Story of the Week: May 2021

Canada also adheres to stringent environmental social governance. It has some of the highest environmental standards in the world! It also ranks very highly on the social side of things. You want to provide high paying jobs? The oil & gas sector does that.

Divestment does nothing to reduce the demand or emissions. It's an empty political statement really. If demand is there, supply will meet it somehow. And so that will mean going outside of Canada to countries that are not as responsible as Canadian companies.

Adam Smith was in fact correct when he wrote, on the one hand, that self-interested investors of capital are led by an invisible hand to promote social good that they did not intend, and, on the other, that people who affect to trade for the public good usually do not actually do much good. He did not qualify his observations with, nor should we add today, the phrase: “except for oil and gas companies.”

It will take at least 30 years for the United States to reach even 50 to 60 percent electric vehicles, meaning that American motorists will have heavy demand for oil and gas unless the environmentalists plan on blowing up our cars. Perhaps I shouldn’t give them any ideas.

The only question is whether we get it from Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota — or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and OPEC nations...Russia, China, and Iran have much worse environmental records than America does.