Canada’s Energy Superpower Dream Is a Delusion, Economist Warns

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You heard it here first, Canada. We are not ever going to be an energy superpower. We aren't one now. We're not going to be one in the future. And I'm going to be talking to John Rapley, who is a political economist, Canadian, but teaches and researches outside of Canada, because he's written an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that says essentially the same thing. John, can you give us an overview of that op-ed? [00:00:25] Speaker 2: Sure, Mark. You know, there's been all this talk ever since the Canadian government announced this project to build a pipeline with taxpayer money to go to the West Coast. And I had noticed my colleagues, I write a weekly column for the Globe and Mail, and I'd written several. I write periodically on climate because it's one of my areas of interest at the moment. And I felt, you know, that it wasn't really my remit to write about this just now because somebody else more qualified than me would take it on. But I was noticing nothing. There was just a lot of commentary, article after article sort of saying, this is such a great idea. This is such an obvious thing. It's a clear win for Canada. And I was simply not seeing critical thinking about it. It was just sort of almost as if a group of people were having a conversation among themselves, I felt, and not getting any kind of, you know, is there another way of looking at this? So I spoke with my editor, and I said, you know what, I think, even though I wasn't planning to write about this topic, I feel I'd need to stir the pot. And he very enthusiastically agreed. He said there wasn't enough of a sort of countervailing position. And really, I looked at it as, you know, if we're going to spend taxpayer dollars to build a pipeline, we should be asking hard questions. This is value for money. And my argument is it isn't. And I've sort of spelled it out. I said, if you look at where the capital in the world economy is being allocated right now, the future demand is for technologies that are not going to rely as heavily on fossil fuels. Yes, there's going to be continued future demand. But so what? You can have future demand for a lot of things. That doesn't mean you should be putting taxpayer money into subsidizing. If that demand is there, let the oil companies meet it and let Canadian tax dollars be put to uses that are going to deliver long term returns for the country, very importantly, to develop new industries rather than to develop existing ones. So I sort of looked at the kind of the reasoning. And I pointed out that oil and gas exports have been rising over the last three decades faster than overall exports in spite of that. The growth rate in the economy has just kept going down and down. If it's such a winner, why is it delivering such poor returns? You know, and I, using the starting point of 1990, I said if China in 1990 had used this kind of approach, they would today be a nation of farmers and exporters of low value manufactured products. They didn't put their money then into the things they were good at then. They identified what are the industries that are going to capture the future? What are the industries in which we might help shape the future? And they did that with amazing success. And of course, one of the effects of this is that they have come really to become the dominant force in renewable energy and in transportation technology based on renewable energy. And as you know, well, you know, the demand, if you want to talk about future demand, that's where the future lies. [00:03:27] Speaker 1: Yes. Now let's, let's talk about defining an energy superpower because I interviewed economist Chris Bataille about this back in 2025 when the, when Prime Minister Mark Carney first started talking about it. And Chris's point of view was that you can be a big exporter of hydrocarbons and Canada is the fourth largest producer of oil at 5 million barrels a day. It's the fifth largest producer, sometimes sixth largest producer of gas, natural gas. That doesn't make us a superpower because superpowers move markets. They can, you know, OPEC or particularly the Saudis can put supply into the market, take it out of the market and affect the price. The United States, which is the world's largest LNG exporter can do the same thing. Those are superpowers. We are a price taker, not a price maker. And you will hear that in the halls of Calgary all day long. Calgary understands that. But it seems that our prime minister does not. And he has a PhD in economics from Oxford. So what's your take on it? [00:04:31] Speaker 2: That's a really good point, Mark. I mean, I hadn't even thought about it that way when I used the term Canada being an energy superpower. I guess what I really meant is that the fossil fuel industry is a superpower within Canada, that oil and gas exports have come to sort of shape so much of the Canadian economy and Canadian policy. And, but, you know, when it comes to being an energy superpower, I think one of the really interesting developments that we're really only starting to just see in the last few months is that energy superpower, I mean, if you, I think the world's preeminent energy superpower now is China. And that's not just because China is the key source of output in a great deal of the renewable energy technologies that are sweeping the globe. It's not just that it is doing that at a time that there's now a huge surge in demand precisely because oil and gas, if you're depending on oil and gas and you're not a producer as most of the world's countries are that, that, that rely on oil and gas, they're importing it. And that means they are dependent on somebody else for the price of their input. Whereas with renewable energy, they can actually localize that in, you know, use entirely local resources. But even more importantly, now we're seeing China is the world's swing consumer. The reason oil prices didn't head towards $200 a barrel amidst the complete closure of supply from Hormuz was that the Chinese were able to sharply reduce their consumption, both by drawing on their own stockpiles and by very rapidly ramping up energy supply, electricity from other sources, because they have electrified so much of their economy, they could do that switching over to more renewables and temporarily firing back up coal fired stations, which they have that sort of spare capacity in these emergencies. But the result is that the price of oil and gas is set increasingly in China. So I think you're absolutely right. This idea that Canada should, you know, it plays a particularly outside role in the world market and has tremendous potential, I think is being probably exaggerated. [00:06:34] Speaker 1: Well, it goes, it goes deeper than that, in my opinion. And, you know, you're an economist, you live in Canada, some of the time, in the UK, some of the time, South Africa, some of the time. So, you're hit into that global school of economic, global thought around economic issues. In Canada, we're exactly the opposite. We're parochial, provincial, we're inward looking, we're a nation of naval gazers. And my observation here is that far too many of our analysts, particularly our economists, are not plugged into the latest, what's the word I'm looking for, innovative, groundbreaking kinds of scholarship and thinking about energy. And given that your unique position, would you agree or disagree with that argument? [00:07:30] Speaker 2: I'd be inclined to agree. I have to say, I'm not really up to date with the current state of thinking in American and Canadian economics departments, but that itself may say something, you know, they weren't sort of coming across my radar all that often where I have been working. I think in part, that may reflect, I mean, the dominance of American economic thought, which has been overwhelming, but is being increasingly pushed back across much of the world and experimentation with new forms of thought. You know, we were talking before the interview began about a mutual friend, Doin Farmer, who's at Oxford University, and came at this from a very different direction. Of course, he's a theoretical physicist who said, well, the economists like physics, so let me sort of start dabbling in economics, they'll probably appreciate what I'm doing. Well, they didn't. He pointed out that their thinking was basically very poor attempts to apply physics and coming up with the wrong conclusions. And so, you know, he's done some very interesting stuff on chaos. And you get a lot of that thinking bubbling up in places like that. That's not to say that in Oxford and Cambridge, the sort of orthodox neoclassical economic thought is not still dominant. But there's a lot more pushback. And it may be that in Canada, you know, just as I say, this year, over the last, and it wasn't always the case, economic thought was not always dominated by American schools. I would say it became so in the late 20th century into the early 21st century, absolutely hegemonic, probably it begins around the time of the Lucas critique in the 1970s. And hiring in American universities, and also the practice, you know, and a lot of this is now being, I say, exposed, I mean, it's being analyzed, the ways in which the tendency to narrow a very small number of publications that are kept by gatekeepers, like the American Economic Review, or the Journal of Political Economy that, you know, and that, that, in other words, you have to fit in with orthodoxy in order to get published in them, the very increasingly small number of schools that are producing the PhDs that dominate the associations that sort of control economics. So there is a, and I've written about this, I wrote a book actually, about 10 years ago, called Twilight of the Money Gods, which looked at economics as being essentially a sort of form of state religion, in which there is a priestly caste that sort of guards the truths, and how this has evolved over time. And I think in some ways, that's, that's not a bad thing, I think, because it wants to see itself economics as a science, and yet it isn't. It, there does need to be some kind of enforcement, if you will, of standards, and some of which I think is good. I think, I think they would, I would probably say that economists do a better job than other social scientists actually trying to adhere to, you know, accepted forms of scientific method. But, but having said that, they also tend to take a very quasi theological approach, you know, I remember once, you know, having a chat with a co author I was working with at the time, at Stanford, and I mentioned an author she'd never heard of, and I said, well, they, they, they've used this sort of slightly Marxist, and she said, well, I can't look at that. I said, well, yeah, but I mean, she's, she's had a huge impact. And she said, well, we don't, we don't, you know, anything with any kind of Marxism, we won't look at. [00:11:07] Speaker 1: But that leads us to a conversation of your new book, Icarus Economics, and maybe I suspect that some of what we've discussed already is kind of would be an introduction to the book, but maybe give us an overview and the arguments you're trying to make in it. So I started out with the trying to [00:11:25] Speaker 2: understand why is it that Western economies are growing slower and slower in Canada is no exception. I mean, the growth rate is approaching zero has been trending downwards for some time. And worth noting, it's been trending down, even though the role of oil and gas in the country's exports has been rising. So the idea that it's going to save Canada, I think is just a complete canard. But I was really trying to, you know, there's a clear long term secular trend that economists have been wrestling with, you know, the labour productivity keeps getting slower and slower. Governments are having to spend more and more money to sort of medicate recessions, what is going on. And that sort of intersected with another interest in mind, which was this whole question of the climate crisis, which is, you know, the conventional wisdom is, well, you know, rich countries may have caused a climate crisis, because they produce the vast majority of emissions that have led to climate change. But it's poor countries, which will pay the highest price, because rich countries do have the wealth needed to make the adjustment. And both of those things came to intersect in the book, what I found is that, look, economic growth does cause a set of ecological, well, natural and environmental changes, but also, and I think this is, you know, it's quite accepted that they cause changes to the external environment, you know, they're causing climate change, they cause an increase in zoonotic pandemics, that can produce these exogenous shocks that cause economic downturns as happened during COVID-19. But the other thing is, I took it a step further, and I looked at the way they change us, our internal nature, not just the external nature, they change our behaviour, they change the way a society organises itself. And I came to the conclusion that developed rich countries had less, were less resilient, actually, before exogenous shocks. And that therefore, when the climate crisis began to hit, I surmise that it was actually going to hit rich countries much harder, because they were less prepared. And so far, that is what the evidence suggests. I mean, apart from anything else, if the effect of extreme weather is to destroy capital, most of the capital is going to be in rich countries, that's where the bulk of damages are occurring. And I think we're only in the very early stages of this, but we are seeing some of the signs showing up, persistent inflation, you know, that inflation that just won't go down. A lot of this has to do with both energy costs that are rising because grids have to be, not just electrical grids, but transportation grids have to be rebuilt in order to withstand whether they were not prepared to deal with. Buildings have to be redesigned because they weren't, you know, prepared for this kind of heat and extreme weather. And then also, we are having things like two years ago in Canada, or was it three years ago, the economy was actually set back when one year by wildfires, the extent of wildfires, which actually slowed economic activity in several parts of the country sufficiently to bring down growth. So we are seeing more of that. And that is going to, we are headed towards, I think, what will be the first climate change recession, after which I think it will become a regular feature of life, and will continue to make it harder and harder to grow. [00:14:36] Speaker 1: Your argument about rich countries stalling, because they're basically wanting to do more of the status quo, the same things that got that made them rich, reminds me of an important bit of scholarship that we've incorporated into our energy transition theory of change comes from Clay Christensen from Harvard School of Business. And what he says is that, you know, companies have an innovation, they commercialize it, they become big and prosperous, and they could be well run and well managed, then a disruptive innovation comes along. And, you know, the usual example is Blockbuster and Netflix, you know, Blockbuster looks actually had Netflix's business plan, because they were looking at buying them in 2006, said no, we don't think the streaming video is going to is going to take off. Four years later, you know, Blockbuster is bankrupt and, and Netflix now has become a huge company. So the point here is that the the existing country or company that keeps doing what it's doing, because it's making money, profit for and returns for its shareholders is analogous to a rich country like Canada. And the disruptive innovators like the China and India and other countries, then are coming along and challenging them. And the rich countries don't recognize the challenge, and they can't adapt, they can't, they can't re-engineer their economies, and their and their societies enough to meet the challenge. And so that eventually what happens is they begin declining. And eventually, they might even fail and become, you know, like, you know, the second class economies. But yeah, that, I don't know, you're the economist, tell me, is that a good comparison or not? [00:16:15] Speaker 2: Mark Kim: Well, it's I think it's a very good comparison, Mark. And this is something I talk about in the book that, you know, Schumpeter used the term creative destruction. And of course, he was basically taking the idea from Marx. But this basic the idea that you need to have in order to maintain economic growth in an economy, you need to have renewal, you know, you get, otherwise, we'd all still be driving, you know, horse carriages. And so in order, every time there is the emergence of a new industry, as the Netflix blockbuster example illustrates, there has to be decline in another one. And the question is, is the economy, and is the society set up in such a way that it will allow that change, that renewal to happen. Now, one of the things about very wealthy societies, and we live in an age now where just in the last few years, wealth has become more important than income. I mean, historically, wealth is the accumulation of income. Today, it's actually the other way around that wealth keeps growing much faster than income. And income is derived from wealth. And but what that means is therefore that it becomes absolutely essential to preserve the wealth. And so that process of allowing, and that would mean that you'd have market corrections where the shares of the declining companies, you know, collapse, and that frees up capital for the dynamic companies. We've arrested that process over the last generation, every time there's a crash between government fiscal stimulus and the central bank policy of monetary loosening in order to boost share values. And this is considered, of course, a great success. Well, look at, you know, 2008, we had a crash on the par with, you know, similar to 1929, we didn't have a Great Depression. But what we have had is, you know, after the Great Depression, which, you know, lasted the better part of a decade, you had economic growth rates that absolutely took off. We're now nearly 20 years from the Great Recession, and the growth rate is more or less still bumping long. And what we have had is a massive expansion, fiscal expansion, particularly south of the border in the US, which is not I mean, for every $2, the American government spends, it's getting $1 of additional economic growth. I mean, that's a model that is now collapsing. That's why bond yields are starting to rise so quickly is that it's reaching the end of the road. And so that kind of process of renewal is inhibited because the society has become so wealthy and because you have so many people who need that wealth to be preserved, or their income will decline. And that is, I think, a challenge that in a developing country, you don't have, it's the reverse. [00:18:50] Speaker 1: Well, that I would think then argues for why Canada has decided to double down on pipelines, oil sales expansion, and LNG growth, because basically, it is being challenged by the rise of China, the electrostate, all of these new electric technologies. And for my audience that isn't familiar with our work on this, we distinguish between electric technologies on the supply side, like wind, solar, and batteries, and then on the demand side, like electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial heat for an industrial processes. So that's the direction, that's the future economy. And we're not prepared to go in that direction. And all you have to do is look at, at Mark Carney's electricity strategy and is a number of other strategies he's got. And it's very clear that we have chosen to do what the companies that Christensen says fail. And that is we double down on the status quo. And the key thing here is that when incumbents companies like that are challenged, they invariably go to the government and they say, we need you to subsidize our operations, our expansion in order to protect, protect jobs, protect your revenue, do all of these wonderful, wonderful things. And the governments take what would normally be an uneconomic project, subsidize it, and make it into a viable business case because they've now, you know, de-risked it with public taxpayers dollars. And I argue that that's exactly what the, what the Carney government, the Alberta government are doing with the hydrocarbons and their infrastructure. [00:20:37] Speaker 2: No, I'd agree. I mean, Canada is in this place playing the blockbuster to the Netflix, and it's not going to work. It's not going to work, I can tell you this, because as I say, you know, I live, you know, now the better part of each year in South Africa, and I spend, you know, I spend most of my adult life living and working in developing countries. And the tremendous attraction of renewable energy, well, it's twofold. One is that, especially in the African continent, you know, it's a vast amount of resources there available in the form of sunlight and wind, but particularly sunlight. Secondly, it's a form of energy technology that can be distributed very easily. You don't need to hook up and, you know, very noisy diesel generator, you put a few row, you know, solar panels on your roof and you're good to go. And, but vitally, what it means is that for a country, to give you an example of a country that just gets this is Ethiopia, which has banned the import of internal combustion engine cars, because they say we're spending $3 billion a year importing oil and gas. We have plenty of hydroelectricity, and we're not even tapping our solar potential. We can basically operate a fleet of cars without importing a drop of gas anymore. This means that nobody, first of all, I mean, there are so many ways in which governments this is attractive. It means if you're for any reason, irritating Donald Trump, he can't put you on a sanctions list and cut off your oil supply. It means that if there is a war in the Middle East, that your supply isn't interrupted. It means that you're not subject to sudden price shocks, which are going to strain your foreign reserve holdings, which is going to devalue your currency and cause all sorts of problems with inflation at home. You're just freed from all that. So you basically rely on entirely local resources. Now, if you look, I mean, it's not just the fossil fuel industry, but the auto industry, two industries which are very powerful in Canada. And you'd say, well, who is going to Canada, who's Canada going to sell all those cars to? Because the 80% of the future demand of the world economy is going to come in developing countries, and they are very quickly, very, very quickly shifting. And it's the growth rate of right now, it's largely imports of Chinese electric vehicles in developing countries is just phenomenal. I mean, it's in some countries from a very low base, like India, but it's like 80% a year, it doesn't take you very long that you can electrify your fleet. Demand for ICE cars globally peaked several years ago and has been consistently falling. And so you will have the traditional, the legacy car companies in Europe and North America fighting over a diminishing pie. And if you're putting taxpayer dollars into doing that, you are basically going the blockbuster route. And I think that it's incumbent on those of us who see that to call out the government for doing it, saying, this is what you're doing with taxpayers' money. [00:23:42] Speaker 1: The strait of Hormuth and now the second strait along the Red Sea, whose name I can never remember, the one that the Houthis are shipping in. So those two straits, that basically is how most of the Middle Eastern oil and LNG gets to Asia. So the Asian countries have looked at this, and here are the numbers for China. And you can immediately see where the incentive lies for China. They imported in 2025, $325 billion worth of crude oil and $50 billion worth of LNG. So there you are, the world's first electrostate. You've got surplus manufacturing capacity in all sorts of, you know, like wind panels, solar panels and batteries and EVs and so on. And you're importing all of these, you know, at an enormous cost every year, you're importing hydrocarbons. And it's getting worse now because you can look forward to continued volatility because of Middle Eastern political and military conflicts. It's almost a no brainer for policymakers to go, well, duh, why don't we electrify, accelerate the rate of electrification and reduce our imports, which frees up more money in our own pockets and leaves us less vulnerable to these fluctuations in oil and gas prices. Your take as an economist. [00:25:11] Speaker 2: Again, you're spot on, Mark. I mean, the choke points in oil and gas are, you know, there really are, I mean, there's a couple that are in a very volatile region. And we're seeing just how very, how easy it is to cut off supply that way. Choke points exist for all products, including products that are connected to the energy transition. But the difference is that you have a whole set of different choke points and none of which is under the control of one country that way, none of which could be no, no country could step in and say, that's it. We're going to, as Iran has proved itself able to do. And Iran's not even a, you know, a superpower. Iran is a regional middle power, but it's able to, with its network of allies in the region to basically cut off the world. And, and therefore, and of course, the thing about these commodities, which are traded on the major exchanges in London and in the US is that it doesn't matter if, as the US can say, we produce our all our own oil, the price is set on international markets. And unless you're going to take those supplies off world markets, you're basically having your price set by a small rogue state in the Middle East, that's not going to be the case. The only, the only state that could try to do that, when it comes to the EV supplies, like the rare earths, I mean, China could, but China tends to take a more pragmatic view is what interest do we have in driving up the costs of a technology that the world wants to buy right now. So it does seem that they don't have an interest in doing that. The American interest in always in trying to control the supply of the Middle East is that if they could control that, they could control the world, but they've been, they've never actually used that control quite the way they have now under Donald Trump, who thinks like an, you know, like a sort of a 19th century oil baron. And we're seeing the effects of that, that he has sort of provoked the Iranians into doing something that they no doubt always thought they might be able to do, but they weren't sure if they could pull it off. Now that they see they can pull it off, there'll be no going back. So I think, you know, there are many people who would say that Donald Trump, the climate skeptic has turned out to be the best thing that's happened to the energy transition because his behavior in the Middle East has caused an acceleration in demand at the very time he's trying to kill it. Uh, and again, talk about it's worse than the blockbuster model. It's like trying to get people to go back to, you know, abandoning their televisions and just listen to, to radio. Um, he's actually trying to, to kill that nascent industry in America. [00:27:52] Speaker 1: Um, I think it, it's time for us, John, to, to talk about, and this, you set this out in your book. Uh, there's the sort of blind faith in the status quo. There's the blind faith in, in other models, but there's a middle ground here for rich countries like Canada. It, it, we, it isn't, uh, for ordained that we're going to not adapt, not re-engineer our economy and, and still pro and not prosper. Uh, and I've set out a number of, of alternatives in my work. So we talk about how, uh, there are technologies now to turn, uh, the oil sands bitumen into non-carbon combustion projects like, uh, products like carbon fiber and, uh, battery carbon and, uh, and asphalt binder. Uh, and so, you know, build now so that 20 years down the road, you actually have a viable industry that could take all of that. And there are, uh, geothermal advanced, uh, uh, closed loop geothermal was pioneered using the drilling techniques and technologies of the Alberta oil sands. And, and, and you could, that is ready to scale at, you know, commercially and at a global level, Canada could lead that Alberta could lead that. And it, it would be busy making manufacturing, drilling rigs and training up workers. And, and, and there's another growth industry. That's two, that's just two examples of where we could go and the money that we're taking, putting into pipelines and, and, and oil sands, uh, uh, CCUS could go into those new industries, scale them up rapidly. And that would be part of the foundation that we would lay for future prosperity, uh, great growing labor productivity and all the things that come with a prosperous economy. And we are not doing that. And this is a failure of imagination and leadership at the federal level, the provincial level, and in the business community, uh, your response, sir. [00:29:54] Speaker 2: Absolutely. Look, um, come back to the climate crisis. We know what we need to do if you wanted to address the climate crisis and keep these ecological feedback loops that cause exogenous shocks that are really starting to have an impact on the economy. We know what needs to be done. We need to address the growth of carbon emissions globally. We also know that we've largely done that in Western countries. The problem lies in the developing world, which are into this very rapid countries, into this very rapid growth phase, and they are going to produce an awful lot of carbon emissions, which are going to start a planet beyond the, you know, the tipping point. Now, the demand to electrify economies in the developing world is there. It's latent. It's huge. I mean, as I said, you know, the reasons for them are obvious. They would love to be able to sort of just get away from importing coal, uh, importing oil, gas and coal where it's done. Um, and to install wind and solar, which is now a cheaper form of electricity, it's abundant. The lack, the problem is lack of capital and they don't have the capital due at a very rapid rate. So it will proceed very slowly. Now, who has the capital? Is it of all countries? And what I argue in the book is I show this twofold. I mean, first of all, if, if there were a investment in the developing countries, first of all, there are opportunities for investment because the demand is there. But secondly, that, that would in effect operate like a sort of new Marshall plan that you would then create demand for the very products and technologies that, as you say, you can specialize. I mean, Canada has quite, you wouldn't know it because of all the talk about the dominance at the moment of the fossil fuel industry in the Canadian conversation, but there's quite a dynamic startup ecosystem and renewable energy in this country. And in fact, Alberta has been one of the centers of it and what they don't have, obviously the political connections and the influence on the policy dialogue. But if that's where we were allocating money, if we were both investing in developing countries and assisting those startup firms to be able to sort of commercialize their technology, where you'd get the sudden growth of demand, you could have a complete renewal of the economy. This is already happening, but where is it happening? It's happening in China. Chinese firms, private firms are starting to invest more and more money building renewable energy plants in developing countries, A, because they see return, but B, there is for the Chinese government, they're quite happy to encourage their firms to do this because if you invest and build a solar plant in Namibia or wherever it is you're building it, you're also going to create demand for your vehicles to export to. So the idea there, the potential there, China is showing it, this has been a sort of renewal of the Belt and Road Initiative as it's called in the last year. But this is unlike the previous iteration of the Belt and Road Initiative, this is driven mostly by private capital seeking opportunities under the, you know, with the encouragement of the Chinese government. I detect very little thinking like that in Canadian policy discussions. I'm not hearing much of it at all. [00:32:55] Speaker 1: I want to close the interview this way, John. The conversation that you and I are having, many people in the audience will go, wow, this is great. I've never heard this before. This is all new to me. Well, folks, it's new to Canadian policy makers as well. Don't kid yourself. And my point here is, John, that the conversation that you and I are having is common outside of Canada. If you go to Europe, university, if you go to think tanks, you go to conferences, you go to policy sessions outside of Canada, the conversation you and I are having is the norm. Inside Canada, it's a rarity. [00:33:32] Speaker 2: That's a huge problem. Yes. No, you're absolutely right. And I certainly, this is the thing that always strikes me when I come back to Canada. It's sometimes easy to sort of think that the country hasn't changed that much since I left, you know, back in the late 20th century. When I say left, I mean, I still come back. But the kind of the policy discussions and also the technological assumptions are still much the same. Well, you know, long distances, ICEs or vehicles are the only way to do it. Train won't, you know, high speed train doesn't make sense because people have cars, they prefer to drive, you know, all these sort of discussions based on, and these are discussions that have taken place 50, 60 years ago in Asia and in Europe, and now are happening in developing countries where it's kind of a no brainer. And you come here and there's this kind of just this, I would call it a complacency. And I don't think it's being sufficiently challenged, perhaps by the, you know, there are definitely a lot of good, there are a lot of good thinkers in Canada doing a good job of pushing back. But I would say to a very considerable degree, the orthodoxy hasn't changed that much. And I think it needs changing. I would agree wholeheartedly. And that's one of our [00:34:49] Speaker 1: objectives at Energy Media is to have an influence on that national public conversation around these various issues. John, this has been a fascinating conversation. Good luck with the book. I'll provide a link in the YouTube description for anybody who wants to, wants to get it. And I look forward to [00:35:08] Speaker 2: more conversations in the future. I do too. It's been a pleasure, Markham. [00:35:13] Speaker ?: you