Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told an audience on Tuesday that the Ukraine war is a good thing because it is helping to accelerate the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels and towards a zero-carbon electric grid.
Trudeau declared that Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and natural gas clearly endangered the continent and positions countries like Canada, with its abundant natural resources, to usurp the dominance that countries like Russia and China have taken in both fossil fuels and industries such as rare-earth metals, used for many of the products necessary for a “green” economy.
Breitbart.com reports: Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, a year before Trudeau became prime minister, and colonized its Crimean peninsula. The world reacted to the first eight years of war in Ukraine with marked apathy before this February, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced a “special operation” to “liberate” the entire country from “Nazism.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, has vehemently denied that he and his government, once derided as “pro-Russian,” was “Nazi” and regularly urges the world to fund and arm Kyiv.
After the Ukraine war became a popular conversation topic in February, Trudeau became one of Zelensky’s most vocal supporters, visiting Ukraine himself in May.
Elsewhere in the climate conversation on Tuesday – held at the Canadian Climate Institute – Trudeau insisted that the idea that climate change is both real and a matter to be dealt with through heavy-handed government intervention was “no longer a political debate” in Canada and lamented that climate believers spent “a lot of time talking about … the challenge of fighting climate change” without highlighting “the opportunities.”
Trudeau made the remarks in a discussion hosted by Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi, host of the “Zero” podcast.
Asked directly if the ongoing war in Ukraine would “delay Canada’s energy transition,” as European countries seek alternative sources of fossil fuels other than Russia, Trudeau answered, “No! It’s accelerating it.”
“It is absolutely accelerating it. As people are saying, ‘Wow, we built an economic model and prosperity in some parts of the world, including in Europe, that was reliant on energy inputs from Russia,’ as they have to get off of that,” Trudeau argued, “people are realizing, ok, getting off of Russian oil and gas means getting onto more oil and gas to replace that from elsewhere.’”
“But it’s also showing, ok, we need to accelerate our moves off of oil and gas our moves to decarbonize the gas at least,” he continued, “so that we can actually not be reliant on Russia but, more than that, not be reliant as democracies on autocracies.”
Trudeau then accused Western countries of “underpinning” their economies on dictatorships, which undermines the message that free societies are self-sufficient and preferable to tyrannies.
Leave a Reply