Our Energy Privilege
The biggest reason the West cares so much about green energy is because we don't really need it.
Energy is literally life. Whether it's from the sun, the furnace in your basement, or from your body itself, it is a requirement for life to exist.
As with most things, when you have a lot of something, it's easy to take it for granted. Young people with seemingly boundless energy rarely think about what it's like for those who's old age has robbed them of the same. People from milder climes can't possibly understand what it takes to stay warm during a Canadian winter.
When it comes to harnessed energy, be it in the form of electricity or chemical energy, it's also easy to take that for granted when you have lots of it.
Canada is a nation abundantly blessed with energy resources. We are a world leader in extracting and processing these resources, in the most sustainable, responsible, and eco-friendly manner.
As far as energy goes - especially in terms of oil, hydro, and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) we have LOTS. So one could be forgiven for not realizing just how blessed we are.
Developing nations need cheap energy. Whether it's wood or coal, or whatever, it needs to be three things: it must be affordable, it must be dependable, and it must be easy to get. Greenhouse gas emissions are not part of their concern, nor should they be.
The Hierarchy of Needs
The hierarchy of needs is a theory by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. It basically states that an individual's most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher-level needs.
At the very base of this pyramid is physiological needs, including food, water, warmth, and rest. Most western, first world countries have all these things in abundance. In Canada, even the vast majority of what we would consider “poor” people have these four things (to varying degrees). Very few are starving here, and water and electricity are available to everyone. Yes, I realize there are some First Nations communities that don't have access to clean water here, but this is entirely a failure of government, not a question of supply.
Access to a source of abundant and reliable energy is a big part of that base. Without that, it's not even possible to think about the next level. Without warmth in the winter, or a way to escape the heat in the summer, or a safe and efficient way to cook food, the rest doesn't even matter. This is where the role of a country like Canada could be a game changer for other nations that are not as rich in resources as we are.
The thing about this pyramid, is that as soon as we think we've got one level in the bag, we just kind of forget about it and move on. We assume it's always going to be there, and we tend to look at the rest of the world through that same lens. While that's great for us, it's not terribly helpful for those nations that are doggedly attempting to catch up to us.
Our Privilege
It's interesting to me that most of the talk I hear about “privilege” (in almost every sense) comes from those who are, by their own definition, extremely privileged. No surprise that it's these same kinds of people that are the loudest voices telling us how bad we should feel about driving our cars, heating out homes, or leaving a night light on.
The only reason anyone in this part of the world is even able to give a shit about "climate change" is because we've already set ourselves up for success by using whatever affordable energy we could without the rest of the world looking down their noses at us and telling us how to do it better. Now that we're set, we can pontificate all we want about how to make things better - and evidently also about how everyone else should do things.
Albert “Inconvenient Truth” Gore made a very enlightening comment at the last climate conference:
"We must see the so-called 'dash for gas' for what it really is: a dash down a bridge to nowhere, leaving the countries of the world facing climate chaos and billions in stranded assets, especially here in Africa. We have to move beyond the era of fossil fuel colonialism."
This "fossil fuel colonialism" he talks about is actually Africa's ticket out of the dark ages. This truly is an inconvenient truth for Mr. Gore. A solid 50% of people in Africa don't even have electricity. But they have rivers that could power generators. They have access to coal that could generate steam power for generators. This is technology that has been proven to work for decades. And yet Al Gore and the rest of these idiots can't see past their shallow idealism to actually help them get these things working in a real way.
It seems like it would be a relatively simple matter to send some engineers out there and show these people how to set up a proper energy system (not a “green” one) and help them with a proper waste management system (so they can get a handle on diseases), and show them how to grow food that will sustain them. This energy system could be a hydro dam, or even a coal plant. Who gives a shit? Right now millions of them are cooking over an open fire in their houses when it's well known that 3.2 million people die from indoor air pollution every year. And this is mainly due to incomplete combustion of solid fuels and kerosene used for cooking. That's almost as bad as the 4.5 million that die from cold every year. Sorry, but wind turbines aren't going to help them cook supper on a calm day, and solar panels aren't going to keep the lights on (or heat their houses) at night. Not without some form of storage, which is even more of a challenge than simply generating the electricity in the first place.
Instead of doing this, we tell them how important it is to find a way to "get to net-zero" and then send billions of dollars overseas and corrupt regimes just eat it up and these people are no better off than they were 50 years ago.
Here's the kicker: as long as we can feel good about "saving the planet" by dutifully putting our nice, clean recyclables into our blue bins, and paying our carbon taxes without complaining, then we've done our part and now we can feel free to criticize anyone who doesn't do that - including those pitiful poor people in other countries who “just don't know any better”.
The part that really pisses me off about this whole deal is that these ruling elite (who remain largely unaffected by all of it) seem to believe that we're too stupid to notice what's going on. And in a lot of cases they're right.
One very successful form of propaganda has been to convince many of us that we are just not smart enough to even have an opinion on these things. Idiotic comments like, “Well, I'm not a meteorologist, so I really can't comment on whether or not you should be wearing a jacket on this beautiful January morning in Siberia,” are literally flooding social media these days.
Here's a news flash for you: nobody needs to be an "expert" in any area to exercise common sense and critical thinking skills. We need to start giving ourselves a lot more credit in these matters and stop abdicating our intelligence in favour of government propaganda.
So, as we in the West sit here in our comfy homes with all our energy needs met (and with more to spare), people in other parts of the world are dying, not from “climate change”, but from lack of access to affordable, dependable energy that would allow them to overcome Mother Nature's unceasing attempts to destroy them.
When Germany's Chancellor, Olaf Scholz came to Canada to meet with Justin Trudeau and asked to make a deal to buy liquid natural gas from our plentiful reserves, Trudeau sent him packing because there was "no business case" for supplying them with LNG.
I imagine the exchange went something like this:
Scholz: Hey Justin, we really need a way to heat our homes this winter and we'd love to buy your LNG.
Trudeau: Well, I don't know that there's much of business case for that, but how about this cool scheme for hydrogen fuel, several years down the road? Surely you can wait for us to build some huge wind turbines off the coast of Newfoundland that will power this really cool machine that turns water into hydrogen, and then into ammonia for shipping.
“Really?” says Scholz.
“Oh yes,” Trudeau continued, “but not ocean water because that would be boring. This machine will pump water from an abandoned mine shaft instead because that's way cooler and much more difficult than just using the water that's already just laying at the feet of these wind turbines."
Of course this plan isn’t even approved yet, let alone in the construction phase, and judging by the amount of time it takes for us to approve a simple pipeline in this country, this project won't likely have shovels in the ground until sometime after 2047.
No surprise that Germany decided they'd rather not wait for that. It didn't take long for them to find some LNG from a US company and sign a contract with Qatar. Evidently Joe Biden saw a business case there and it seems Germany would rather deal with someone who can actually get shit done. Also, in the case of Qatar, it seems Germany would much rather deal with a dictator than with an idiot.
A little while later Fumio Kishida, the Prime Minister of Japan came knocking for the same reason.
Here's how I figure that one might have gone down:
PM Kishida: We want your LNG.
PM Trudeau: We'd love to help, but the world is also looking to decarbonize…
PM Kishida: The world is in the midst of an energy crisis. We'd really like to work with you.
PM Trudeau: Well, we could supply you with minerals and agricultural resources…
Once again, the US came to the rescue with their LNG in the form of the Rio Grande company, Next Decade. Evidently there were in fact, two business cases for LNG from the American perspective.
This is the height of privilege: The attitude that what has worked (and is working) so well for us is worth so little. That our vast reserves of this life-giving energy that lifted us out of energy poverty is looked upon with such disdain.
This kind of privilege is only exceeded by the arrogance of those exercising it, while they preach and virtue-signal to everyone else. If there's a crisis in the world today, it's got nothing to do with the climate, and everything to do with the dismal failure of government.