Decline of the Great North American Decarbonization Charade
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Markets | June 27, 2025
Through ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – mandates, the titans of global finance positioned themselves as the arbiters of corporate virtue. They pressured companies to divest from fossil fuels. They built an entire moral and financial architecture around the concept of decarbonization.
But this June, two major events confirmed the slow demise of the great North American decarbonization experiment.
First, Nippon Steel finalized its historic acquisition of U.S. Steel, signaling a massive resurgence of energy-intensive manufacturing on American soil. Up North, the government of Saskatchewan announced its plan to keep coal-fired plants alive beyond 2030, openly defying federal regulations and international climate agreements.
They are not minor setbacks to the climate agenda but fundamental course corrections, powerful acknowledgments that the prosperity and security of nations depend on energy-dense resources and the industries they power.
Steel Deal That Shattered Green Illusions
On June 18, Nippon Steel acquired the legendary Pittsburgh-based company to reshape the global steel industry. The $14.9 billion transaction, one of the largest in recent industrial history, creates a powerhouse with a crude steel capacity of 86 million metric tons.
“Together, Nippon Steel and U. S. Steel are moving forward as the ‘Best Steelmaker with World-Leading Capabilities,’” says the press release. Massive capital will be unleashed across steelmaking facilities in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Arkansas, Minnesota and Alabama. The overall investment package is expected to protect 10,000 jobs and create 10,000 more in construction trades through the addition of a new electric arc furnace.
Steel production consumes enormous quantities of energy – primarily from coal and natural gas. The blast furnaces, coke ovens and electric arc furnaces that make up the lifeblood of steel mills are not powered by solar panels or wind turbines. They are powered by carbon-based fuels. Period.
This acquisition alone smashes multiple climate illusions in one blow. One, that emissions-intensive sectors would be phased out in rich countries. Another, that ESG-aligned finance would avoid “dirty” industries. And a third, that international treaties would keep governments and corporations aligned toward decarbonization.
Look who helped push this deal through. Citibank served as the financial advisor to Nippon Steel. Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Evercore were among the advisors for U.S. Steel. These are the same firms that plaster their websites with ESG statements and Net Zero commitments.
The same firms that swore to “align their lending portfolios with climate goals” and pressure companies to reduce carbon footprints. Yet here they are, actively greasing the wheels of a carbon-heavy industrial renaissance.
Saskatchewan Calls the Bluff on Coal Phaseouts
Then the same week, came another announcement, this time from the political frontier of Western Canada. The government of Saskatchewan made clear that it would extend the life of its coal plants beyond 2030, despite federal mandates to the contrary.
Energy Minister Dustin Duncan was unapologetic. “We’re not going to let federal politicians in Ottawa tell us to turn off the lights,” he said. Citing energy security and cost stability for residents, the province says it will keep coal-fired plants past the 2030 deadline imposed by Canada’s federal Clean Electricity Regulations,
This open rebellion is framed as a strategic return to realism with no use of euphemisms such as “transition” or “temporary extension.”
Collapse of the Climate Narrative
The Net Zero facade has collapsed massively, undeniably, irreversibly – because no policy survives violations of the laws of physics and market demand. Despite trillions spent on “renewables,” their contribution to energy production has barely budged in two decades.
What we’re witnessing in North America is not an anomaly but rather the beginning of a new phase. In 2023, fossil fuels still accounted for over 80% of global primary energy use. Globally, energy-intensive industries are thriving. China, the world’s largest coal consumer, approved 106 gigawatts of new coal power in 2024 alone.
The thud you hear is the sound of the decarbonization fantasy crashing to Earth. The sigh is one of relief as common sense returns to the public square.
There is no post-carbon future on the horizon, only a post-illusion present. And fossil fuels remain the lifeblood of progress.
Alberta Could Hold Secession Referendum – Premier
RT | May 6, 2025
Alberta could hold a public referendum on breaking away from Canada next year if a citizen-led petition gets the required number of signatures, the province’s Premiere Danielle Smith said on Monday.
The western province has long clashed with the federal government over legislation limiting fossil fuel development and promoting clean energy, which Alberta officials say unfairly targets their economy. Smith’s announcement comes days after the Liberal Party secured a fourth consecutive term in the federal election, deepening political divides between Ottawa and oil-rich Alberta.
Following the election, the Alberta Prosperity Project launched a petition calling for a referendum on the province’s independence. The petition garnered more than 80,000 signatures within 36 hours of its May 2 launch and remains open for public support.
“Should Ottawa, for whatever reason, continue to attack our province as they have done over the last decade? Ultimately that will be for Albertans to decide,” Smith said.
She added that although she does not personally support the idea of separation, she would respect the will of voters. “I will accept their judgement,” the premiere said.
Recently, Smith’s government also introduced legislation to lower the threshold for referendums initiated by citizen petition. The bill reduces the number of signatures needed from 20% to 10% of eligible voters from the last provincial election and extends the collection period from 90 to 120 days. In order to pass the threshold, a petition would need about 177,000 signatures.
Smith noted that Alberta doesn’t want “special treatment or handouts;” it just wants to be free to develop its “incredible wealth of resources” and choose how to provide healthcare and education. She expressed hope that secession would not be necessary and that her government would be able to reach an agreement with Prime Minister Mark Carney and Canada’s new government.
Last week, Carney’s Liberal Party retained power after a campaign that focused heavily on what he called the existential threat posed by US President Donald Trump, who has floated the idea of Canada becoming the 51st US state and imposed extensive tariffs on most of its neighbor’s goods.
The outcome of the election has added to long-running tensions in conservative regions. In Alberta, where the Conservatives won 34 out of 37 seats, many residents have expressed frustration with their federal leadership. Similar dissatisfaction has been reported in neighboring Saskatchewan, and to a lesser extent in British Columbia.
Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says no to digital ID
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, said that if he were to be elected Prime Minister, he would not impose digital IDs. He made the comment on a campaign trail in Windsor, Ontario.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its federal Digital Identity Program last August.
“And to answer your question, I will never allow the government to impose a digital ID,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre’s comment came a few days after Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers said that they were not interested in a federal digital ID.
“The government of Saskatchewan is not creating a Digital ID nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding,” said Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe.
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith said that she fully supported what Moe said.
Transport Canada has recently announced that the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project is ongoing, contrary to earlier reports suggesting that the project has been discontinued.
The KTDI is a collaborative effort between the World Economic Forum (WEF), Accenture, INTERPOL, various government entities, and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada. The project was initiated in 2018 to create a secure and decentralized digital identity system for travelers between the Netherlands and Canada. The system utilizes cryptographic encryption and distributed ledger technology to ensure the protection of travelers’ personal information.
Saskatchewan premier slams Trudeau’s radical climate agenda
By Anthony Murdoch | Life Site News | November 8, 2022
REGINA, Saskatchewan — Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has bluntly announced that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s extreme environmental policies can go to “hell,” and that his province will assert full autonomy over its natural resources.
“To hell with that!” Moe told the Saskatchewan legislature’s speaker of the house during a debate about the Trudeau government’s environmental policies on November 3.
Reading sections of a recent report by Pipeline News verbatim, Moe quoted the outlet saying, “‘Thou shalt not use coal for power generation post-2030,’ the federal government hath said. ‘And it’s moving to do the same with natural gas by 2035.’”
“‘On November 1, the Province of Saskatchewan said, ‘To hell with that,’ but in a more sophisticated, legal manner,’” Moe added, further quoting the article’s humorous, mocking tone.
While Moe employed a joking tone while quoting the report, he continued in a serious manner to blast Trudeau’s environmental policy goals, stating that “a fossil fuel phase–out by 2035″ is “going to make for an awfully cold house in Saskatoon on Jan. 1, 2036,” adding that “One needs to look no further than the European Union” to see the impacts of such policies.
“I would say for the rest of the world to observe and it’s on full display for the world to observe. The energy costs in the European Union over the last number of years due to enacting these solely environmental focus policies have been skyrocketing,” stressed the politician.
As mentioned by Moe, the Trudeau government’s current environmental goals – which are in lockstep with the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” – include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades.
The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil-fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – of which Trudeau and some of his cabinet are involved.
Pushing back against federal interference in the energy sector, the government of Saskatchewan introduced the Saskatchewan First Act on November 1 to “confirm Saskatchewan’s autonomy and exclusive jurisdiction over its natural resources.”
In specific, the new piece of legislation will amend the province’s constitution to make it so that the province has “sovereign autonomy and asserts Saskatchewan’s exclusive legislative jurisdiction under the Constitution of Canada over a number of areas,” such as the “exploration for non-renewable natural resources.”
The Saskatchewan First Act will also allow the province to choose what fuel it wants to use to power its electrical grid, independent of the dictates of the federal government.
Alberta also pushes back
Last week in neighboring province of Alberta, newly-selected Premier Danielle Smith also accused the Trudeau government of pushing “hostile policies” towards the province that have “been led by the most extreme left on environmental, social and governance ratings.”
She noted that such policies “focus so narrowly just on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and the demonization campaign that has happened against our energy industry, which sadly, the federal government with [Minister of Environment and Climate Change] Steven Guilbeault is aligned with.”
Smith applauded Moe’s Saskatchewan First Act, and said that in Alberta her soon-to-be-released Sovereignty Act will likewise help assert the province’s autonomy over its abundant natural resources, and prevent federal government overreach.
“This is the reason we have to stand up to Ottawa. They have no right to regulate our industry.”
While Trudeau’s plan has been pushed under the guise of “sustainability,” his intention to decrease nitrous oxide emissions by limiting the use of fertilizer is something farmers have warned will reduce profits and could lead to food shortages.
Moreover, experts are warning that the Trudeau government’s new “clean fuel” regulations, which come into effect next year, will cost Canadian workers – many of whom are already struggling under decades-high inflation rates – an extra $1,277 annually on average.
Clearing the plains
Book review by Paul Burrows • Briarpatch Magazine • March 10, 2014
In the context of a Canadian popular imagination still permeated by myths about heroic voyageurs, intrepid Mounties, and an inexorable yet ostensibly “peaceful” and “lawful” acquisition of other peoples’ lands, James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains is a vital intervention. Described by historian Elizabeth A. Fenn as a “tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of Indigenous peoples,” Daschuk’s study of Indigenous health and disease on the Canadian Prairies draws on decades of research to recount Canada’s policies of forced starvation and ethnic cleansing. More broadly, it’s a good introduction to the history of Canadian expansion into the northwest and the nature and evolution of Canadian Indian policy in the 19th century.
Research for Clearing the Plains began some 20 years ago as part of Daschuk’s doctoral program in history at the University of Manitoba under the supervision of D.N. Sprague. Sprague was himself a scholar of Canadian and Métis history, perhaps best known for his lengthy feud with Tom Flanagan over interpretations about Louis Riel, presumptions of government “benevolence,” and the causes of Métis dispossession in the Red River valley. Like Sprague’s own work, Canada and the Métis (1988), Clearing the Plains finds little evidence of Dominion “benevolence” in its annexation of the Canadian northwest or in its post-Confederation dealings with First Nations.
However, Daschuk’s is also a work of environmental and epidemiological history. As such, he argues that human agency, greed, and colonial power are “only half of the story.” In his view, the field of biology is equally important to understanding Indigenous history, not just in present-day Canada but also throughout the hemisphere. Much of what follows is an attempt to strike a balance between these two sides of causation, with Daschuk see-sawing between a portrait of epidemic disease as an inexorable, objective, even organic force, and a counter-portrait that emphasizes the social determinants and policy-induced nature of compromised immunity, disease outbreaks, and death.
The historical scope of Clearing the Plains is sweeping. The book opens with an assessment of pre-European health and well-being on the northern Great Plains, then concentrates on the impact of the fur trade era and nascent European settlement, and ends with the post-Confederation treaty era and the “nadir of indigenous health” in the wake of the Northwest Resistance of 1885. Throughout the book, Daschuk emphasizes the relationships between Indigenous health, outbreaks of epidemic diseases, and environmental factors, as well as settlement expansion, settler ideology, and most crucially, Indian policy. In this regard, Clearing the Plains joins a growing body of historical work examining the social determinants of health and, in particular, the relationship between Indigenous health and Canadian policy.
Overall, Daschuk’s book is important less for unearthing new and surprising historical facts than for expanding upon, reinterpreting, and publicizing them. For example, one of the central theses of Clearing the Plains is that famine was a deliberate policy weapon used to coerce “unco-operative Indians” onto reserves and remove them from lands coveted by white settlers. This isn’t a revelation for anyone familiar with existing scholarship. In his influential 1983 article, “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree,” John Tobias persuasively demonstrated that starvation was a weapon used to impose the reservation system, bring “recalcitrant” leaders such as Big Bear to heel, and force the Cree to capitulate to treaty terms. Clearing the Plains not only expands on such themes, bringing to light further evidence and examples, but its publication has made them accessible to a much wider public.
Daschuk’s interpretive framework sheds the congratulatory and smug self-image that still dominates in much Canadian historical writing. He is unafraid, for example, to label the settler-colonial process in southern Saskatchewan “ethnic cleansing,” and elsewhere he has described the foundation of modern Canada as resting upon the twin truths of “ethnic cleansing and genocide.” Those wanting a crash course in Prairie colonial history would do well to read Daschuk’s book alongside Sarah Carter’s Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (University of Toronto Press, 1999). Both books are carefully empirical but rooted in a deep commitment to social justice. Together, they serve as excellent points of departure for further research into colonial policy in the Canadian Prairie provinces.
Paul Burrows is a Winnipeg-based writer, researcher, and parent. A lifelong activist, he co-founded the Winnipeg A-Zone (Emma Goldman Building) in 1995 and is currently finishing a PhD in history related to Treaty 1 Territory and settler-colonialism.
By James Daschuk
University of Regina Press, 2013
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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