Yup. You tend to see it in countries that have the right geography (like Canada). There's a relatively famous case between France and Switzerland I believe, but I can't remember the name. There's also talk of leveraging abandoned mines as well as a sort of gravity battery, but I don't know of any actual applications of this model.

I appreciate that you're not trying to deny climate change, but this talk of our inability to handle the economic consequences of the required action is also really common and it always has the same flaw: it ignores the economic cost of inaction.

I also think you're misunderstanding the definition of standard of living if you're equating it with one's ability to waste energy. That's a mindset born of the broken system that brought us here. A country that prioritises density and electrification is a country that uses far less energy... because it doesn't need to waste it. Smaller cars use far less than SUVs, and e-bikes use a fraction of that, while moving in that direction offers you safer, cleaner, and quieter cities at a fraction of the price. The same applies to insulation and electrification of heat: cleaner, quieter, healthier, and cheaper.

I offer my own life as an example. I sold my car in 2008 and stuck to transit and cycling, renting a car for the occasional long weekend road trip. I saved roughly $10k/year, and bought a house in 2021 with about £300k down. I installed solar panels on my house for about £6000 and now my hydro bill is just £8/month while the rest of the country is choking on gas and paying around £150-£200/month for the privilege.

At the end of the day it's about taking the long view and recognising that the cost of inaction far exceeds any short-term costs, then you do what a leader is supposed to do, take the nation with you and build the future you've convinced them they want.

Canada has been hooked on fossil fuels for so long that too many of us think that it's the only way to live. This mindset has convinced many to decide that not setting the world on fire isn't worth it, which is objectively insane.

Canada will not survive a 4° increase in global temperatures, so any argument that begins with "we can't do what's necessary" is an argument against our survival.

So much to cover with this.

We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing...

The argument that "we need time" to wean ourselves off of oil is dead. It just is. I know this because I've been hearing it for forty years and absolutely nothing has changed in that time. Well that's not true, it's gotten worse. We burn more oil and gas, our transport infrastructure is dedicated to private vehicles and crumbling, and the world is literally on fire. "We're not ready yet" was being passed around in the 70s during the oil crisis ffs, and somehow it's all the excuse we need to do nothing. The very same arguments were used then as you're using now and they're a big part of the reason that we're still not ready.

You cannot extricate an economy from fossil fuels by building new pipelines. It sounds obvious, but apparently I have to say it anyway. More market liquidity, lower fossil fuel prices, and increased trade in (and dependence on) fossil fuels do precisely the opposite. Instead of backing away from fossil fuels 40 years ago, Canada has committed itself again and again to a "burn the world now, fix it never" strategy for my entire lifetime.

So just stop with this "we're not ready" excuse when what you really mean is "I don't want to". It's a terrible position to take, but at least it's an honest one.

I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.

Just what kinds of assessments and monitoring were you hoping for? Oil and gas come out of the ground, we put it into pipelines, ships, and trucks and eventually set it on fire, pushing up the temperature of the planet. The more we burn, the worse it gets. That's objective. It doesn't need an environmental assessment, there's nothing new to monitor. We know what happens when we do it, so asking for it is performative at best.

Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice.

This is true, though it ignores the fact that the reason carbon taxes are so praised is that they work as both a carrot and stick: they make burning fossil fuels more expensive, while funding the infrastructural changes to give people alternatives. The Liberals brought in a carbon tax alright, but true to form treated it as more of a performance, dumping those public funds into fossil projects, and doing absolutely nothing to provide alternatives in more than a decade. Essentially, they taxed Canadians so that we could extract and burn more fossil fuels.

Personally, I'm not happy that Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax, but I can appreciate the pragmatic reasons for it. My problem is that my experience with Liberals and neo-liberal bankers is that I fully expect them both to lack a grasp of basic physics when it comes to the environment and pretend that the biosphere can be someone else's problem, and his performance in the debates wherein he wouldn't stop talking about how much he loved pipelines was completely unsurprising.

Carney is a neo-liberal banker in his 60s. My daughter is 6. He'll be long dead while she's trying to stay alive on a burning world.

All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM

...and this is why we can't have nice things. So long as people pretend that there are only two parties: "Burn the world", and "Burn the world slowly", we're basically fucked.