For nearly a decade, the Trudeau government has been accused of playing a bad game of three-dimensional chess as it tried to balance the urgency of the climate crisis with the stridency of the fossil fuel lobby and its political enablers. But gradually, the federal climate and energy strategy has begun to look more like a game of poker—in which case it must be the highest-stakes game in history, with hundreds of millions of tonnes of emissions on the table. With the release of the federal Clean Electricity Regulations this week, Ottawa is finally showing its hand.  “These leaks represent the tip of the iceberg of methane emissions, the super-emitters, for which there is no justification – these could be radically reduced at little or no net cost,” said Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defence Fund.    If the crowds aren’t going wild, they probably should be. And, weirdly, we may just look back one day and force ourselves to thank the fossil lobby for setting its own trap.  Playing a Longer Game.....limate strategy first began to emerge, it seemed as though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers were trying to please everyone but satisfying no one. They introduced a price on carbon pollution, but then sent billions of taxpayers’ dollars to a company in Texas tobuy us all an oil and gas pipeline, a sprawling construction megaproject whose price has since ballooned from $7.4 to $30.9 billion. While all of that was going on, Trudeau told the big CERAWeek oil and gas conference in Houston that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” They introduced a price on carbon pollution, then sent billions of taxpayers’ dollars to a company in Texas to buy us all an oil and gas pipeline, a sprawling construction megaproject whose price has since ballooned from $7.4 to $30.9 billion. While all of that was going on, Trudeau told the big CERAWeek oil and gas conference in Houston that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Ottawa announced a groundbreaking phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, but didn’t exclude fossil companies from the public financing available to any industry—even though no other line of business accounts for 28% of the country’s carbon emissions or leads all sectors in annual emission increases. (Surely some smart federal analyst could have figured that one out?). The net result: It’s always easy to find climate hawks who mistrust and reflexively criticize anything Ottawa says or does. Even though direct authority over natural resources lies with the provinces, and as Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault observed earlier this year, provincial obstruction is the biggest obstacle to ambitious climate strategy. But if you’ve been keeping score, the picture began to shift nearly 18 months ago......read on   https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/playing-poker-with-power-plants?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email