Angry Man Warns Saskatchewan Premier Not Use Fuel Source

Steven Guilbeault is an angry and convicted man:

It would be against the law for Saskatchewan to run its coal-fired power plants after 2030 unless the greenhouse-gas emissions from those plants are captured, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Wednesday.

Advertisement 2

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

Article content

His comment comes as electricity generation becomes the latest jurisdictional battle over climate policy between federal and provincial governments.

Canada’s current climate plan aims for all electricity to be emissions-free by 2035, and regulations to enforce the target are expected later this year.

The draft policy published last year suggests that by 2035, all electricity will have to be clean — such as hydroelectricity, nuclear, wind or solar. Either that or the emissions will have to be abated somehow, such as with carbon capture and storage systems.

Under the proposal, some natural gas plants built before regulations are established would be able to operate after 2035 for an as-yet-undefined length of time.

Moe hears you.

Moe simply doesn't care:

Premier Moe has the impertinence to reject this hallowed fantasy of the greenologists. In the current woke frenzy, to stand aside from certain brands of madness takes (what it should not require in a sane world) some considerable courage.

Here is Moe’s admirably forthright response to the forced dream and embraced folly of net zero, specifically the Trudeau government’s dictum that electrical grids be net zero by 2035:

“I want to be very clear about this. In Saskatchewan, we will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production in our province. We will not risk plunging our homes, our schools, our hospitals, our special care homes, our businesses into the cold and darkness because of the ideological whims of others. We will not increase power costs for our businesses and for our families to the point they become completely unaffordable. If we were to do that, we wouldn’t grow anything in Saskatchewan. We wouldn’t move anything. We wouldn’t go anywhere. And we’d get awful cold in a hurry. Saskatchewan must have affordable and reliable electricity available on demand.”

Also:

The Parliamentary Budget Officer released on Thursday a distributional analysis of the Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR), showing how the new Liberal policy will increase the price of gas and diesel when the program is fully implemented by 2030. The PBO estimated that at the national level, in 2030, the cost of the CFR to households would range from $231 for lower-income households to $1,008 for higher-income households.

His analysis also showed that the impact will mostly be felt by lower-income households for whom the price difference represents a larger share of their disposable income. As a result, the PBO called the CFR “broadly regressive.”

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault attacked the PBO’s modelling approach, calling it “unbalanced” because he said it does not take into account costs of climate change. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s former adviser, Gerald Butts, slammed the PBO’s “incompetence on climate change” and accused it of doing “real damage to the policy discussion in Canada.”

PBO Yves Giroux said that his team’s conclusions were never questioned by Guilbeault’s own department, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), which provided the data for the analysis, until Guilbeault put out a statement criticizing the report.

(Sidebar: please see here.) 

“I can understand that people are not happy when we underline that government action will have repercussions, and in this case, costs, but I stand by the analysis we provided,” Giroux said.

The CFR, which take effect in July, is a series of requirements imposed on refiners and importers to reduce carbon emissions of the gasoline and diesel they produce and sell for use in Canada. Their target is to reduce an estimated 26 million tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030.