At the end of the day, the cause of climate change is not fossil fuels themselves. It is the carbon emissions associated with the burning of fossil fuels,’ says minister of natural resources, Jonathan Wilkinson
In the Financial Post last week, my colleague William Watson called for Canada to adopt a more nuanced view of the struggle between reducing carbon emissions and ensuring the lights stay on.
He offered up the example of Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional Danish foreign minister in the brilliant drama Borgen, who, having run on a climate change platform, brazenly shifts her party’s policy to support the development of oil in Greenland (albeit for reasons of personal political survival).
Watching episode three in the new series last night, there was an air of familiarity to Nyborg’s reasoning — that the world will remain dependent on fossil fuels for the next 30 to 40 years, with much of it coming from undemocratic countries that do not exploit the resource in a “reputable” way.
That’s because these arguments bear more than a passing resemblance to a similar, if less pronounced, refinement in the approach to fossil fuels by the government of Canada — or at least by its minister of natural resources, Jonathan Wilkinson.
For the rest of this column: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-refreshing-realism-on-the-need-for-canadian-oil-from-a-trudeau-liberal