Fortunately, there is at least one person with the knowledge, passion and credibility to move Trudeau

There is a brilliant way to build Canada with cleaner energy and higher levels of prosperity.

Sadly, it’s not the way that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposes, with his revolutionary shift to renewable energy from oil and gas.

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Trudeau’s way has been tried at huge expense in places like California and Germany but has done little to lower carbon emissions , while greatly raising the cost of power.

Fortunately, there is at least one person with the knowledge, passion and credibility to move Trudeau. That is Michael Shellenberger, North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy.

Canada should build on its impressive strength in nuclear power and its potential for liquified natural gas exports, Shellenberger says.

This will actually help the country reach or exceed its climate commitments while building its wealth, as opposed to the Trudeau Liberal plan that will gut the economy and not come anywhere close to curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Who is Shellenberger? The California activist has been at the forefront of the American environmental movement for two decades. He was a key player in the progressive movement pushing solar and wind power, so much so that he became a leader in President Barack Obama’s green shift. In 2008, Shellenberger was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Environment.

But then came a fundamental shift for Shellenberger himself, his realization that solar and wind are too weak and unreliable to power a modern economy and that his opposition to nuclear power was baseless.

Here are some key takeaways from my interview with Shellenberger this week:

“I was totally in love with the idea,” Shellenberger said of his early embrace of solar and wind power. “I just think there was something very spiritual, very romantic about being powered by natural flows rather than energy stocks we dig up and burn, or fission … I really viewed renewables as a way to heal America and heal the planet.”

Shellenberger came up against fierce opposition from local people against massive wind and solar farms, which they saw as a new industrial blight, the wind turbines acting as gigantic insect and bird-killing machines and the solar panels taking up large swathes of natural space and creating their own form of pollution, spent panels that dissolve into toxic dust. “In theory renewables have no environmental impacts. In practice everywhere they are deployed they have huge environmental impacts.”

By the early 2010s, Shellenberger was persuaded by thinkers like Stewart Brand to rethink his position on nuclear. He realized places like Ontario and France had most of their energy produced carbon-free because of nuclear power. Another huge moment came when leading British climate scientist David MacKay of Cambridge University was dying and bluntly admitted that England needed nuclear and not any renewables.

As for the oil and gas industry, Shellenberger said, it will take many decades to move from gasoline for cars to either hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electric vehicles. “The carbon density of gasoline … is such an amazing advantage, how much energy and power and endless range you can get in an internal combustion engine. So that’s not going to go away very soon.”

Canadian Candu nuclear technology works well, is proven and is safe, Shellenberger said. In Canada, a new generation of “boring, standardized” Candu reactors should be built to decarbonize society, with the country exporting as much LNG to coal-burning countries as it can. “This is the only way to go with climate change.”

But what about nuclear waste? Nuclear is the one power source that does not emit waste, but captures all of it, storing it safely on site, Shellenberger said, as opposed to sending it to landfills or into the atmosphere. “There’s so little waste that nuclear produces … that we have room for thousands of years on existing plant sites.”

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Will Trudeau listen to this most excellent advice? Or continue on his costly spirit quest to renewables?

Shellenberger says the dreamy look and exaggerated claims when Trudeau talks of renewables are familiar to him. “With Trudeau, I look at the way his eyes look when he talks about renewables and I know that for him it’s a spiritual quest, just like it was for me … Progressives, romantics and idealists, we fall in love with renewables, and that’s clearly what Trudeau has done, as well as his guy (Gerald Butts).”

Will Trudeau buy Shellenberger’s diagnoses and prescription?

One can certainly hope.

Alberta and Canada’s future depends on him waking up to the hard facts about the only sane plan to combat climate change, with made-in-Canada nuclear and liquified natural gas.