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Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

Some minerals are ‘critical’ to the digital economy, but current prices don’t reflect that – by Aya Dufour (CBC News Subury – March 04, 2024)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

Junior mining companies struggle to raise money as prices for nickel, lithium, graphite sink

For almost a century now, players from across the mining industry — big or small, Canadian or international — have been gathering in Toronto annually to talk about capital, technical innovations, and market trends.

This year’s Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention is no different, with some of Canada’s critical mineral explorers hoping to close deals that will help overcome a tough year in the capital markets.

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Expert says green energy proponents have ‘delusions of grandeur’ – by David Staples (Edmonton Journal – February 16, 2024)

https://edmontonjournal.com/

Had enough of advocates for green energy technology who promise the sun and the moon in terms of efficiency and cost savings only to have this new tech crap out the moment it’s needed most?

Fed up with an armada of state-of-the-art electric buses where none of the buses work nearly as well as promised and at least half of them are broken down in the garage at any given time?

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Opinion: Don’t raid poor countries’ development budgets to fund climate policy – by Bjorn Lomborg (Financial Post – January 26, 2024)

https://financialpost.com/

Rich countries shouldn’t force unreliable wind and solar power on poor nations where alleviating poverty is the priority

Too many rich-world politicians and climate campaigners seem to forget that much of the world remains mired in poverty and hunger. Yet rich countries are increasingly replacing their development aid with climate spending.

The World Bank, whose primary goal is to help people out of poverty, has now announced it will divert no less than 45 per cent of its funding toward climate change, shifting some US$40 billion annually away from poverty and hunger.

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Ruthless, reckless, damaging: the Hon. Steven Guilbeault is MLI’s Policy-maker of the year – by Heather Exner-Pirot (MacDonald Laurier Institute – December 21, 2023)

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Guilbeault has treated the fact that Canada is a democracy, a market economy, and a federation as inconveniences to be overcome.

The Liberals have been chided for focusing on communications over substance, for announcing policies rather than implementing them. But there is an exception to this rule: the ruthlessly efficient Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. No one else in Canada has been as influential, and, in my view, no one else has done so much damage.

From an emissions cap to toxic plastic straws, and from Clean Electricity Regulations to the Clean Fuel Standard, Guilbeault has been advancing economy-killing and constitution-defying laws at a frenzied pace. He was appointed Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada in October 2021.

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The only thing wrong with the globalist climate agenda — the people won’t have it – by Ross McKitrick (The Cochrane Times-Post – December 20, 2023)

https://www.cochranetimespost.ca/

Phasing out fossil fuels is going to cost way more than ordinary people will accept. Delegates to COP28 clearly didn’t understand that

It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, especially the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global CO2emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, which they didn’t do.

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Trudeau’s eco ego stifling investment in Canada – by Lorne Gunter (Toronto Sun – December 5, 2023)

https://torontosun.com/

Why does it seem that every time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault have a big environmental announcement to make — that affects the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Alberta workers and small businesspeople — they make those announcements outside the country?

The latest example was Guilbeault’s release of stringent new methane emission regulations announced Monday. Did he proclaim them in downtown Calgary or in one of Alberta’s large natural gas fields, where billions of dollars of investment and thousands of well-paying jobs could be affected?

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COP28 will ignore net-zero’s atrocious waste of money – by Bjorn Lomborg (National Post – December 1, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com/

Global climate summit will almost certainly be another failure

The spectacle of another annual climate conference is getting underway in the United Arab Emirates (Nov 30 – Dec 12). Like Kabuki theater, performative set pieces lead from one to the other: politicians and celebrities arrive by private jets; speakers predict imminent doom; hectoring NGOs cast blame; political negotiations become fraught and inevitably go overtime; and finally: the signing of a new agreement that participants hope and pretend will make a difference.

This circus has repeated since the 1990s. Despite 27 previous conferences with iterations of ominous speeches and bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased, punctuated just once, by the economic shutdown of COVID-19. This year is likely to see higher emissions than ever before.

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A bumpy road for metals and mining – by Alex Brinded (Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining – November 27, 2023)

https://www.iom3.org/

Post London Metal Exchange Week 2023, Wood Mackenzie hosted a briefing on the risks and opportunities for metals and mining amid accelerated energy transition pressures.

‘The current metals super-cycle, which is a major component of the global energy transition, could stall due to a gloomy global macroeconomic environment, geopolitics and a lack of investment in new production facilities,’ according to analysts from Wood Mackenzie.

Speaking at a briefing in London, Nick Pickens, Research Director of Global Mining at the firm, highlighted that US$200bln of new mining projects are required by 2030, as well as more efficient and creative methods of recycling existing scrap metals.

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Opinion: Net-zero policies colliding with economic reality – by Henry Geraedts (Financial Post – November 17, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Renewables aren’t reliable and many companies are discovering they don’t pay for themselves even with unsustainably high subsidies

Across the advanced economies, the politics of net zero are colliding with reality, yet most politicians seem oblivious to the dynamics at play. The inconvenient truth is that the clean energy transition is not unfolding as foretold. Three decades and trillions of dollars in subsidies later, wind and solar still represent single-digit percentages of global energy demand, which continues to grow. Demand for hydrocarbons, meanwhile, remains at over 80 per cent of the total.

Exxon and Chevron recently invested a combined US$110 billion in long-term U.S. oil and gas development, driving home the reality that liquid hydrocarbons will be as indispensable post-2050 as they are today.

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Mining faces gulf between ambition and reality on energy transition, China – by Clyde Russell (Reuters – November 1, 2023)

https://www.reuters.com/

Mining companies in the West are facing two overarching challenges in trying to produce enough metals to enable the energy transition, and at the same time build alternative supply chains to lessen their dependence on China.

The problem is that there is a vast gulf between the scale of the ambition and the reality of what’s actually happening, and what’s likely to happen in the next few years.

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CMS: Friedland mocks lithium but touts battery tech – by Colin McCelland (Northern Miner – October 13, 2023)

https://www.northernminer.com/

Robert Friedland, billionaire founder and executive co-chair of Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN), criticized lithium mining at a London conference, ridiculed the West’s green energy transition and urged prayer to end the Israel-Hamas war.

Researchers at Ivanhoe start-up Pure Lithium in Boston are going from lithium brine to lithium metal in a step that could radically transform the electric vehicle battery market valued at around US$50 billion a year, Friedland told The Northern Miner’s Canadian Mining Symposium on Friday.

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The politics of climate alarmism – by Derek H. Burney (National Post – October 3, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com/

The climate debate has been hijacked by a political narrative that brooks neither dissent nor balance

Damaging weather events inevitably lead to climate evangelists making apocalyptic claims of imminent disaster. UN Secretary General António Guterres led the most recent chorus, talking about “global boiling” and raising alarmism to a fever pitch.

Yet, more than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel physics laureates, have signed a declaration stating that, “There is no climate emergency.” That poses a serious political problem for any government that has been arguing the contrary.

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Climate Change May Usher in a New Era of Trade Wars – by Ana Swanson (New York Times – January 25, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Countries are pursuing new solutions to try to mitigate climate change. More trade fights are likely to come hand in hand.

WASHINGTON — Efforts to mitigate climate change are prompting countries across the world to embrace dramatically different policies toward industry and trade, bringing governments into conflict.

These new clashes over climate policy are straining international alliances and the global trading system, hinting at a future in which policies aimed at staving off environmental catastrophe could also result in more frequent cross-border trade wars.

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Opinion: China needs to pay a higher price for its coal plants – by Gwyn Morgan (Financial Post – September 26, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Take the carbon taxes off the shoulders of Canadians and transfer them to carbon-spewing Chinese imports

In my last column, in early July, I wrote about the irony that a self-described “progressive” Liberal government kept in power by a deeply socialist NDP, both supposedly dedicated to protecting the poor, was fighting a war on carbon emissions whose costs, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has calculated, fall disproportionately on lower-income Canadians.

Since then we’ve had a devastating wildfire season, so it’s understandable that Canadians may be wondering if high and rising carbon taxes are a sacrifice we simply must make in order to fight climate change.

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Climate targets threatened by lack of mining investment: McKinsey – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 27, 2023)

https://www.mining.com/

Soaring demand for metals and minerals needed to achieve a reduction in global emissions, paired with low commodity prices driving investors and mining firms to cut spending are set to cause major shortages of key elements for the world’s energy transition, a new report shows.

According to consultancy McKinsey & Company, looming supply gaps for rare earths, lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, boron and copper could lead to higher prices and market volatility, hindering emissions goals.

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