Chris Sankey is a former elected Councilor for Lax Kw’alaams Band, businessman and Senior Fellow for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
The federal government is pushing an aggressive emissions reduction strategy that could devastate the Canadian economy and threaten our way of life. This isn’t just about the oil and gas industry. Port-related industries, transportation, infrastructure, health and education, and countless other sectors will be collateral damage. As will the standard of living of everyday Canadians.
And, yet, it isn’t even clear the government’s green agenda will do much of anything to lower emissions. I recently had a chance to listen to Adam Waterous, the CEO of the Waterous Energy Fund and former Global Head of Investment Banking at Scotia Waterous. He is, I may add, an incredibly intelligent businessman who lives and breathes energy.
Waterous shared some surprising facts about EVs. For instance, he mentioned that it takes five times the amount of oil to build an EV than it does to build a conventional gas-powered vehicle. In order to offset this difference, a person must drive an EV 120,000 kms using the electrical grid; meaning, every time we build an EV, demand for oil goes up, not down.
Further, an EV battery does not last the lifetime of the vehicle itself, crapping out in as little as eight years. This expands the EV’s carbon footprint even further as producing a single EV-grade battery emits over seven tonnes of CO2 emissions. All told, an EV has roughly double the production footprint of a conventional vehicle.
For the rest of this column: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/liberal-net-zero-agenda-is-a-plan-to-kill-the-economy