No one. I mean NO ONE should be surprised about the Biden administration nixing the Keystone Pipeline. If you are surprised, you haven’t been paying attention. This project was dead in 2015 under Obama. If we’re being honest, it was dying from its inception in 2008.

Yes, folks should be pissed off about it. I am. A lot of money has been sunk into it. A lot of livelihoods are at stake. It’s an epic display of grand malfuckery.

But I’m glad too. It was a bad idea. The entire fossil fuel energy sector is also dying. Yet, our leaders refuse to muster the courage to usher in change.

I’m using fossil fuels here as shorthand for the entire industrial machinery that extracts, refines and consumes dinosaur juice. Yes, I know. It’s more complicated than that.

That whole complex is the most subsidized on the planet.

And it’s been disrupted.

Let’s look at it this way. When the automobile was invented, it displaced the buggy whip. When refrigerators were invented, they displaced ice boxes. Wikipedia displaced print encyclopedias.

Fighting for ice boxes and buggy whips seems dumb, right?

We’ve seen the damaging consequences of our accelerated use of these legacy energy sources. We’ve had notice. We’ve had time to pivot to more sustainable and renewable options.

It has never been about the WHAT. We know what to do. It’s HOW we get there that matters.

Jason Kenny is still bleating and lamenting the what. And he’s not alone. Everyone saw this coming. They’re just door to door encyclopedia salesmen, desperate and angry.

If they wanted to show leadership, they’d navigate a path forward for how Albertans and Canadians can capitalize on new opportunities. Not continue to sink and waste money on the past.

Green technologies are far from perfect. They, too, can be damaging to the environment. The extraction of rare earth metals and the like. But it’s where the investment needs to be. Direct the firehose of money, brains and sweat equity in that direction. It will pay off.

We are a resilient and innovative bunch. To do less would be an insult. Our leaders can do better.