Thankfully, most Canadian businesses keep ignoring politicians’ growth-killing climate crusade – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – December 2, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Governments keep promoting — and paying for — unprofitable “green” technologies in the name of helping businesses shift to the post-carbon economy

Rachel Notley isn’t going to let the fact that she has yet to get any pipelines built stop her from giving lessons on how to get pipelines built. In a speech to Ottawa’s Economic Club last week, she lectured oil-industry champions and “conservatives” that “denying (manmade) climate change … won’t get pipelines built.”

The Alberta premier’s last lesson on getting pipelines built told Albertans they needed carbon taxes to win “social licence” from opponents. That hasn’t worked either, which is why Notley had to travel to B.C. this week with the federal natural resources minister to plead with opponents there to please stop opposing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Anyway, try and find a prominent conservative in Ottawa or Alberta who hasn’t agreed to go along with the manmade-climate-change orthodoxy. Or an oil industry representative, for that matter, with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers recently saying (as reported by Post columnist John Robson from a recent Manning Centre conference) “If we spend time as an industry or as Western Canadians arguing about climate… we’ll not get any more pipelines built.”

So conservatives, westerners and oil executives have tried the hell out of the not-denying-manmade-climate-change approach, and the pipeline enemies still win every time.

The compelled political agreement on the dangers of fossil fuels is surely what is actually to blame for smothering any and all economically important energy mega-projects, from pipelines to LNG plants.

For the rest of this column: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/kevin-libin-thankfully-most-canadian-businesses-keep-ignoring-politicians-growth-killing-climate-crusade