We’re getting too far ahead on our climate policies that kill oil and gas jobs – by Jack Mintz (Financial Post – July 29, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Federal policies that halt fossil fuel development too quickly can have only one result: to make us poorer

Is Canada moving too quickly with climate-change policies to kill oil and gas jobs? After all, while we are pushing up the carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, the U.S. doesn’t even have a pricing policy yet.

And on top of our aggressive carbon pricing, we are also adopting important — and burdensome — new measures such as clean fuel standards, electric-vehicle substitution and building retrofits.

The federal government has also declared plastics toxic and introduced aggressive environmental regulations to stop fossil-fuel development.

It’s one thing to pick a target; it’s another to jump ahead of other countries, especially when you account for only 1.6 per cent of global GHG emissions. The fossil-fuel industry has been a source of immense wealth for decades.

It could continue to be an important source of income and taxes even after an energy transformation whose details — and even broad outlines — are still undetermined.

For the rest of this column: https://financialpost.com/opinion/jack-m-mintz-were-getting-too-far-ahead-on-our-climate-policies-that-kill-oil-and-gas-jobs