This, this is what I’m talking about. Ontario, Quebec, BC, they all have abundant hydro-power. We don’t have that in the prairies. We do have this. We have unique plate tectonics that make deep bore geothermal safe, abundant and potentially limitless.
There was originally a plan to use this tech for the data centre in Grand Prairie Alberta before the powers that be insisted on making natural gas powered. It’s cost effective, and it has enough capacity to completely substitute domestic fossil fuel baseline power. It doesn’t need to entirely displace oil for export, it just needs to displace domestic consumption. Furthermore, if you pair it with the carbon capture tech from Carbon Engineering out of Squamish BC you could have massive carbon neutral liquid synthetic gas for export and domestic use.
Neither of these are “way out there” ideas. They’re real, on the ground projects that we just don’t fund because we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. Those deep bore power plants, they use the same tools, tech and skills we use right now for digging conventional oil wells, and a little bit of the hydro-fracking process our engineers invented. These aren’t 50 year projects, they’re maybe a decade to spool up. I’m not talking windmills or solar, although they would be nice too. I’m not looking at fusion plants or thorium molten salt reactors (MSRs), these are projects we’ve got right here right now, shovel ready. And I’m going to guess you’ve never heard of any of them.
I mean that as politely as possible. But as I’ve said almost ad nauseum, there’s an all of the above approach. Sure, these sound like great projects, so what’s wrong with doing them in addition to the current mix?
One profitable enterprise does not mean another profitable enterprise can’t exist. So, if these are destined to be profitable, why not have them alongside the other proposed projects?
Edit: It’s not like the pipeline memo has stopped progress on the nuclear plants, the electrification project, the hydro ones etc…
My point is, you’re still looking at it as Tragedy of the Commons and it’s not. It hasn’t been for a long time.
We’re not going to find a private investor for those pipelines. How long before Carney announces tax payers are going to pick up the tab to shut up the Alberta separatists? We’re sinking millions into tax breaks, subsidies, and remediation for existing oil companies that aren’t pulling their weight economically and sticking Canadians with the bill. This isn’t a “Canada only benefits” situation. We’re spending billions and we’re going to spend more billions to make rich foreign oil executives richer instead of demanding they pay their own way. The opportunity cost of these subsidies is tax dollars not going to projects like this that could future-proof our industries for the next century. That’s what I mean by it no longer being a “Tragedy of the Commons” situation. We’re suffering for the sake of foreign capital and we don’t have to. We need to spend money somewhere to grow our economy. We can spend it on fossil fuel, or we can spend it on this, and both ways are going to create jobs.
We don’t need to do anything to oil, we just need to stop throwing money at it and let the market handle it. Let it rise or fall on its own merit. A fraction of what we spend on propping up the industry would be enough to have these programs fielded and generating returns by the early 2030s. You’re repeating the Tragedy of the Commons thing, but that’s just reciting truths that haven’t been valid for nearly a decade, because people keep repeating them. No one has updated their information on the subject since 2015. That’s not normal.
How long before Carney announces tax payers are going to pick up the tab to shut up the Alberta separatists?
You’re imagining a scenario about what the government is planning and getting angry about it.
What Carney has said over and over again is that a private proponent needs to come forward. There might be some cost sharing but to expect Canada to not take it as an investment is, at best, a little silly.
If the projects you describe are going to be market profitable regardless (which is **required ** to make this not a tragedy of the commons scenario) then the markets can and will do their thing. That’s literally how investment works.
It seems like you’re angry that no one knows about your special projects rather than the actual climate change policy. Like, the same sort of investments that you’re asking for are happening in nuclear, hydro and the requisite electrification. You can’t seriously claim that because you can imagine the government eventually paying for a pipeline that we’re not moving forward on other things.
It also sounds like you are confusing the subsidies cost with direct subsidies/tax breaks (including the ones most companies get for depreciation etc) my guess is that you’re looking at totals which include the externalities (which is literally the exact thing that makes it a tragedy of the commons; the environmental externalities are huge and why the IMF has put our “subsidies” at a huge price tag but it’s a price borne by the entire world, as are their pollutants by us.)
Edit: As we’re a similar age, I imagine you’ll know the Billy Maddison bus driver bit. “Me and Ms Veronica got it on!”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well, a friend of mine, he and her, they got it on!”
“Naw, they didn’t.”
“Well, you can imagine what it would be like.”
“Okay, I’m gonna go now.”
Feels very similar to this insistence that Carney will subsidize a non profitable pipeline.
I never said it wouldn’t be profitable. I think if you managed to get started in the next year or so you’ll break even by 2035 and be running it net profit for a long time after that. Declining profit, but profit. That wasn’t true before the war in Iran, but the calculus has changed. I don’t think there will be private investors for a number of reasons, only a fraction of with have anything to do with potential profit.
If the projects you describe are going to be market profitable regardless (which is **required ** to make this not a tragedy of the commons scenario) then the markets can and will do their thing. That’s literally how investment works.
No, that’s a significant oversimplification of how markets and investments work. It’s something like the oversimplified model of an atom we teach school children; good enough in general, but imprecise, and there’s a lot of factors it leaves out. We are not in a conventional or free market at this time.
my guess is that you’re looking at totals which include the externalities (which is literally the exact thing that makes it a tragedy of the commons; the environmental externalities are huge and why the IMF has put our “subsidies” at a huge price tag but it’s a price borne by the entire world, as are their pollutants by us.)
No, those are concerning, but I’m talking about the direct subsidies including failure to enforce our own laws and letting serial criminals make a mockery of us. I’m talking about actual waivers of legal consequences, direct and indirect corruption, and straight up cash infusions, tax waivers, and bailouts during tight seasons.
I never said it wouldn’t be profitable. I think if you managed to get started in the next year or so you’ll break even by 2035 and be running it net profit for a long time after that.
How long before Carney announces tax payers are going to pick up the tab to shut up the Alberta separatists?
If the first set of statements is true, then Canada would be wiser to invest in the damn thing itself, which is a far cry from picking up the tab.
It’s something like the oversimplified model of an atom we teach school children; good enough in general, but imprecise, and there’s a lot of factors it leaves out.
Obviously it’s a simplification. We aren’t running numbers on a theoretical project here. Come on. And if it isn’t good enough to attract private investment etc and oil and gas is… Well, I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
I’m talking about the direct subsidies including failure to enforce our own laws and letting serial criminals make a mockery of us. I’m talking about actual waivers of legal consequences, direct and indirect corruption, and straight up cash infusions, tax waivers, and bailouts during tight seasons.
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as externalities.
If the first set of statements is true, then Canada would be wiser to invest in the damn thing itself, which is a far cry from picking up the tab.
See there’s an issue with that. Remember I said it was going to create declining profits? It’s bad enough when it’s a private owner, do want to see what happens when a public crown corp loses 30% of its year-over-year revenue? Take a good hard look at Canada Post.
And if it isn’t good enough to attract private investment etc and oil and gas is… Well, I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
If we stuck by that logic Canada would still be using whale oil and relying on carrier pigeons for communication. The rules of economics work funny here, because we are living next to the economic equivalent of a black hole. That means Canadian startups have a problem. Canadians don’t invest domestically unless it’s a guaranteed dividend. We don’t do angel investors and our banks are deeply risk averse. Meanwhile foreign investment tends to go south every time, because it’s a much bigger market with a gravitational pull that breaks the economic system of its neighbours. Historically, that means every time an emerging industry needs seed capital, they have to turn to the state. Everything from electricity, to telephone, to radio, and even our oil. Our oil sector started out as public, until we sold it off for some quick short-term gains. We do crown corps and public-private-partnerships for all kinds of things for a reason. Those markets couldn’t emerge naturally in this environment. So yes, we aren’t running theoretical numbers, but we do live at the extreme edge of the universe where the rules work funny.
Apologies, I meant to edit out the silly bits because I knew we’d get distracted.
Meant to just respond:
I’m talking about the direct subsidies including failure to enforce our own laws and letting serial criminals make a mockery of us. I’m talking about actual waivers of legal consequences, direct and indirect corruption, and straight up cash infusions, tax waivers, and bailouts during tight seasons.
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as climate externalities. (ie, the tragedy of the commons.)
And right now, your entire claim seems to rest on this shadowy secret costs that are separate from the often cited climate externalities.
No, that’s a significant oversimplification of how markets and investments work.
You are similarly welcome to share why you believe you have a project that is a viable, long term profitable green energy approach that is simultaneously uninvestable. But so far, your only given reason is this nonsense that “we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. " That’s not at all how markets work, not even in a simplified child’s model.
But to your points:
Take a good hard look at Canada Post.
Canada Post loses billions a year, that’s not making a profit by any model.
Canadians don’t invest domestically unless it’s a guaranteed dividend.
By your logic, almost no Canadian company should exist. Believe it or not, they do.
Canada Post loses billions a year, that’s not making a profit by any model.
Didn’t always. See what happens when legacy crown corps slip away into irrelevance?
By your logic, almost no Canadian company should exist. Believe it or not, they do.
I am also simplifying, there’s a complex web of motives, completely unrelated to profit, that influence how Canadians invest, but as a general trend we absolutely do not invest in emerging domestic industry. It’s got to be a proven market or it won’t get a second glance. There’s also a threshold above which domestic investment just wouldn’t cut it and relying on international cash means trying to land big backers to projects in a market 1/10th the size of our nearest neighbour. This is part of why no one is going to fund the pipelines. They’ll be profitable. They won’t get built unless we do it ourselves, and we won’t be able to sell it off to private markets before it becomes a boat anchor on our economy for a century.
I’m talking about the direct subsidies including failure to enforce our own laws and letting serial criminals make a mockery of us. I’m talking about actual waivers of legal consequences, direct and indirect corruption, and straight up cash infusions, tax waivers, and bailouts during tight seasons.
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as climate externalities. (ie, the tragedy of the commons.)
And right now, your entire claim seems to rest on this shadowy secret costs that are separate from the often cited climate externalities.
No, that’s a significant oversimplification of how markets and investments work.
You are similarly welcome to share why you believe you have a project that is a viable, long term profitable green energy approach that is simultaneously uninvestable. But so far, your only given reason is this nonsense that "we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. " That’s not at all how markets work, not even in a simplified child’s model.
This, this is what I’m talking about. Ontario, Quebec, BC, they all have abundant hydro-power. We don’t have that in the prairies. We do have this. We have unique plate tectonics that make deep bore geothermal safe, abundant and potentially limitless.
https://deepcorp.ca/
There was originally a plan to use this tech for the data centre in Grand Prairie Alberta before the powers that be insisted on making natural gas powered. It’s cost effective, and it has enough capacity to completely substitute domestic fossil fuel baseline power. It doesn’t need to entirely displace oil for export, it just needs to displace domestic consumption. Furthermore, if you pair it with the carbon capture tech from Carbon Engineering out of Squamish BC you could have massive carbon neutral liquid synthetic gas for export and domestic use.
https://carbonengineering.com/
Neither of these are “way out there” ideas. They’re real, on the ground projects that we just don’t fund because we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. Those deep bore power plants, they use the same tools, tech and skills we use right now for digging conventional oil wells, and a little bit of the hydro-fracking process our engineers invented. These aren’t 50 year projects, they’re maybe a decade to spool up. I’m not talking windmills or solar, although they would be nice too. I’m not looking at fusion plants or thorium molten salt reactors (MSRs), these are projects we’ve got right here right now, shovel ready. And I’m going to guess you’ve never heard of any of them.
And what is your point?
I mean that as politely as possible. But as I’ve said almost ad nauseum, there’s an all of the above approach. Sure, these sound like great projects, so what’s wrong with doing them in addition to the current mix?
One profitable enterprise does not mean another profitable enterprise can’t exist. So, if these are destined to be profitable, why not have them alongside the other proposed projects?
Edit: It’s not like the pipeline memo has stopped progress on the nuclear plants, the electrification project, the hydro ones etc…
My point is, you’re still looking at it as Tragedy of the Commons and it’s not. It hasn’t been for a long time.
We’re not going to find a private investor for those pipelines. How long before Carney announces tax payers are going to pick up the tab to shut up the Alberta separatists? We’re sinking millions into tax breaks, subsidies, and remediation for existing oil companies that aren’t pulling their weight economically and sticking Canadians with the bill. This isn’t a “Canada only benefits” situation. We’re spending billions and we’re going to spend more billions to make rich foreign oil executives richer instead of demanding they pay their own way. The opportunity cost of these subsidies is tax dollars not going to projects like this that could future-proof our industries for the next century. That’s what I mean by it no longer being a “Tragedy of the Commons” situation. We’re suffering for the sake of foreign capital and we don’t have to. We need to spend money somewhere to grow our economy. We can spend it on fossil fuel, or we can spend it on this, and both ways are going to create jobs.
We don’t need to do anything to oil, we just need to stop throwing money at it and let the market handle it. Let it rise or fall on its own merit. A fraction of what we spend on propping up the industry would be enough to have these programs fielded and generating returns by the early 2030s. You’re repeating the Tragedy of the Commons thing, but that’s just reciting truths that haven’t been valid for nearly a decade, because people keep repeating them. No one has updated their information on the subject since 2015. That’s not normal.
You’re imagining a scenario about what the government is planning and getting angry about it.
What Carney has said over and over again is that a private proponent needs to come forward. There might be some cost sharing but to expect Canada to not take it as an investment is, at best, a little silly.
If the projects you describe are going to be market profitable regardless (which is **required ** to make this not a tragedy of the commons scenario) then the markets can and will do their thing. That’s literally how investment works.
It seems like you’re angry that no one knows about your special projects rather than the actual climate change policy. Like, the same sort of investments that you’re asking for are happening in nuclear, hydro and the requisite electrification. You can’t seriously claim that because you can imagine the government eventually paying for a pipeline that we’re not moving forward on other things.
It also sounds like you are confusing the subsidies cost with direct subsidies/tax breaks (including the ones most companies get for depreciation etc) my guess is that you’re looking at totals which include the externalities (which is literally the exact thing that makes it a tragedy of the commons; the environmental externalities are huge and why the IMF has put our “subsidies” at a huge price tag but it’s a price borne by the entire world, as are their pollutants by us.)
Edit: As we’re a similar age, I imagine you’ll know the Billy Maddison bus driver bit. “Me and Ms Veronica got it on!”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well, a friend of mine, he and her, they got it on!”
“Naw, they didn’t.”
“Well, you can imagine what it would be like.”
“Okay, I’m gonna go now.”
Feels very similar to this insistence that Carney will subsidize a non profitable pipeline.
I never said it wouldn’t be profitable. I think if you managed to get started in the next year or so you’ll break even by 2035 and be running it net profit for a long time after that. Declining profit, but profit. That wasn’t true before the war in Iran, but the calculus has changed. I don’t think there will be private investors for a number of reasons, only a fraction of with have anything to do with potential profit.
No, that’s a significant oversimplification of how markets and investments work. It’s something like the oversimplified model of an atom we teach school children; good enough in general, but imprecise, and there’s a lot of factors it leaves out. We are not in a conventional or free market at this time.
No, those are concerning, but I’m talking about the direct subsidies including failure to enforce our own laws and letting serial criminals make a mockery of us. I’m talking about actual waivers of legal consequences, direct and indirect corruption, and straight up cash infusions, tax waivers, and bailouts during tight seasons.
If the first set of statements is true, then Canada would be wiser to invest in the damn thing itself, which is a far cry from picking up the tab.
Obviously it’s a simplification. We aren’t running numbers on a theoretical project here. Come on. And if it isn’t good enough to attract private investment etc and oil and gas is… Well, I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as externalities.
See there’s an issue with that. Remember I said it was going to create declining profits? It’s bad enough when it’s a private owner, do want to see what happens when a public crown corp loses 30% of its year-over-year revenue? Take a good hard look at Canada Post.
If we stuck by that logic Canada would still be using whale oil and relying on carrier pigeons for communication. The rules of economics work funny here, because we are living next to the economic equivalent of a black hole. That means Canadian startups have a problem. Canadians don’t invest domestically unless it’s a guaranteed dividend. We don’t do angel investors and our banks are deeply risk averse. Meanwhile foreign investment tends to go south every time, because it’s a much bigger market with a gravitational pull that breaks the economic system of its neighbours. Historically, that means every time an emerging industry needs seed capital, they have to turn to the state. Everything from electricity, to telephone, to radio, and even our oil. Our oil sector started out as public, until we sold it off for some quick short-term gains. We do crown corps and public-private-partnerships for all kinds of things for a reason. Those markets couldn’t emerge naturally in this environment. So yes, we aren’t running theoretical numbers, but we do live at the extreme edge of the universe where the rules work funny.
Apologies, I meant to edit out the silly bits because I knew we’d get distracted.
Meant to just respond:
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as climate externalities. (ie, the tragedy of the commons.)
And right now, your entire claim seems to rest on this shadowy secret costs that are separate from the often cited climate externalities.
You are similarly welcome to share why you believe you have a project that is a viable, long term profitable green energy approach that is simultaneously uninvestable. But so far, your only given reason is this nonsense that “we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. " That’s not at all how markets work, not even in a simplified child’s model.
But to your points:
Canada Post loses billions a year, that’s not making a profit by any model.
By your logic, almost no Canadian company should exist. Believe it or not, they do.
Didn’t always. See what happens when legacy crown corps slip away into irrelevance?
I am also simplifying, there’s a complex web of motives, completely unrelated to profit, that influence how Canadians invest, but as a general trend we absolutely do not invest in emerging domestic industry. It’s got to be a proven market or it won’t get a second glance. There’s also a threshold above which domestic investment just wouldn’t cut it and relying on international cash means trying to land big backers to projects in a market 1/10th the size of our nearest neighbour. This is part of why no one is going to fund the pipelines. They’ll be profitable. They won’t get built unless we do it ourselves, and we won’t be able to sell it off to private markets before it becomes a boat anchor on our economy for a century.
You are welcome to share a trustworthy resource that comes to similar findings but I’ve never seen anything like that from a reputable source. IMF is pretty decent and calculates the vast majority of the costs as climate externalities. (ie, the tragedy of the commons.)
And right now, your entire claim seems to rest on this shadowy secret costs that are separate from the often cited climate externalities.
You are similarly welcome to share why you believe you have a project that is a viable, long term profitable green energy approach that is simultaneously uninvestable. But so far, your only given reason is this nonsense that "we’re too obsessed with selling our fossil fuel reserves. " That’s not at all how markets work, not even in a simplified child’s model.
Edit: Clarity.