal resources they can draw upon. But they still have a quarter as much energy per person as Britain and most of that is burning biofuels and animal waste. They need something better than that. Or take Bangladesh. Tim’s concern that a third of its agricultural GDP may be lost rests on one unsupported and un-footnoted speculative sentence in a World Bank technical report. He is right to point to population displacement, but that has sadly been happening in the Ganges delta since time immemorial, and the casualties from it have fallen dramatically as Bangladesh has got richer. The fundamental problem for those who think like Tim is that the rest of the world wants to get rich and live like Westerners. For now, fossil fuels and, in some cases, nuclear represent the only viable route. Investing in renewables does not secure your energy supply until the battery storage problem is solved – which is still many years away. For all the progress we have made in Britain – and we are a world leader in emissions reduction, contrary to what hand-wringing NGOs would have you think – solar and wind power supply under 5 per cent of our total energy. No one is getting out of fossil fuels – unless they want to get poorer. Even if we ignore these facts, nothing we do in Britain could change them. We produce 0.8 per cent of global emissions. You could vaporise the entire British economy and it would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by just one hundredth of one degree. British emissions have already fallen by half over the last 30 years as we have introduced expensive renewables, reduced energy consumption and exported energy-intensive industry. This has had precisely zero impact on most of the rest of the world, either practical or, it seems, moral. British voters and workers have already more than done their bit. We have tried to exercise leadership. The problem is that there hasn’t been any followership. The answer to the climate problem does not lie in terrifying ourselves or in a Soviet-style reordering of our entire economy around carbon emissions. It lies in adaptation to a slowly warming climate and in adopting new low-carbon technology if and when it becomes economically viable and, crucially, better than its predecessors. Conservative politicians, of all kinds, ought not to be captured by big unproven ideas regardless of their human consequences. Benjamin Disraeli did clean the Thames, and he was right to. But he did it because a Londoner could smell the result, within a Londoner’s lifetime, for a price a Londoner could bear. He did not tax the poor of Whitechapel to alter the temperature in 100 years’ time on the off-chance that Shanghai would follow suit. That is the difference between responsible stewardship and pointless sacrifice... Tim thinks the online Right looks silly. Perhaps it sometimes does. But there is nothing clever about spending a fortune to change the weather by a hundredth of a degree, and nothing particularly conservative about saying we have no choice in the matter."
Clearly, if the British destroy their economy even more, the rest of the world will suddenly be inspired to be equally suicidal, so they need to double down
BP’s North Sea exit shows Ed Miliband has been a disaster for Britain - "Ed Miliband leaves behind his role as Energy Secretary with the UK facing the highest industrial electricity costs in the world. Industries such as chemicals and building materials are under enormous pressure... There are so many different ways that Miliband has damaged the British economy that it is often hard for even his most assiduous critics to keep track of them all. And yet there is one that should absolutely top the list... It is impossible to blame BP for the decision to finally give up on the North Sea. It was one of the pioneers of offshore oil exploration six decades ago, but it has now decided it is no longer worth the hassle. A windfall tax confiscates any money it might make, it is subject to constant lawfare, and while Andy Burnham has signalled a more pragmatic approach, the Government has until now refused to give it permission to expand its fields. While rivals such as Norway’s state-owned Equinor deliver bumper profits, driven by increased output in its share of the North Sea, BP faces nothing but restrictions and levies. It is only doing what makes sense for its shareholders, and that means retreating... As energy secretary, Miliband made two crucial mistakes. First, he prioritised net zero over energy security. Given that Britain accounts for less than 1pc of global emissions, and we have already dramatically reduced them (unfortunately almost entirely by closing down heavy manufacturing industries instead of switching to green production), there is relatively little that we can do about the state of the global climate, decarbonisation of the power grid aside. But the security of our energy supplies is entirely within our own control, and anyone can see that domestic production is far more reliable, as well as better for the balance of payments, than oil and gas that has to be imported. The energy secretary could have balanced the two, and reached a reasonable compromise, but Miliband gave no sign of even contemplating that. Next, he failed to seize the opportunity to expand production, especially of gas, at a time when there was significant demand across Europe. It is not an issue of taking climate change seriously or not. Everyone knows that we will need fossil fuels while making the transition to cleaner forms of energy, and they may as well create jobs and tax revenue in this country instead of in Qatar, the US or Norway. If Miliband had demonstrated just a slither of flexibility, BP might still be expanding, instead of shutting down. After his two years in power, Miliband has left a trail of damage in his wake. Energy prices have soared out of control. Industrial energy is now four times more expensive in Britain than in the US, and twice the price of France, showing little sign of coming down any time soon. That has made it completely impossible to remain competitive in industries such as steel or building materials where energy can account for 40pc to 50pc of the cost base. And whole swathes of industry have been forced to close as the added costs of both energy and the green levies have crushed them. Britain dropped out of the top 10 largest manufacturing nations last year, overtaken by rivals such as Taiwan, Mexico and even Russia, and shows little sign of recapturing that place now. Meanwhile cement production has fallen to a 75-year low, meaning that even if the Government wanted to build houses, there wouldn’t be any domestic materials for the job. Of course, there are different reasons for each decision. But Miliband’s disastrous decisions have clearly been a major factor. It is going to become even worse. Instead of being thrown out of office, as any sensible prime minister would do, Burnham has promoted Miliband to Foreign Secretary. Instead of going straight to Washington to try to lay the diplomatic groundwork to persuade the Trump administration to lift its latest round of tariffs on Britain, Miliband spent his first week in charge of foreign affairs flying to Spain for some meaningless waffle about fighting climate change together. We can safely assume that backing the Business Secretary on the bread and butter issues of tariffs, trade deals and promoting exports, which should be the core priorities for the Foreign Secretary of a country with massive debts and desperately in need of a boost to growth, will be forgotten about for the next few years, while they will have plenty of photo ops where Miliband can boast about “moral leadership”. Red Ed has turned into a one-man wrecking ball, taking out huge chunks of our industrial base, destroying the North Sea,and patting himself on the back as the country’s energy supply becomes more precarious."
Climate change hystericists are still praising the UK, because they're totally clueless and/or see destroying the economy as a good thing
