Story of the Week: February 2022

How Canada can keep Europe's lights on by John Ivison  Appeared in The National Post on February 23, 2022 Gina's Thoughts "Russia supplies one third of the gas that heats homes across Europe."  "Western countries were still purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars of oil and gas from Russia."  "Helping to keep the lights on in Europe should be a foreign policy priority for Canada."  InvestNow has always asserted that if North American and global oil demand keeps going up, supply will increasingly come from countries like Russia.    Canada can and should be the global supplier of choice for oil and gas.  Canadian resource companies are leaders in efforts to improve efficiency, deliver high environmental standards, and ensure product affordability.  Competitive transparent markets are the best guarantee for good performance by resource companies and Canada has some of the world's best.  However, the regulatory environment has made it incredibly difficult for Canadian oil and gas companies to get projects off the ground, let alone completed.  The "open hostility" to the energy industry in our own country needs to stop before we can think about keeping the lights on in foreign countries.

Student climate activists from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Vanderbilt file legal complaints to compel divestment by Susan Svrluga Appeared in The Washington Post on February 17, 2022 Gina's Thoughts "For years, they tried to convince universities that investing in fossil fuels was immoral. Now they're telling them it's illegal." It has been just over ten years since the beginning of the divestment movement and the messaging that divestment is the moral solution to climate change. And in those ten years, divestment commitments have increased, demand for oil and gas has increased and emissions have increased. Divestment does nothing to affect the demand for oil and gas. To take a quote from the article, "natural gas and oil power our global economy." Virtually every public company a university endowment fund invests in is reliant on oil and gas to exist, operate and succeed. Trying to make it illegal to invest in oil and gas is wrong and will only hurt the free societies in which universities flourish.

A windfall tax on oil giants would harm - not help - pensioners by Ross Clark Appeared in The Spectator on February 8, 2022 Gina's Thoughts BP and Shell form the backbone of many UK pension schemes and both companies are "the rare chinks of light" in this year's performance of the shares and bonds which make up those pension funds. "BP is up 15 per cent and Shell up 20 per cent, with both enjoying bumper profits on the back of high oil and gas prices." The author writes that the state wants to "snatch a punitive share of these profits during the good times" by imposing a windfall tax on these companies. But the state does not "appreciate how the retirement plans of many millions of ordinary workers depend on dividends and share values of public companies. In the state's mind, 'dividends' and 'shareholders' are rude words - whereas in reality the people with a stake in BP and Shell are in many cases exactly the same people who are struggling to pay their heating bills." Layer this way of thinking with the fact that BP and Shell are the biggest villains for the divestment lobby and have been for the ten years that the divestment movement has been in existence, and we can see why there is a disconnect. "The current surge in gas prices is a sign of the divestment folly: it reminds us how, in spite of huge investment in renewables in recent years, we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels and will be for the forseeable future. Oil and gas companies are doing well at the moment because they are providing a vital public service, and we would be in serious trouble if they stopped providing it."

Fossil Fuel Follies of 2021 by Gwyn Morgan Appeared in the Financial Post on January 28, 2022 Gina's Thoughts "Last year saw an intensification of the great march to "net zero", aimed at replacing the 84 per cent of global energy currently supplied by fossil fuels.  This unrealistic objective saw actions ranging from the impractical to the hypocritical to the simply bizarre."  So begins the fossil fuel follies article by Gwyn Morgan, a recap of the year gone by.  My favourite folly in the list is "Greenwashing by the Caisse de Dépôt: Quebec’s provincial pension fund says it will divest its oil production assets by the end of this year. No mention of divesting assets that require oil to function, including airports, highways and marine shipping terminals."  What the Caisse, and any other institution, fund, or bank considering divestment fail to realize is that every other industry relies on the hydrocarbon industry to function.  Canada's oil and gas industry fuels every other sector on our stock exchanges.  To divest from oil and gas is pure folly.