“Energy Matters”

The first reactors in Canada’s planned nuclear expansion will depend on foreign suppliers — including the United States — to enrich and fabricate their fuel, even as Prime Minister Mark Carney argues Canadian sovereignty depends on the country’s ability to supply and control its own energy.

It marks a sharp departure from the Candu reactor system, which gave Canada — the world’s second-largest uranium producer — a largely domestic nuclear supply chain for more than half a century.

The summer 2026 news cycle continues to be dominated by the Iran War and its vicissitudes and consequences. The disruptions to oil and natural gas supplies and the economic fallout are animating articles with headlines such as Bloomberg’s last month, “Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition.”

The energy transition is the idea that the United States and the world are already starting to see the wholesale replacement of oil, natural gas, and coal by three politically favored energy technologies: solar and wind, moderated by batteries.

A few years ago, nuclear power looked doomed.

Plants were shutting down.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo won applause bragging about closing a nuclear plant “14 years ahead of schedule.”

Just how nonsensical does a pitch for a new oil pipeline have to be, in the current political climate, to be rejected out of hand?

Courtesy of Doug Ford and Danielle Smith, we’re about to find out.

This week’s proposal by the two premiers to build a 3,300-kilometre route to Ontario from Alberta is, at the outset, not being taken very seriously even by many of the people who were pushing for the new west-coast pipeline tentatively announced a few days earlier.

Outside the city of Thetford Mines, Quebec, in a region that once supplied the world with asbestos, workers are drilling underground in search of an unusual and potentially vast new source of clean energy.

A start-up called Vema Hydrogen has drilled two test wells into the bedrock, each 1,000 feet deep, and is starting to inject treated water into the iron-rich rocks below. The goal is to trigger a special type of chemical reaction that could eventually produce large quantities of hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that may one day play a vital role in tackling climate change.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the prime minister has “wasted an entire year” deliberating a potential new oil pipeline out of Alberta — criticism that comes after Mark Carney said a new pipeline is “more probable than possible.”

“He’s been prime minister for a year and he still hasn’t even made up his mind whether he supports a pipeline,” Poilievre told reporters at a news conference in Toronto on Sunday morning. “He’s wasted an entire year.”

Carney is waiting for the the deal that best suits China.