While not literally ‘pie in the sky’, asteroid mining used to be science fiction. Perhaps, it is no longer fantasy. Various private space companies have focused on launching satellites, with hazy side-bets on future colonization ventures. However, recent...
Ingenuity and efficiency are reducing links between economic growth and energy consumption In recent years, particularly in Canada, we have seen substantial a change in public opinion regarding the production and distribution of energy, as well as its associated costs...
Far from being a threat, coal continues to bring health, welfare and prosperity to billions At the recent Environmental Protection Agency public hearing in Charleston, West Virginia, on withdrawing the “Clean Power Plan,” anti-coal activists were out in force: the...
Day 24 - Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas. Here at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy we want to tell you about some of the things we would like to see under our tree. On Day 24 we wish for an end to Canada’s quixotic quest to change the...
Canada exports huge quantities of water to the United States and all over the world. As the world’s fifth largest exporter of agricultural products – which are composed mainly of water – huge amounts of Canadian water leave the country every day. Whole lakes are...
A recent Globe and Mail story about a firm developing garbage-to-biodiesel technology shows how continuing progress makes the global warming extremists’ most hysterically apocalyptic predictions, and their extreme absolutist ‘solutions’, not only grossly wrong but...
Niger Innis is Co-Chair of the Alliance to Stop the War on the Poor and the National Spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the oldest African-American anti-poverty groups. It was founded in 1942 as one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement in the United States. Its national Headquarters is located in New York City.
Artificially high energy prices, the work of politicians manipulated by radical environmentalists demonizing energies they don’t like, are therefore “immoral,” and a “de facto regressive tax on the poor. . . . They destroy jobs, erode civil rights gains and force minority and elderly households to choose between food, fuel and medicine.”
An even bigger problem with the green-collar vision is its ultimate goal: ending our “addiction” to fossil fuels and mandating “sustainable,” hydrocarbon-free lifestyles. Conservation, efficiency and renewables will not bridge this enormous energy gap, certainly not in one decade and probably not in four. To decimate the energy system we have – and claim we can replace it with technologies that don’t yet exist – is delusional and irresponsible.
Alberta’s energy industry has lately been made into an ecological bogeyman by environmentalist groups, portraying the oil sands as a “dirty,” undesirable source because of its carbon footprint. “We say the economic frontier is the last frontier for achieving racial equality in society,” Mr. Innis says. “And access to affordable energy … is what we consider to be the master resource for the economic survival for our community. Rising energy prices represent an immoral war on the poor, because it keeps people poor.”
The same will be true with oil. As prices rise, there will be more incentives to create a substitute. The beauty of all of it is that we never know where the innovation will come from — or lead us. We will not need to “plan” this innovation. Someone who wants to make a profit will research — or employ others to research — new technologies.
Exploring how technology and public policy interface with one of the world’s leading technology gurus.
If there is anything to be learned from the recent string of bubbles, it may be that surplus investment capital, now floating round the world in cyberspace, is always looking for a speculative home and that as one bubble bursts, the fund managers desperately seek out a replacement. Will we see a gathering flock to carbon trading, windmills, biofuels and other renewables driven largely by the legislators?
“We favour any and every energy source,” he said in an interview. “We do not believe in this artificial game that the radicals play of pitting the so-called bad energy versus good energy. All energy, when prices are as high as they are, which is such a critical resource and the lifeblood of a nation’s economy and the survival of people, is good energy as far as we are concerned.”
The world is consuming more and more energy and, as if by miracle, the amount left to consume grows ever higher. Never before in human history has energy been accessible in greater abundance and in more regions, never before has mankind had more energy options and faced a brighter energy future.