 view from the North. It's really important discussion today. Canada is a huge energy producer and consumer. And in these days, after energy has become destabilized, thanks to Vladimir Putin, markets are roiling all over the world. Energy is more expensive. We should talk about the comparison between the U.S. and Canada and Canada and other places. And for that discussion, we do as we always do. We talk to Dr. Ken Rogers, and he tells us about Canada and how it compares. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. It's good to be here. And I probably have a different opinion than you do on some matters. That's why we like to have you on the show. Oh, well. You know, when you think of energy, the future, you really have to break it into just two simple concepts. The first one that most people don't count when they're talking about the second. And the first is that we're going to need an awful lot more energy. You know, for example, 15 years ago, China used half as much energy as the United States. Today, it uses twice as much. Now, the U.S. has about, you know, 5% of the world's population, but uses 15% of the world's energy. So if you just wait a little while and various countries in the world start to catch up, not necessarily at China's pace and not necessarily to get to the American pace, but certainly most countries, you know, 15 years from now may be similar to what China is now. You know, I call third world countries, like especially one like India, with the humongous population, Indonesia and Brazil. You know, I don't necessarily think the Philippines, Egypt and Ethiopia, each of which currently have more than 100 million people are going to pull up their socks as fast as might be the case, or you know, could be the case. Still, there's going to need an awful lot more energy. Well, the second piece is you can't separate anything to do with energy from global warming or the climate crisis. Well, if you're to start with the climate crisis, you could basically say, what causes it? Well, it's really better termed as global warming rather than, you know, the climate crisis. Well, global warming is caused by an increase in the gases in the atmosphere, which trap the heat. Well, CO2 gives approximately three quarters of the, let's call the weight of the gases that go into global warming or that have an effect. Well, you know, currently everybody with the, in the climate, let's call it anti-oil and gas business, rather than call it environmentalists. Yeah, spoken like, spoken like a Western Canadian. Well, I think there's a realistic touch to it. For example, carbon dioxide amounts to 77% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Now, on the other hand, you've got methane, which amounts to 11%. And you've got nitrous oxide, which is 7%. Well, nitrous oxide has a, compared to CO2, has 300 times the ability to trap energy or trap heat. That is, its contribution to global warming is 300 times as much as CO2. Well, if you have 77% of what, of the gases that are there are CO2 and only 7% is from nitrous oxide. You know, but if nitrous oxide is 300 times as powerful, then you're sitting where the nitrous oxide would be 27 times more important. That is, you know, you could eliminate one pound of nitrous oxide is just as good as eliminating 27 pounds of CO2. So that, you know, CO2 isn't necessarily the total story. You know, the environmentalists tend to be attacking it, you know, as the total story, you know, so that when you're trying to get the future for energy, and you say one of the objectives is to not have any greenhouse gases or eliminate global warming, you know, and the other one is you've got to have an awful lot more energy. And so you need a policy to get from now till then, you know, and, and so if you're trying to get from now to then, and you say, well, the biggest energy user in the world is China. Well, China is still an importer of energy. And interestingly, you know, the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia, you know, their biggest export is exporting coal to China. You know, in China, out of its own production, where it's its production of energy by China itself, 71% of the energy China produces for itself is coal. Well, so if you're trying to say, gee, transition, the global warming question is really a world problem. It's not a Canada problem. Like Canada, it's almost like a joke compared to looking at China or the Orient or Japan, because I mean, Canada has four of the provinces like the one I live in, where 97% of the electricity in British Columbia comes from hydropower in Manitoba, which is just north of North Dakota. And Manitoba produces 99% of its electricity from hydropower. Well, nobody else has that luxury. You know, like Canada has 20% of the world's fresh water, so that you kind of have a little bit of an advantage. And we've got lots of mountains so that, you know, your water running downhill is important in enabling you to have hydropower. But, you know, countries, while Florida was a country, you know, and it has 21 or 22 million people, but it's flat. And it's not high enough. I mean, if you look at the flooding that occurred in Orlando solely because they had unexpected huge quantities of rain and it had nowhere it could drain quickly. So your energy question, you have to deal with what can one country do that would help the world as opposed to itself. You know, where where Canada's contribution is like a farce because we have, for example, from, you know, Central British Columbia, you know, halfway between Vancouver and the Alaska Panhandle, you know, we have got a couple of really nifty ports. Well, those ports, like for shipping, are closer to Japan or Beijing, China than is Australia or any part of the United States or almost anywhere in the world where there's any energy other than like Malaysia or, you know, Brunei. The now what the Canadian government's done is saying they wouldn't allow any pipelines to have exports of any energy from those ports. There were 27 corporations applied for permits to export LNG, like that's the natural gas in its most condensed form. And, you know, the thing that's sort of saving Europe this week. Well, they didn't, they finally have one approved where, you know, when those 27 applications were made, there were virtually none in the U.S. Now the U.S. now has seven liquid LNG plants in operation and half a dozen more that are under construction or close to being started of construction. And those plants are, you know, one LNG plant produces billions of dollars a year in revenue. I mean, it's not, they're not chicken feed facilities, they're humongous. And the United States has gone from, you know, an importer of LNG to the world's largest exporter. You know, just recently did, you know, have greater exports than either Australia or Qatar, which are now the second and third biggest exporters. Well, if you're trying to get, you know, transitional, you know, LNG to a great extent is transitional. And where transition becomes important is if you think of Europe. And how did they get in the mess they're in? Well, they started off with an overzealous, ill-informed or misguided, you know, if I could put enough adjectives in, race to have no carbon energy. You know, that is anti-carbon, like anti-oil, anti-gas. And so they had this big rush. And the first thing, they did just a magnificent, wonderful job, better than anybody else in the world at getting wind farms and solar farms. You know, but after a big effort on wind farms and solar farms, and they then sort of looked at, gee, all the negative stuff they had about oil and gas, you know, shutting down, and coal, you know, shutting down all of their coal power plants and, and, you know, while they were at it thinking that, gee, if, you know, we're talking environmental, why don't we pick on nuclear as well? You know, so even Germany, or particularly Germany, you know, decided they would decommission their nuclear plants. You know, well, you know, they chugged along for a little while and, you know, despite the fact that their development of solar and wind power was really, really terrific, it was just a drop in the bucket. So suddenly they had a big panic. Like why I call misguided was they just didn't understand or didn't properly recognize the sheer magnitude of the energy business. And so suddenly, you know, they looked at over their shoulder and, and gee, they, all of these wind farms and solar farms just, just weren't cutting it. I mean, they were productive, they're pretty good. If you look at a country like Denmark, it looks pretty magic, you know, but if you Germany, it was a joke. You know, like the United States has done an awful lot of solar and wind, but today it really amounts to like 4% of the energy produced. Well, since they started doing it, the energy usage of the US has grown by more than that. You know, so it really hadn't gained much. Well, what Europe did was, you know, suddenly they recognized, gee, this doesn't work. Well, politically, once you've said, well, gee, nuclear is an awful thing, and we're going to decommission those plants, it's kind of a tough political decision to say, well, we want to change our mind. You know, similarly, if we're going to shut down a coal plant because it really is the worst of the CO2 contributors, you know, it's kind of hard to say, let's put it back in to commission. You know, so they make a deal with Russia for natural gas by pipeline, you know, because natural gas was at least much, much cleaner than coal or oil. Was that supposed to be a transitional fuel? I believe that natural gas may never be relegated to the category of transitional, surely purely because if the energy needs of the world grow, the population grows, but if the standard of living of other countries start to, you know, pull up their socks, the need for more energy is going to be such that there will be great difficulty. Your transition is the whole science to me that needs to have a real effort. You know, for example, I believe nuclear power should be called a transitional source of energy. We may never get to the stage where we need to shelve it, like natural gas. It really depends on what the growth in the energy needs are. I don't see anybody taking a political stance that let's all use less energy. Well, a couple of thoughts on that. You know, theoretically, Ken, suppose I really made my mind up and to use your expression, I pulled up my socks and decided I wanted to use renewable energy of all kinds. You know, in Canada, for example, has plenty of those things. Aside from, you know, hydro, it has solar, it has wind, it is very abundant in the energy sources it has that are not carbon or fossil. So the question I put to you is, suppose you had a political will thing, where they said, well, we're going to not only do more than that 4% per annum, we're going to do lots more. We're going to throw the money at it. We're going to do solar and wind and everything renewable we can do. My question to you is, can we actually achieve, you know, an appropriate response to climate change? Can we reduce climate change by changing, you know, the basic systems in the US, maybe in Canada too, in Europe for sure, Asia, can we beat climate change if we really focus on it and treat it as the emergency that it is? I believe we have to. You know, we have to try, but we have to be realistic. You know, for example, there is a lot of stuff in the press nowadays about hydrogen. Now, hydrogen would be really, really nice as a partner with wind and solar, because when wind and solar doesn't work, if you've got an underground reservoir and you store a bunch of hydrogen under pressure, you know, then you can use the hydrogen, you know, for the period when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. And hydrogen works as a good fuel for transportation. You know, the difficulty with hydrogen is the cost to produce it. You know, you can do, you know, make hydrogen from water, which is really expensive, or you can make hydrogen from natural gas, which is very economic, but if you make it from natural gas and you capture the CO2, and you sequester the CO2, like carbon capture and sequestration, is the thing that they're trying to implement for most power plants around the world. That is, they, you know, it's one big spot. It's pretty easy to capture the CO2. And there's lots of old, you know, salt caverns and equivalent in which you can pump the CO2 into and it's sequestered very safely. Like that's a transitional move that really takes a lot of the negatives out of oil and gas, you know, particularly gas. When I come to, and I always wind up in this place, is that a couple of basics. Number one is an economy which has abundant energy is going to be a stronger economy. You can build stuff with energy. You can make the economy run better with energy any place. And of course, if the energy is too expensive, that's a problem, because it's not really abundant. If it's cheaper, well, then it's more likely to be the case that your economy will benefit by that. At the end of the day, question of money. And if you say that climate change is the most existential threat, it's the biggest story of our lifetimes and it's happening around us ever since Al Gore and before and worse all the time. And despite all these meetings and United Nations efforts and whatnot, we're still sinking into climate change. We're not putting in the political will, but we're also not putting in the money. I guess those two things are related. If we put in the money, and we make energy abundant everywhere around the world, and we make it renewable energy, A, we have a better effect on climate change. Maybe we save the planet. And B, we have better economy. So to me, it's a matter of focusing on energy and being willing to have political will and put in much more money than we're putting in now. Seems to me, we have the technology. You were just talking about that. We have the technology. We just have to deploy it, build the infrastructure and the like. And we're not really focused because look at Florida. Look at Florida. And they talk about all the sad stories of the people whose homes were wrecked and the lives lost, what have you. But bottom line, they're not talking about dealing with climate change. As you said, they're talking about rebuilding, but rebuilding only so it would happen again and again and again. And there's so many places in the world like that. So the answer is to try to beat climate change and that would be the biggest priority of all. And the other thing I wanted to just throw into the pot on that is nuclear. There was a young kid out of Virginia who is a Republican and who hasn't been completely candid in his campaign about what his position was, has now come out and favors nuclear. And there are companies in the United States and Asia for that matter who are ready to use nuclear technology and build bite-sized power plants, power plants that are safer, more efficient and so forth. And I suspect there's a groundswell of people who would support nuclear like you either as a transitional fuel until we get a handle on climate change or even more long term than that. So even if you don't have the political will, if you have the will to build nuclear, then maybe you can get your arms around this. I don't think we treat it seriously enough and I agree with you and that all of the wind and all the solar doesn't make that much difference in the face of fossil fuel, which is still our predominant source of fuel everywhere. So my thought is we aren't going to be able to beat this until we change the norms, change the political will, change our spending habits. What do you think? Well, you started with the premise of it would be really nice to have all of the energy come from renewable sources. Well, if you take Iceland, Iceland has a unique geology where it has enough geothermal that the majority of its energy can be geothermal no matter how much their population grows. But all of Iceland has such a puny population. It's less than a normal city. Well, similarly, Iceland, you'd say, well, compare Hawaii instead of Iceland. In Hawaii, you got way more sun than Iceland. So solar would work better in Hawaii. It would work much better in Nevada and Utah and Arizona. But Hawaii has quite a bit of sun. Because you have more clouds, not as much as Arizona. So each country has a different situation. Now, if you're sitting with a country that's densely populated like the Netherlands, you can't have a great big monstrous solar farms unless you're going to eliminate the dairy farm or eliminate something else like they're using every inch. I mean, they even plant things along the sides of highways. We're in Canada, we'd call that the ditch. In Canada's case, one would think we're blessed with a lot of natural resources, but there would be great difficulty in getting to the type of scenario that Denmark has. Denmark has a combination of wind, solar, and then they have natural gas from their interests in the North Sea. And so they've got a pretty clean, compared to anybody else in Europe, they've probably got the cleanest energy scenario, but they're still using a fair slug of fossil fuels for anything else. You don't try to manufacture anything without some byproduct of oil. You know, I'm just I'm conflicted on whether the solution is country by country, region by region, geographical construct against geographical construct. You know, it's one thing in Canada, it's another thing in Germany, and so forth. And we have world oil markets and world energy markets that supposedly alleviate this. And I would like to ask you about Putin, because one of the things that Germany and Western Europe did was they made themselves dependent on Putin's gas. And they really didn't think of what Plan B was going to be, and they didn't really recognize the geopolitical problems around Putin and Russia, and dependency. So if you have a flat world, so to speak, Friedman's flat world, if you have a world that's interdependent on energy, you subject yourself to those geopolitical things and dictators who, you know, want to take sovereign, get there, you know, invade their neighbors and the like, and be mean and nasty, and use the dependency of other countries as a lever. And so perhaps the answer is, like Denmark, you have certain primary sources that are local, and you have certain backup sources that you can replace if necessary. You know, one of the things that Germany is waiting for is American LNG, but they don't have the infrastructure to take it yet, and they're going to have a very cold winter. Um, how do you avoid being held hostage that way? How do you avoid the geopolitical manipulation of the energy markets? Well, for years and years, the United States had always had a concern about, you know, we'd gone past peak oil and that the U.S. was importing too much oil and, you know, there was a crisis, they were, you know, dependent on other countries. And as a net result, for example, the countries in OPEC could have, you know, terrible human records, you know, what they do for, you know, with their public or with their, you know, no female rights whatsoever, etc. They get away with that on the world stage because other people depended on their resources, you say. Energy dependent. Well, each country is really standing on its own in this world. You know, if you say the United States, you know, is probably, you know, I would say for sure is the world's largest contributor to helping other countries. But, you know, how could you look your constituent in the eye and say, we're going to send a whole bunch of money to Somalia to enable them to have some wind and solar farms up, you know, right away quick and to, you know, do X, Y, and Z, which would also enhance their economy and energy self-sufficiency. You know, well, you know, you'd have, how could you possibly do that and not fix the problem in Puerto Rico? You know, is there's an allocation of resources? You know, you can look at the United States clearly discriminated Puerto Rico versus Florida. You know, your comments are so touching because it's just kissing cousin to the whole question of immigration. What country, you know, what countries are going to allow immigrants to come from? And on what basis? It's about borders. And so that suggests to me that what we are missing here, both in immigration and in energy, is a global organization. Now, the UN in many ways is a failed organization because, you know, they have the Security Council rule and then the bad guys can, you know, veto anything they want so they never get anything done. But assuming the United Nations was reformed somehow or more powerful somehow, wouldn't that be an appropriate place to organize global energy markets and allow for the, you know, the free transfer of power in an equitable way without allowing the interdependence to become dependence? Well, you'd kind of have why does the UN have problems, you know, and you're saying, you know, the Security Council veto by one of any of five countries, you know, you can say, well, how do you fix that? You know, can you say, well, let's have the G20 instead of, you know, the five and say you got to get three of the 20 or something. You know, you can have a change of rules. It's much like in the United States, how do you fix some of the stupid, pardon my way of looking at it, undemocratic things like, like the filibuster in the Senate, the fact that you have two senators from every state, you know, the, you know, gerrymandering being a kosher activity, just, you know, you can you can see the way things ought to be fixed. But, you know, there isn't a structure to enable that fix. You know, if you said you want to change the veto, you know, you know, the United States might be the first one to say there is no way on earth they will be part of any organization where the U.S. doesn't get an absolute veto. And out of the other side of the U.S.'s mouth they'd say, yeah, but we shouldn't let, you know, a puny country like France have a veto. You know, France is not so puny on the world stage, but relative to the U.S., it's pretty, you know, small. But, you know, you've got to have much like compromise. Let's assume the compromise. Let's assume the empowerment of the United Nations. And I totally agree with you that it's really, really hard to reform the United Nations. Or for that matter, the problems in the U.S. clearly we spend a lot of time thinking about what the problems are, but not coming up with solutions. In any event, let's assume for this discussion that you could have an international organization that would manage energy markets. That would allow for the free and equitable transfer of fuels from one geographic area to another. Wouldn't that solve this problem we've been talking about? No. Okay. Let's just use China and India as examples. Now, China, from my statistics just looking at it, produces 71% or of the energy it produces itself, 71% of it's from coal. Okay. So the United Nations of your idea says, let's not have any coal production at all. Like we shouldn't have coal and steel. We shouldn't have coal for burning at power plants or for heat. And in particular, we're worried about every time you have coal mining, you get methane goes into the atmosphere and it's 20 times as problematic as CO2. Much like my example with nitrous oxide, the methane is terrible as an atmospheric greenhouse gas. Anyhow, how are you going to convince the Chinese to dig into their empty pocket to buy energy from somebody else? Like Iceland can't send them their geothermal power. Electricity, one of the problems which technology has yet to solve is transmitting electricity over a fair distance without losing most of the electricity along the way. I totally agree. This is a big problem. But let's assume for a moment that the United Nations organization is powerful and can speak power to China. Let's assume that these are wild assumptions, I understand. Okay. But what about hydrogen? Why can't this very powerful United Nations organization that runs energy markets say, look, we are making hydrogen a world fuel. And we take everything we can, short of fossil fuels, and we put it into hydrogen, and then we put those hydrogen tanks on ships and we move them around the world. And you can buy them off the ships and use them to power your cities. And it's the preferred and ideally the prevailing kind of energy. And we only use renewables to make the hydrogen. What about that? Is that a perfect solution? Hydrogen is an excellent fuel for almost anything. That is, if you could get the economics of hydrogen to work, it would be a great solution. I happen to think that hydrogen will play a major role in the future. In the short run, it's much like my China example is you get economics. Economics gets in the way of everything when you're trying to say what's for the social good. And you overcome that. Like if you have international money, everything working collectively, well that doesn't work. There is no international pooling of money. Europe and the United States can go their way and eventually the rest of the world will follow. But that's the only way you're going to get some of these things done. The Chinese are as keen as anybody to see any fuel like hydrogen work well. Well, we'll use hydrogen as an example. The province I live in has a ton of natural gas that's just locked in. You know, it's just sitting there. It's proven reserves. It's easy to produce. It's fairly close to a port. But the federal government in Canada just won't allow any pipeline to go from where the gas is to a port. Is that for environmental considerations? Well, it's not as good as the prime minister going on a photo-op. Okay, that's my cynical way to say where I made a comment earlier about the Europeans being ill-informed to make the mistake of cutting off all of their sources of energy and then having to get unbended need to get gas from Russia, which was going deeper into stupidity. But I lost my train of thought with that diversion. But the hydrogen you could produce from natural gas very easily and economically now. If you sequester the CO2 that results from doing that, then you have, instead of green hydrogen, which if you produced it from solar or wind, then call it green hydrogen. That would be really good and fit exactly what you're saying. Well, call it blue hydrogen. They actually have terms on hydrogen as to how it's produced. And if it's produced from natural gas but all of the bad stuff is sequestered, then it's blue. It's not quite green. Well, that's a great transitional thing. Now, you've got to do the transitional things and down the road find out whether you can even end the transition or whether you got to keep going with that transitional procedure, such as nuclear power, such as using natural gas that's but sequestering. But you got to start with the heavyweights first and get rid of coal. Yeah. Well, there it is. I think that's the takeaway from this discussion that you don't know how long you're going to be involved in a transition, but you know the transition is better than the status quo because right now we're still so heavily invested in fossil fuels. And it's okay to have a transitional bridge on this. Maybe that's not the right term. A transitional bridge when you don't know exactly how long the bridge is, but you only know that the transition is better than the status quo. It's a conversation that has to keep going. And I'm sorry we don't have more time, but I feel at least in my view we've made some real progress in trying to understand the larger picture, including for Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, so forth. It's global markets. We have to see it that way. Thank you very much, Ken. Very valuable discussion. Well, if I add one thing, just when you use the United Nations political will, just pick on the United States and Canada. The United States produces or 13% of the energy the US consumes comes from coal, 5% in Canada. Well, if you can't solve that problem, how could you possibly look to somebody like India and say, gee, they should clean up their act? You know, if a wealthy country like the United States bows to Joe Manchin, you know, then don't look to anybody and talk about what they should morally do. Amen to that. We have to clean our own house, literally. Well, thank you so much. Be nice if Canada could clean its house and properly help the rest of the world, but our political will is dumber than yours. Well, Ken Rogers helping us clean up the world here. Really appreciate it. Again, it was really interesting to hear you go through those issues. And I look forward to our next discussion, which I hope will be a comparison of infrastructure in the United States and in Canada, how you do it, how you fund it, how well it works and so forth. And how bad it is. And how bad it is. Ken Rogers, view from the north. Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.