To people who keeps thinking that Carney's playing along with realpolitik given the situation we're in, I for one don't buy that playing according to these realities and trying to move the country away from fossil fuel is mutually exclusive. You can play along with Smith, Poilievre, Trump, but you also have so many other provinces where you could be pushing towards that greener future. You're governing a nation, not a city state with extremely limited resources and a small monocultural population.
Now, I'm not saying that nothing is done by Carney's gov. They've been doing some stuff, but they're mostly financial instruments aimed at industries. The approaches so far have been largely crticized as insufficient to highly insufficient. The theme from the government seems to be this: they want both green and fossil fuel industries to thrive. I find that grossly naive: green industries are young and budding and it's difficult for them to survive, whereas fossil fuel industries are established and have the space and resources to keep finding ways to kill green industries to prevent them green industries from eating their pie.
To clarify, one of the things Carney's gov is doing in the green space is to offer grants for companies looking to go into green battery tech. This is a pretty important piece of technology that's still quite the question mark to be fair: as in, what even is this? Many look to hydrogen and I know a professor who's actively working on hydrogen batteries, but it's gonna take a good while to get that to a place where we as end consumers see it in our day-to-day. Meanwhile, it seems like we're building a gigefactory to produce EV batteries in St Thomas, Ontario, with Volkswagen, but that's likely using tech we already know, i.e. lithium-ion. It also seems like the planned primary supplier of lithium is going to be from a company in Quebec, which uses mines around North America.
Now, I'm not saying Carney's recent O&G-friendly posture is not abhorrent to see; I'm actually appalled by it. There's a part of me that hopes that this is the feds trying to throw Alberta a lifeline to get them out of the O&G hellhole by trying to push them towards so-called "Blue Hydrogens" (which I know isn't a great resource given the reliance on O&G still and having to rely on these industries in making sure harmful emissions like methane are properly contained), which will later bring them to green once they have more infra to support a less carbonated society, but the way Carney's gov has handled the messaging does not stoke any confidence in that being the case. I mean, if that is the goal, why aren't they saying it, right? And from what we know about Smith, there's no guarantee that Alberta will going to work towards Blue Hydrogens, and we'd just be giving O&G companies freebies to continue tearing our lives apart.
