Canada's own 2024 grid scare proves we're on the same path unless we change course.
Europe's green-energy unraveling is no longer a distant cautionary tale. It's a mirror -- and Canada is already seeing the first cracks.
A new Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the European story in stark detail: a continent that slashed emissions faster than anyone else, only to discover that doing so by tearing down firm power before its replacement existed comes with brutal consequences -- collapsing industry, sky-high electricity prices, political fragmentation, and a public increasingly unwilling to subsidize wishful thinking.
The tragedy isn't that Europe tried to decarbonize quickly.
The tragedy is how they did it: by insisting on an "or" transition -- renewables or fossil fuels -- instead of what every energy-literate nation outside Europe pursued: renewables and fossil fuels, working together while the system evolves.
And here's the uncomfortable truth:
Canada has already had its first European-style crisis. It happened in January 2024.
Most people have already forgotten it, because our political class desperately wanted you to. But in January 2024, Western Canada came within a whisker of a full-blown energy security breakdown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. were stretched to their limit. The grid was under cascading stress. Contingency plans were activated. Alberta came terrifyingly close to rolling blackouts.
It wasn't caused by climate change. It wasn't caused by a mysterious cyberattack.
It was caused by the same structural brittleness now crippling Europe:
But instead of treating it as the national wake-up call it should have been, B.C. did something telling -- and deeply damaging.
Just a couple of years ago, an economist publicly warned about the economic price of emerging system vulnerabilities due to a groaning stack of "clean economy" policies.
The B.C. government didn't respond with data, evidence, or even curiosity. Instead, a cabinet minister used the safety of legislative privilege -- that gold-plated shield against accountability -- to launch nasty personal attacks on the economist who raised the concerns, which themselves had originated in the government's own analysis.
Just slurs -- the very definition of anti-intellectual governance.
It was a moment that told the whole story:
Too many policymakers in this province believe that energy systems obey politics, not physics.
Physics always gets the last word.
The WSJ reporting couldn't be clearer about the consequences of that denial:
Europe is now an object lesson in how good intentions, executed poorly, can produce the exact opposite of what was promised: higher prices, higher volatility, declining competitiveness, and a public ready to abandon climate policy altogether.
This is precisely what January 2024 warned us about -- but on a continental scale.
Every serious energy expert knows the truth Europe is now living: intermittent renewables require massive amounts of redundant capacity, storage, and backup generation. That's why the U.K. now needs 120 gigawatts of capacity to serve a demand previously met with 60-70 gigawatts, even though electricity use hasn't meaningfully grown.
This is the math policymakers prefer not to show the public.
And it's why B.C.'s refusal to have an honest conversation about firm power is so dangerous.
If we electrify everything without ensuring affordable and abundant natural gas generation, we're not building a green future.
We're building Europe, 10 years early.
Here is what Europe and January 2024 together say, in one clear voice:
Renewables are part of the system, but they don't run the system. Natural gas does. Hydro does. Nuclear does. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with rolling blackouts.
When ministers attack economists instead of answering them, it signals that ideology is running the show. Europe learned the cost of that. We will too, unless we change course.
Europe lost the room. Once people see their bills double while factories close, the climate agenda becomes politically radioactive.
Europe dreams of having an abundant, local, low-carbon firm-power fuel like northeastern B.C.'s natural gas. We treat it like a political liability. That's not strategy. It's negligence.
Without prosperity, there is no climate policy that survives the next election cycle.
Canada must embrace an "and" strategy:
Renewables and natural gas. Electrification and realism. Climate ambition and economic competitiveness.
January 2024 showed us the future in a flash. Europe shows us the end state if we keep ignoring the warning.
We can still choose something better. But only if we stop pretending that energy systems bend to political narratives -- and start treating them with the seriousness they demand.