Energy Magazine Category: USA

CERA Week Reflections Op-Ed

At CERAWeek 2026, the message was clear: countries that lean on reliable, affordable energy with resilient delivery systems like natural gas will lead at home and support allies abroad.

By Susanna Zagar, President & CEO, Canadian Gas Association

CERAWeek isn’t widely known outside the energy sector, but it should be. Now in its 44th year, this premier global gathering in Houston brings together more than 10,000 participants, including government leaders and industry voices from 89 countries, to discuss what’s changing—and what comes next.

In conversation after conversation this week, one point kept surfacing. Energy is no longer discussed only as an environmental or market issue. It’s discussed as a matter of security and competitiveness, with a firm bottom line: the jurisdictions best positioned to attract investment, support industrial growth and strengthen resilience will be those that can deliver the energy people and businesses need.

That is as true for Canada as it is anywhere else. Canada’s ability to deliver for our allies starts with our ability to deliver at home. We would be wise to develop a clear strategy for natural gas – one that is communicated regularly and can serve to benefit both governments and industry as they seek to attract capital to Canada.

What is also clear is that the conversation has moved beyond “all of the above” to something more urgent: we will need MORE of the above. Demand is not waiting. Every credible pathway points to the need for more supply, more infrastructure and more capacity across the system, starting with what we can deliver here at home.

“Demand is not waiting. Every credible pathway points to the need for more supply, more infrastructure and more capacity across the system, starting with what we can deliver here at home.”

In that context, natural gas is not peripheral. It is central to meeting the moment.

Across Canada, the natural gas delivery industry meets 40 per cent of the country’s energy needs through a network that serves more than 7.6 million customer locations. This is a system built for Canadian conditions, one that provides scale, storage and reliability, and positions Canada to both meet domestic demand and contribute to global energy security.

What I have also heard this week is that pressure on the broader North American energy system is only increasing, which means we must permit and build faster to meet consumer demand. All of this is part of a much more practical conversation than the one we were having even a few years ago. The question is not simply what kind of energy future we aspire to. It is whether our systems can deliver affordability, reliability and resilience while that future is being built.

We’re now hearing from Canadian leaders that the future can be built on the shoulders of natural gas. As Minister Hodgson and others have underscored, “energy security is national security.” His recent message is also a welcome signal of ambition: “We will win this race. We will only win it with natural gas.” That clarity is important and worth recognizing. Natural gas is a great enabler—powering AI, supporting onshoring and delivering affordable, reliable energy. But it cannot be treated simply as an export opportunity. Canada must align domestic policy to unlock existing resources and infrastructure to support affordability, economic growth and system resilience.

Canada is uniquely positioned with abundant natural gas resources and an extensive delivery network. That advantage should be part of how we think about resilience and economic strength here at home.

Natural gas underpins affordability. It supports reliability. It enables economic growth. That role should be clearly recognized and supported, not only in global forums like CERAWeek, but in the policies and decisions we make at home on behalf of Canadians.

Canada has an opportunity to approach this moment with confidence and pragmatism and speak to natural gas as the backbone of the energy system that it already is today. If the conversations at CERAWeek are any guide, the decades ahead will ask more of every part of the energy system, not less.

In an increasingly unstable world, the need for a robust North American energy alliance to ensure energy security, propel economic growth, achieve climate goals and keep geopolitical foes at bay may seem more urgent than ever. However clear the benefits may be for Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, which already share a highly integrated energy system, some observers say fraying trilateral trade relations and conflicting domestic priorities have dimmed prospects for a strategic alignment on energy. Others say building Fortress North America is not only necessary but possible, and the moment is now.

By David H. Coburn 

The last time North America’s leaders met, they agreed on the need to build regional supply chains to promote economic security by protecting the highly integrated economies of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico – an easy layup given still-fresh memories of pandemic-era bottlenecks and rising geopolitical tensions. Thornier issues related to drugs, immigration and energy, including different approaches to climate change and Mexico’s policies restricting foreign investment in its energy sector, went unresolved.

Still, the January 2023 “Three Amigos” summit in Mexico City generated enough positive feeling for the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times to wax eloquent in defense of the alliance that has expanded prosperity for all three partners since its inception in 1994 as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).

“Of course, the U.S., Mexico and Canada have their own needs and interests – and political challenges,” the Times wrote. “But the North American partnership is too important and presents too many valuable opportunities to be sidelined by frosty relations. The summit should be a reminder of how much the countries can accomplish together.”

Fast forward nearly three years, and such optimism seems sadly at odds with the current reality. With new leadership installed in Ottawa, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, trade liberalization and trilateral cooperation have taken a backseat to bilateral jockeying in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on its two largest trading partners, including a threatened 10% levy on Canadian oil and natural gas that has enjoyed zero-tariff status under both NAFTA and CUSMA.

The growing trade rift, combined with the rise of energy nationalism in Mexico and conflicting domestic agendas in each country, has cast a shadow over the long-sought vision of a “Fortress North America” that holds the promise of ensuring the continent’s energy independence and economic prosperity, mitigating threats from hostile foreign actors and helping each partner meet their climate obligations.

One observer, writing in “The Elgar Companion to North American Trade and Integration” published in February 2025, calls the potential for such a robust energy alliance “an image in the rear-view mirror,” with the strong trilateral cooperation of the early 2000s that inspired the “Three Amigos” moniker now a relic of the past, replaced by “something more like three bilateral acquaintances in the 2020s.”

Indeed, since Trump’s initial tariff salvo shortly after returning to office last January, Canada has been actively courting separate energy partnerships with Mexico that could benefit both nations. Meanwhile, questions about the fate of CUSMA, approved in 2020, continue to linger with the U.S. declining to commit to renewing the three-way pact, which is due for a mandated review next summer.

Others, including international energy policy expert Damjan Krnjević Mišković, offer a more sanguine outlook on the prospects for creating an energy-secure Fortress North America. While noting the current political challenges, partnering to achieve energy security is clearly one of those opportunities too valuable to be derailed by “frosty relations,” as the Times put it. It’s a goal that is not only necessary but within the continent’s grasp, given its vast resources of oil, gas, critical minerals, technology and investment capital – as well as a cross-border system of energy infrastructure that is already deeply interconnected.

Krnjević, a Canadian former senior UN official who grew up in Montreal and is now Professor of Practice in Contemporary Geopolitics at ADA University in Baku, Azerbaijan, defines energy security as a fundamental requirement of development and the “indispensable predicate to just about everything else citizens and governments want to do” – from building strong economies at home to sharing their abundant resources in a way that helps allies and trading partners achieve their own energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing dirtier sources of energy.

“No country in the world – at whatever stage it’s in – can develop, or develop further, without a reliable, resilient, affordable, and abundant energy system,” Krnjević said. “You can’t be prosperous in any sustainable sense without assuring, as much as possible, your energy security. It would be geopolitical malpractice not to do everything in our power – we North Americans, so, we Canadians and our American and Mexican neighbors, together – to acquire and maintain energy self-sufficiency, autonomy, and security … in other words, energy sovereignty and energy independence. I simply don’t see how we can accomplish this strategic imperative by discriminating against the use of natural gas, oil, and other homegrown energy sources. Our abundant hydrocarbon resources are strategic national assets, not liabilities. Our policy makers need to encourage the further building-up of relevant transport and storage infrastructure, including pipelines, to get more affordable, efficient, and secure energy sources into our homes, our businesses, our factories, our data centers, and our ports for export abroad.”

With collaboration on energy languishing – North America’s three energy ministers haven’t met since 2017 – and Trump’s trade policies calling into question the future of the CUSMA pact, free-trade proponents across the continent are echoing the call for a renewed effort to work together. The Business Council of Canada and its counterparts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Mexico’s Consejo Coordinador Empresarial in May issued “North American Energy Security: A Proposal for Greater Cooperation” calling on Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to pursue development of a “North American energy alliance” that focuses on maximizing shared energy security, economic and geopolitical interests.

“North America is uniquely positioned to leverage its natural resources and deeply integrated energy markets to enhance energy security and the economy in the years ahead,” the group said in its proposal.  “Enhanced and formalized cross-border collaboration under the auspices of a North American energy alliance would provide an enduring framework to cement the continent’s role as a global energy powerhouse.”

Energy integration runs deep

The interconnected nature of North America’s energy markets and infrastructure – with sprawling networks of oil and gas pipelines and electric power grids intersecting borders from Canada through the U.S. and into Mexico – by itself makes energy security a matter that is best addressed on a trilateral basis, rather than as a purely national or bilateral concern, despite headwinds posed by ongoing tariff threats and other nontariff barriers affecting energy trade between the three CUSMA partners.

“Is North American energy security necessary? Yes. And the reason is pretty straightforward: Our energy systems are highly integrated. So even if a hostile actor or hostile state focuses on undermining American energy security, such actions will have deleterious effects – unavoidably so – on Canada and, to a slightly lesser extent, Mexico,” Krnjević said. “This, in turn, means that it’s necessary for all three North American countries to pull themselves together in response. The continent is uniquely positioned as a virtual geographic standalone with phenomenal resources – things that can allow it to ensure the hostile actors cannot succeed.”

North America currently produces 30% of the world’s oil and gas, with the U.S. at No. 1 in both oil and gas production as well as the leading exporter of oil and gas, in the past two years becoming the top exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil and No. 5 in natural gas production. Mexico ranked No. 11 in oil production and No. 20 in natural gas production in 2024.

Just as significant is the high degree of energy interdependence that binds together the fortunes of all three nations, particularly Canada and the U.S. Canada is the second-largest trading partner of the U.S. with 2024 two-way trade of $917 billion, including $150 billion in energy trade, which has ballooned by more than half from nearly $100 billion in 2010. Canada accounts for 60% of U.S. oil imports, sending heavy crude south to U.S. refineries primarily in the Midwest.

The two-way flow of natural gas between the U.S. and Canada, enabled by a sprawling pipeline network that connects more than eight Canadian provinces and 10 U.S. states through 27 border crossings, exemplifies the magnitude of integration across North America’s energy systems. Canadian gas is delivered to the U.S., with 73 billion cubic metres going to key markets including the West Coast, Midwest, and Northeast in 2023. At the same time, Canada receives U.S. gas, with Eastern Canada relying on deliveries of 25 billion cubic metres of U.S. natural gas imported from the Midwest and Northeast.

In all, 13 U.S. states rely on imported natural gas from Canada for at least 30% of their natural gas supply, according to a tariff impact analysis conducted by the Canadian Gas Association in January 2025. On average, nearly 60% of the gas entering these states originates from Canada, with that percentage ranging from as low as 30% in states like California and Iowa all the way up to 100% in states like Montana and Vermont.

Nearly all of these states use gas for at least one-quarter of their total energy end-use, along with using it to generate electricity. In addition, Canada is also the leading exporter of electrical power to the U.S., providing more than 90% of U.S. electricity imports across 35 transmission lines in 2023, with nearly two-thirds of the total generated using clean hydroelectric power.

The extensive natural gas pipeline network has also opened new markets for Canadian natural gas producers that are now supplying gas to major U.S. LNG exporters such as Cheniere Energy, making it possible for Canadian natural gas to reach overseas markets even before LNG Canada’s Kitimat, B.C, export facility shipped its first LNG cargo in mid-2025. Such arrangements have helped North America support European and Asian allies in their effort to shore up their own energy security by eliminating reliance on Russian natural gas in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Though smaller in scale, the U.S.-Mexico energy trade – $66.5 billion in 2023, less than 10% of the $946 billion in total two-way trade between the two countries – again relies on a heavily interconnected energy system. Mexico imports more than 70% of the natural gas it uses from the U.S. through cross-border pipelines, as well as a range of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and propane. On the energy export side, Mexico sends crude oil produced by its state-owned oil company, PEMEX, north to the U.S., and also exports a small amount of electricity to its northern neighbour via cross-border transmission lines.

While Canada’s energy trade with Mexico has been negligible, prospects for growing the bilateral energy trade and further integrating North America’s energy markets are increasing. The “Canada-Mexico Action Plan” announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum in September seeks to develop opportunities to work together on energy projects that can help meet Mexico’s fast-growing demand for natural gas to satisfy power generation and industrial needs.

For example, Mexico’s new West Coast LNG liquefaction and regasification facility, Energia Costa Azul, on the Pacific in Baja California, could open up a new market for Canada’s rapidly expanding LNG export capacity while helping Mexico develop and decarbonize its economy and, at the same time, reduce its reliance on U.S. natural gas supplies.

One thing is clear: Demand for North American energy is surging both at home and abroad. With natural gas demand for power generation and direct use skyrocketing across North America – driven by economic growth, widespread electrification, ongoing retirement of coal-fired generation and the explosion in power requirements for AI data centers – the Three Amigos and their allies will need more energy, not less, to ensure their energy security, making close collaboration more important than ever.

‘All of the above’ approach key

To advance the vision of Fortress North America, however, proponents recognize energy security has to begin at home with much-needed policy reforms at the national level in all three countries to remove barriers to development of natural resources and investment in infrastructure for both renewable and low-carbon non-renewables if the continent is to ensure its primacy as a global energy powerhouse.

The Business Council of Canada’s “North American energy alliance” proposal, for example, advocates an “all of the above” approach that “directs private and public investment and policy support toward projects that strengthen short- and long-term energy security and resilient supply chains” – including expanding LNG exports and other energy exports on both west and east coasts.

The proposal also calls for a North American regulatory task force “responsible for developing a  common vision for identifying and expeditiously approving and permitting infrastructure and facilities that strengthen the combined resiliency of North America’s energy and critical mineral supply chains, with a specific emphasis on cross-border infrastructure and integrated supply chains.”

U.S.-based think tank Atlantic Council, in a whitepaper entitled “North America’s Moment: The case for North American energy cooperation,” also acknowledges the key role of natural gas in energy transition and calls streamlining licensing and permitting processes across the three countries “essential” to maximizing energy security, meeting climate obligations and bolstering economic growth.

Both recommendations are a direct rebuke of policies that have stalled development of Canada’s energy resources over the past decade – including the Impact Assessment Act, the industrial carbon tax, the tanker ban, and the emissions cap – and allowed the U.S. to “beat Canada to the puck” in the LNG export race, as Enbridge CEO Greg Ebel put it in a speech to the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto in October.

Krnjević, who helped launch the negotiations that led to the adoption of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and has been intimately involved in the UN’s recent climate change conferences, including COP29 held last year in Baku, is also among those who has argued for a Canadian “‘all of the above’ approach to energy: all fuels, all technologies, all systems, and more,” as he wrote in an August 2025 paper for the MacDonald-Laurier Institute. “Transforming our country into an ‘energy superpower’ requires treating hydrocarbons as an integral part of a comprehensive, single-standard, and non-discriminatory energy strategy,” he added. Krnjević is also among those who unequivocally reject the “climate maximalist” ideology behind such policies that consider developing Canada’s hydrocarbon resources and reducing carbon emissions linked to climate change to be mutually exclusive objectives.

In fact, the opposite is the case. The rapid expansion of Mexico’s natural gas infrastructure has allowed it to replace dirtier fuels used in power generation, transportation and industrial applications. Looking beyond North America, developing countries all over the world need cleaner sources of energy, including natural gas, to replace inefficient, unhealthy fuels such as open fire, coal, dung, wood and crop residue, and to drive economic development.

Krnjević points out that Canada’s climate obligations include contributing to a USD$300 billion fund agreed to at COP29 to help developing countries implement climate mitigation or adaptation measures and says Canada’s ample natural gas supplies and growing LNG export capacity need to be part of the solution to reducing emissions not only in those countries but also in heavy-emitting developed countries globally.

“The low-hanging fruit on emissions reductions within North America is in Mexico, and the rapid development of that country’s energy resources is the best way to get that fruit quickly,” Krnjević said. “Beyond that, the reality is that the biggest emission reduction opportunity is going to be by moving North American energy to global markets, and North American technology to global markets, and both those things require faster economic development in North America.”

Despite the fact that North America accounts for 30% of global energy demand, the continent contributes less than half that – about 14.3% – to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to  Krnjević, who calls North America’s record on environmental performance “one of its greatest strengths” and “one that should be considered part of the ‘Fortress North America’ asset base.”

The United States and Mexico have also joined in putting a thumb on the scale, picking energy winners and losers and adopting policies that have stymied trilateral cooperation and blocked integration of energy systems. In the U.S., cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline project and pausing LNG permitting come to mind. Mexico continues to play favourites with its state-owned electricity and oil companies with policies that limit much-needed foreign investment in energy infrastructure – including renewable energy projects – by denying government permits needed to connect to the national grid.

“Policy makers should stop saying one end use or another and should encourage all fuel delivery systems – electric, gaseous, liquid, even solid – so that there is more competition and more energy available to all,” Krnjević said. “Energy feeds prosperity. Policy makers telling Canadians which type of energy to use impedes our prosperity without in any significant way moving the needle on global emissions reductions. Why on earth would we do something like that?”

Energy security versus ‘America First’?

Putting aside the cross-border chaos created by Trump’s tariff tantrums, his campaign promise to achieve U.S. energy dominance, and his professed indifference to the future of the 31-year-old trilateral trade partnership, observers say the broader goal of North American energy security is not incompatible with the president’s “America First” agenda.

In the final analysis, Fortress North America – enabled by a “whatever works” strategy of developing North America’s oil and gas resources, renewables, nuclear and low- or no-carbon fuels including blue and green hydrogen, and facilitating the free flow of energy and investment across borders – remains an attainable vision because a robust energy alliance serves each of the Three Amigos’ national interests.

Building a continental clean-energy supply chain, for example – leveraging Canada’s abundant supply of critical minerals and Mexico’s potential as a processing hub – would reduce U.S. vulnerability to China’s recent threats of export controls and lessen similar risks for Canada and Mexico. It would also serve the goal laid out at the 2023 summit of creating regional supply chains to bolster economic security.

As Enbridge’s Ebel reminded his Empire Club audience: “Energy security is now national security and economic security.”

Behind his bluster about scrapping CUSMA and slapping tariffs on Canadian oil and gas, Trump has a “pretty solid understanding of energy” and the key role the trilateral partnership – and the trade liberalization, market access and integration successive trade agreements have fostered – has played in America’s energy success story, according to Krnjević.

“The U.S. President is a deal maker. He wants better deals,” Krnjević said. “He will negotiate hard because he is a good negotiator, and he is well-briefed by Chris Wright, his excellent Energy Secretary, and others on just how significant the value proposition is across the continent on energy, and how working with Canada and Mexico on it helps the U.S.”

Operating on the fundamental principles of diplomacy – finding common ground, addressing conflicting interests, and promoting cooperation – can the Three Amigos advance North American energy security in the face of American jingoism, climate maximalism in Canada and energy nationalism in Mexico? Krnjević is hopeful.

“America’s energy dominance is best served by having two friendly integrated neighbours, both of whom are energy-rich in their own right, so really we’re talking about North American energy dominance,” Krnjević said. “Just look at the flows of energy back and forth between Canada and the U.S. It is an incredibly efficient relationship and could become even more so. Mexico promises the same, as that country continues to build out its infrastructure even more. The real question is what can we do to increase that already high level of integration and cooperation.”

Just a few years have passed since analysts were predicting demand for U.S. natural gas would soon peak and begin a long slide as climate goals spurred America’s energy transition. But surging domestic demand for electric power – in large part due to the AI-driven rush to build new data centers – and a significant ramp-up of LNG export capacity could turn 2025 into another record year for natural gas, barring disruptions from disastrous trade policies.

It wasn’t so long ago that the prospects for the U.S. natural gas industry seemed so dim that it became fashionable for local distribution companies to distance themselves from their fossil fuel roots and start rebranding themselves as “energy infrastructure companies.” 

Even if then-proliferating bans on new hookups and forced electrification policies prevented companies from pushing the geologic fuel to their customers, they knew their transmission and distribution systems would be key to delivering new-era energy molecules, including renewable natural gas and hydrogen. 

Hold the phone: Lo and behold, natural gas seems to be America’s darling again, if not with climate advocates, then certainly with the businesses and industries that are counting on the nation’s abundant supplies of the fuel to fill new energy needs and continue to power the U.S. economy. 

Coming off a record year for U.S. natural gas consumption in 2024, the upward trajectory has continued into 2025, with the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) forecasting in mid-March that consumption will hit a new record of 92.0 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) this year. 

 

Of course, that estimate likely didn’t foresee the impact of ongoing trade shenanigans on the part of President Donald Trump, which as of mid-April had financial markets reeling, staunch allies like Canada wondering what happened to their reliable old friend and recession risks soaring. 

Long term, however, two powerful trends buoy the rising fortunes of the U.S. natural gas industry: America’s appetite for electric power is suddenly growing again for the first time in decades, and global demand for U.S. LNG continues to surge just as new infrastructure needed to serve the export market is coming online.  

Those trends, combined with one of the coldest winters in several years, had pushed benchmark prices of natural gas over the $4/MMBtu mark by late March, up from under $2 last year, propelling analysts to predict expanded investment in gas production and infrastructure to serve domestic and export markets. 

Structural growth happening here

The U.S. power sector in January set a new monthly record for gas demand for a winter month, and the same month, industrial demand hit the highest level on record going back to 2005, according to Richard Meyer, Vice President, Energy Markets, Analysis and Standards at the American Gas Association.   

“The industrial number is very interesting because that’s driven by not just heating demand, but there are economic and structural factors,” Meyer said. “The fact that it’s at an all-time high in what was a very cold January but not the coldest we have on record is very suggestive of some structural growth happening here.” 

Meyer has no doubt that some of that structural growth is thanks to investments in U.S. manufacturing spurred by incentives in the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which have goosed demand for natural gas both for power generation and for direct use in production. 

In addition, the increase in nearshoring – shortening global supply chains by moving manufacturing and assembly operations to Mexico from far-flung locations to reduce exposure to geopolitical risks and vulnerabilities laid bare during the pandemic – is also boosting Mexico’s demand for U.S. natural gas. 

U.S. natural gas exports to Mexico are expected to grow nearly 40% from 6.5 bcf/day to 9 bcf/day by decade’s end, with nearshoring accounting for about one-third of the growth, according to Patrick Rau, Senior Vice President, Research and Analysis for industry publication Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI). 

Riding AI and the data center boom 

The game-changer for U.S. natural gas in the near future, however, is America’s voracious appetite for electric power, with consumption expected to rise 50% by 2050 after remaining essentially flat for much of the past 25 years. Experts say U.S. generating capacity will have to double by 2035 to meet the need.

“The game-changer for U.S. natural gas in the near future, however, is America’s voracious appetite for electric power, with consumption expected to rise 50% by 2050 after remaining essentially flat for much of the past 25 years. Experts say U.S. generating capacity will have to double by 2035 to meet the need.”

In addition to the aforementioned structural changes in demand, some of that growth will result from electrification policies – a key strategy advocated by climate advocates to replace the direct use of natural gas in various applications with electricity generated from lower-emitting energy sources such as renewables.  

But the major driver of growth in the short term – artificial intelligence or AI – wasn’t even on the radar just a few years ago. Today, demand for power from America’s tech giants is exploding as they build out new data centers to handle the huge computing requirements of AI-driven programs. 

Some experts project a 15% annual growth rate in electricity consumption by data centers through 2030 and estimate that data centers could account for fully 5% of total global consumption of electricity by the end of this decade. 

A Bank of America Securities report in early March projected capital expenditures for “hyperscalers” – the massive data centers being built by tech giants like Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon and Tesla to train AI models – will increase 34% year-over-year to $257 billion in 2025.  

There’s little agreement on how much data center electricity requirements could add to gas demand, with estimates from 1 bcf/day by the end of 2030 to 18 bcf/day. NGI’s Rau believes the median is around 4.5 bcf/day, adding that it could be “a bit bullish depending on how a number of different factors play out.” 

Unknowns include how quickly AI developers can follow the lead of DeepSeek in finding less energy-intensive ways to train the models used by generative AI tools like ChatGPT and how much supply chain issues, such as turbine shortages, will limit the natural gas industry’s ability to pounce on opportunities.  

Case in point: NRG Energy, GE Vernova and Kiewit announced plans in late February to build more than 5 gigawatts of natural gas combined-cycle plants to supply data centers, with the new capacity phasing in from 2029 through 2032. “That right there tells you there is a long lead time,” Rau said. 

Still, natural gas is in an enviable position to cash in on the data center boom. All of the big tech players have net-zero climate goals and would prefer to not use natural gas to run their data centers, but neither intermittent renewables nor nuclear, which faces even longer wait times, can meet all their needs. 

“With AI, the idea is that these new data centers are going to need to run 24/7, so they’re going to need to be able to run baseload, they’re going to need to be able to run all the time at full capacity,” Rau said. “Natural gas really seems to check all of the proverbial boxes of what folks would want and need.” 

The ability to meet those kinds of specific power requirements – not only for data centers but other mission-critical applications – is one reason natural gas used in power generation was up 3.3% in 2024 and still accounts for 43% of the overall power generation energy mix in the U.S., according to the EIA. 

While the ultimate future impact remains murky, one thing is clear: The adoption of AI-driven technologies is growing at an exponential rate. ChatGPT has gone from zero when it was introduced in November 2022 to 400 million weekly active users as of February, according to OpenAI. 

And it’s still early days. Emerging “agentic AI” models promise to deliver true automation to all manner of business and industrial processes from renegotiating contracts to smart robotics able to think and make decisions autonomously. Even assuming more energy-efficient models, AI will require a lot of juice. 

Opening the LNG spigot

Adding to the prospects for another record year for natural gas has been the rapid buildout of U.S. LNG export infrastructure and – with the shifting policy landscape in Washington, D.C. – an unabashedly favourable view of natural gas and gas infrastructure and fewer regulatory hurdles to delay projects. 

New LNG export facilities scheduled to come online this year are expected to increase demand for feed gas by about 3 bcf/d, which would be close to a 25% increase over 2024 volumes, according to NGI’s Rau. Feed gas demand as of mid-March was averaging more than 15 bcf/d, with flows on March 21 approaching 17 bcf/d. 

Those projects include Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG 2 facility, slated to start shipping LNG in September, nine months after shipping its first cargo from Plaquemines 1. Venture Global in March announced plans to expand Plaquemines’ capacity from 27 million tons per annum (mtpa) to 45 mpta. 

Cheniere Energy also was expected to start up the first phase of its Corpus Christi Stage 3 expansion facility in Texas this year, and Exxon reported in a regulatory filing earlier this year that its Golden Pass LNG project, a joint venture with Qatar Energy, remains on track to ship gas before the end of 2025.  

With flexible destination clauses that allow them to send cargoes to where they will fetch the highest price, U.S. exporters are well positioned to capitalize on global LNG demand, said Rau, noting that demand remains strong as Europe continues to shun Russian gas and restock depleted inventories following a cold winter. 

Red flags on trade cloud outlook

Robust domestic and export demand and low levels of natural gas in storage are combining to lift prices, and higher prices are sending the signal to natural gas producers that it’s time to increase production to bring supply and demand into line. 

The EIA revised its 2025 price outlook in mid-March to an average $4.20 MMBtu for the year – up 11% from February – and estimated 2026 Henry Hub spot prices at an average “near $4.50 MMBtu,” according to the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook report issued March 11. That’s in line with Natural Gas Intelligence’s $4.45 MMbtu 2026 Henry Hub forward curve published the same day. 

As early as February, those prices had already turned a flat to negative outlook on U.S. gas production in 2025 into expectations for a significant increase. NGI’s Rau began hearing in February about producers’ plans to add rigs and fracking crews and is projecting gas growth of more than 3% this year and closer to 5% in 2026. 

“There’s a tremendous amount of gas that’s unlocked once you reach above (USD) $3.50 all the way up to $5.00,” said the AGA’s Meyer, referring to the range of Henry Hub futures prices. “It doesn’t surprise me that operators are responding. Now we’ll see how quickly it comes to market and at what volumes.” 

Despite all indicators pointing toward another record year for natural gas, disruptions resulting from trade conflicts between the U.S. and its partners could derail forecasts, although at this writing in late March, it remained unclear whether angry exchanges of tariff threats would turn into a real trade war.  

Rau downplayed the short-term impact on the U.S. natural gas market from trade friction with America’s largest trade partners. Canada supplies only 7% of U.S. gas needs, and Mexico gets 70% of its gas from the U.S., making it unlikely gas would be a pawn in a trade spat with America’s neighbor to the south.  

His greater concern is a protracted trade war that triggers a global recession and shrinks demand for natural gas at home and abroad. As of mid-April, economists were putting the odds of a U.S. recession this year at 47% – about double February estimates – largely due to the erosion of business and consumer confidence resulting from President Trump’s erratic trade policies. 

America’s natural gas industry – like its Canadian counterpart, no doubt – can only hope more moderate voices prevail and the world can avoid a global economy weighted down by tariffs and counter-tariffs. There will be no winners in that scenario. 

The US Federal Government’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program – known by its homely acronym LIHEAP – has proved a durable safety net for vulnerable Americans struggling with energy bills since the early 1980s. But advocates worry efforts to cut natural gas out of the nation’s energy mix as a strategy to meet climate goals could cripple LIHEAP’s ability to combat energy poverty.

In Washington, a town where hyper-partisan politics is the order of the day, there’s at least one thing Republicans and Democrats have been able to agree on for more than 40 years: The federal government has a legitimate role in helping vulnerable Americans who can’t afford to pay their energy bills.

Since 1981, that consensus has sustained the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which last year distributed more than $4 billion to help families avoid utility disconnections, weatherize their homes, and pay for emergency repairs or replacement of furnaces and air-conditioning systems.

The program’s impact is significant in a country where one in four Americans say they have been forced to forego basic necessities in order to pay an energy bill. Consider these data points:

LIHEAP’s bill payment assistance program restored power or avoided disconnection for more than 2.7 million American families in FY2023.

In the same year, nearly 61,000 homes were weatherized using program funds, providing improvements in energy efficiency that lowered energy use and bills.

In 2022, the program lifted 34,000 children and 48,000 older Americans out of poverty thanks to energy assistance.

But even at current funding levels, LIHEAP today is able to serve only one in six families who meet the program’s income eligibility requirements, according to Katrina Metzler, executive director for the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition (NEUAC), the principal LIHEAP advocacy group.

Although LIHEAP is one of the few federal programs that has seen small increases in funding in recent years, the expiration of pandemic-era emergency funding has put the program in a hole at a time when rising energy costs, extreme weather events and inflation are exacerbating energy insecurity.

“What we’re seeing is a steady increase in applications and an overall decrease in funding available because those emergency resources have faded,” Metzler said. “The families we’re talking about regularly are making choices between medicine or food and paying their utility bill.”

Even so, LIHEAP puts the U.S. well ahead of Canada, which lags other developed economies in low-income energy assistance efforts, according to Abhilash Kantamneni, director of action research for Efficiency Canada, which focuses on energy efficiency as a key to addressing energy affordability.

“There’s a lot to learn from LIHEAP that Canada can do,” Kantamneni said. “Canada is one of the few (developed) countries that doesn’t have an official definition of energy poverty, and there is no energy assistance program at the national level to help low-income households struggling with energy bills.”

Flexibility a key feature

The key to LIHEAP’s effectiveness, say observers, is in the program’s flexibility. Federal funds are appropriated by Congress and distributed to the states, which work with local utilities and community action organizations to find the best ways to get energy assistance to those in need.

In this way, the federal dollars can be combined with a variety of other funding sources – the states themselves, energy assistance programs operated by utilities and funded by donations from their own charitable foundations and customers, and nonprofit fuel funds – to amplify LIHEAP’s impact.

“That’s a very mature role for the federal government to play in being able to elevate the ambition of existing state and local programs – and then providing them the long-term stability of funding so that then they can use it in smart ways to unlock the benefits for households,” Kantamneni said.

LIHEAP funds can be applied to household energy bills regardless of the energy source, so some states include solar as an eligible weatherization option. States can also increase the impact of their LIHEAP dollars by combining them with money from a separate federal weatherization assistance program.

There’s also flexibility in how states can apply LIHEAP funds. In addition to emergency payments, several states use LIHEAP to fund a Percentage of Income Payment Program (PIPP) that pays a percentage of a customer’s utility bills for a year while also working to reduce energy use through efficiency upgrades.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy offers a program for LIHEAP-eligible customers that provides a flat on-bill credit for 12 bill cycles while automatically pre-qualifying participants for its weatherization program, said Kevin Alexander, director of vulnerable customer strategy and agency for Duke Energy.

“We’re trying to find ways to get customers into those programs to address the energy efficiency aspect of affordability but also help them today as well,” Alexander said, adding the utility has launched a new initiative in North Carolina to improve its ability to connect more customers with energy assistance programs.

Similar bill assistance and on-bill credit programs are available in Canada, such as the Ontario Energy Board’s ratepayer-funded Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP) and the taxpayer-funded Ontario Electricity Support Program (OESP), said Harneet Panesar, chief operating officer for the OEB.

The big difference, of course, is that Canada currently has no federal program to augment provincial energy affordability efforts. A new program launching in 2025 allocates $800 million to residential energy efficiency retrofits but doesn’t include bill assistance of any kind, Kantamneni said.

“You can’t host enough bake sales at the local level to replace LIHEAP,” said NEUAC’s Metzler. “Four billion dollars is a lot of resources that our federal government infuses into our system to ensure that energy is affordable for everyone. Taking that away and expecting states or local agencies to pick up the burden is not a reasonable approach to ensuring access to energy in our country.”

“It makes a big difference,” Alexander said. “LIHEAP represents the vast majority of funding that’s going to be available at the state and local level and it’s helping out a lot of those agencies who are really trying to support customers in need.”

‘Party doesn’t matter’

Enacted during Ronald Reagan’s first term in response to the energy crisis, recession and rampant inflation of the late 1970s, LIHEAP has survived through five decades, seven administrations, budget cuts and a pandemic. Observers credit the bipartisan support advocates have built over the years.

“I think one of the reasons the program has survived when a lot of programs have not is because it’s bipartisan,” said NEUAC’s Metzler. “No matter which side of the aisle in Congress you sit on, you’re able to see the benefit to your district and the constituents in your district of programs like these that help maintain family and community stability and provide for health and safety concerns in the community.”

NEUAC’s membership hints at the breadth and diversity of partners involved in supporting LIHEAP: Utility trade associations and utilities themselves, groups representing delivered fuels like propane, grassroots nonprofits, faith-based charities and state and local agencies that manage energy affordability programs.

In addition to organizing LIHEAP Action Day, its flagship advocacy event that brings hundreds of supporters to Capitol Hill every year, NEUAC also plays a key role in making sure the coalition’s 300-plus members are working effectively together to benefit the maximum number of households possible.

One of NEUAC’s core functions is educating member organizations and other stakeholders to ensure they know how to connect customers in need with LIHEAP resources. With funding help from the American Gas Association (AGA), NEUAC created an interactive map that makes information easily accessible.

With a full-time staff of only two, NEUAC relies on its utility partners to raise awareness of LIHEAP. Duke Energy and its Piedmont Natural Gas unit, for example, communicate to their customers about LIHEAP and their own programs, Share the Light and Share the Warmth, through their websites, bill inserts, community events and other platforms.

Brian Caudill, managing director of government affairs and public policy for the AGA, credits the strength of the coalition for LIHEAP’s success in garnering “plus-ups” – funding increases – over the last few years even as appropriations bills containing the funding were being routinely cut.

“As long as we have the advocacy in place and we can be able to make the message resonate with our policymakers and show the benefits of the program nationwide, then the program will be increasingly better funded,” Caudill said. “Party doesn’t matter, and party surely doesn’t matter to somebody who’s without heat in the middle of January.”

Transition’s looming challenge

Despite the program’s success, LIHEAP advocates worry that energy security could become unattainable for even more Americans if the transition to a low emission energy economy pushes policymakers to double down on electrification and take affordable natural gas out of the nation’s energy mix.

Natural gas provides heat for 60% of American homes, and households that use natural gas save an estimated $1,132 per year compared to an all-electric home, according to the AGA. Losing that price advantage and the financial burden of switching from natural gas to electric concerns NEUAC’s Metzler.

“I don’t have expertise about electrification, but what I know about is the impact that we can discern that it would have on households,” Metzler said. “To that end, it’s imperative that we address the affordability needs of those families when we talk about forced electrification.”

The AGA’s Caudill points out greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas distribution system have declined 70% since 1990 and continue to drop as the industry decarbonizes through investments in infrastructure, lower-carbon fuels such as renewable natural gas and hydrogen, and stepped-up energy efficiency programs.

“Why would we eliminate the most cost-effective heat for people in need, especially considering the indispensable role natural gas can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions?”
– Brian Caudill, managing director of government affairs and public policy for the AGA

“Why would we eliminate the most cost-effective heat for people in need, especially considering the indispensable role natural gas can play in reducing economywide greenhouse gas emissions?” Caudill asks. “These are some of the things that we are constantly noodling on and trying to address on the Hill.”

Efficiency Canada’s Kantamneni suggests the cost implications of total electrification highlight the need to ensure a community’s lowest-income residents are not also living in the least energy-efficient homes – an energy affordability goal embedded in climate policies in the United Kingdom, he says.

LIHEAP advocates would prefer to stay in their lane and focus on the health-and-safety message that has won hearts and minds on Capitol Hill since 1981. But as pressure to meet climate goals ratchets up, they and America’s most vulnerable clearly have a huge stake in the debate over how that transition unfolds.

 

David Coburn is a strategic thinker, writer, media relations expert and communications consultant leveraging 30-plus years of print journalism and agency public relations experience.

As U.S. natural gas utilities continue efforts to stave off legislative and regulatory assaults at the state and local levels, they’re receiving welcome support from stakeholders representing diverse interests who understand the real-world impact of forced electrification policies. Together, fuel-choice proponents have held their own in the gas-ban battle.

When America’s first local gas ban was being debated in Berkeley, California, some of the loudest opposing voices came from restaurants – especially those featuring Asian and Latin fare – who argued the ban would deprive them of the cooking techniques essential to their “flame-dependent” cuisine.

Fast forward five years to January 2024 in Seattle, where a proposed ban announced by state lawmakers elicited the starkest of warnings from a representative for a trade association of builders throughout the state: Ban natural gas and our power grid will fail.

As restrictions on natural gas have become a popular strategy for achieving state and local climate goals, utilities have begun to work to ensure that consumers and other stakeholders understand the implications of these proposed restrictions, while also talking up initiatives they are pursuing to reduce their own carbon footprint.

But in the very public debates over local and statewide bans on new natural gas hookups and total electrification mandates, U.S. utility executives from coast to coast may be humming the tune from Carole King’s 1969 hit, “You’ve got a friend.”

Indeed, in the five years since the recently overturned Berkeley ban took effect, a diverse array of stakeholders have become indispensable allies in efforts to slow the headlong rush to electrification, says Daniel Lapato, Associate Vice President for State Affairs for the American Gas Association (AGA).

“I think our opponents try to paint this as a utility-led effort, but at the end of the day I think you’ll see the utilities are just part of the conversation,” Lapato said. “There is a broader conversation with a variety of stakeholders who have begun to realize the impacts gas bans will have on their members, their businesses and their communities.”

Hospital associations, organized labor, small-business groups, low-income advocates, homebuilders and many other stakeholders all have helped turn up the volume and amplify utilities’ own messages about the benefits of the energy source 189 million Americans rely on every day and the risks of banning it.

So far, utilities are holding their own. Fuel-choice legislation is on the books in 25 states and proposed in eight more. Local gas bans or statewide building electrification codes are in force in 12 states and proposed in nine other states or local jurisdictions, according to the AGA. Forbes reported in March that 70 U.S. cities now have regulations requiring or incentivizing all-electric building construction.

“These 25 states have allowed the industry and our partners to talk about the benefits of natural gas from a national perspective, because at this point now half the country has preserved fuel choice,” Lapato said. “I think that’s really important to focus on.”

From his vantage point at AGA, which supports more than 200 local energy companies nationwide, Lapato sees a common thread – getting more people talking about the negative impacts bans on natural gas would have – running through utility efforts to resist moratoriums on new hook-ups and building-code changes that promote electrification.

“The utilities play a big role in these conversations—helping other stakeholders understand that these discussions are taking place and that this is a time for them to weigh in.”

Lapato points to a coalition of interests that came together to support a ballot initiative in Spokane that would have blocked the city from implementing a ban on new natural gas hookups. Homebuilders, organized labor, and even a trade association of gas fireplace manufacturers united to talk about the negative impacts a ban would have on housing affordability, small businesses, jobs and consumers.

The industry’s friends in the fuel-choice battle often have been willing to talk about the risks of forced electrification in a more direct way, plainly and bluntly pointing out the real-world ramifications in ways that hit home with consumers and policymakers alike.

In January, lawmakers in Washington state revived a bill to ban natural gas a few weeks after a historic cold snap forced Puget Sound Energy to plead with customers to reduce their energy use. Greg Lane, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, didn’t mince words when a reporter asked him about the impact of the proposed ban: “Removing natural gas as a source of heating homes and water will cause our electrical grid to fail.”

At a January press conference in Chicago, officials of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 150 stood shoulder to shoulder with city leaders opposed to a newly proposed ban on new hook-ups. The union has taken to the airwaves and newspapers with hard-hitting ads slamming Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker for a state law enabling local gas bans and regulatory actions that wiped out 1,000 jobs.

The headline on the “Fight Back” section of the union’s website blares IUOE’s message in red capital letters: “TELL ILLINOIS GOV. PRITZKER AND THE ICC TO LIFT THE NATURAL GAS BAN AND MAKE A PLAN FOR GRADUAL TRANSITION TO CLEAN ENERGY.”

Nearly a year has passed since North Carolina became the latest state to join the fuel-choice club, but neither have there been any new statewide connection bans nor electrification mandates. However, the legality of bans has come to the forefront since a federal appeals court struck down the Berkeley ordinance in April 2023 in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by the California Restaurant Association (CRA).

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed its decision in early January, forcing many jurisdictions to weigh the impact on existing or proposed bans. Spokane and Palo Alto subsequently dropped their bans, and Berkeley itself settled the lawsuit in March by agreeing to stop enforcing its ban on new gas hookups and eventually repeal it. Meanwhile, legal challenges to New York’s year-old state law banning new natural gas hookups have been filed based on the same arguments underpinning the Berkeley decision.

Where legislative efforts to restrict the use of natural gas have foundered, some states and cities are taking the “back-door ban” approach of adopting electrification requirements in building codes or influencing the development of model codes that are pushed down to the state level. Once again, industry partners are weighing in.

“Some of the loudest and strongest voices in these discussions have been the builders, the HVAC contractors, realtors, the commercial building operators who have really been the ones pushing back because it comes down to cost, cost, cost,” Lapato said. “It’s driving up not just the cost of construction but also the cost of the building itself, whether it’s a home or a commercial building, and that cost is really becoming burdensome.”

“Given that natural gas accounts for only 4-10% of a home’s total GHG emissions, the focus is misplaced.” – Daniel Lapato, Associate Vice President for State Affairs for the American Gas Association (AGA)

Lapato says he hasn’t seen many utilities roll out broad consumer-facing communications campaigns aimed at promoting fuel choice because they understand the public doesn’t necessarily focus on abstract energy policy discussions, but rather, engage only when the personal impact becomes clear.

Last year’s public outcry over a regulator’s suggestion that natural gas stoves might be banned is a case in point. Five states that already had fuel-choice legislation in place – Florida, Georgia, Montana, South Dakota and Tennessee – passed freedom-to-cook laws preventing the prohibition of appliances.

Unfortunately, the focus on natural gas bans and forced electrification as a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has obscured the important strides utilities are making in reducing the carbon footprint of natural gas, whether through energy efficiency and weatherization efforts, ongoing investments in pipeline integrity or newer decarbonization initiatives such as RNG, certified gas, blue hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies.

Given that natural gas accounts for only 4-10% of a home’s total GHG emissions, the focus is misplaced, according to Lapato, who says the emissions reductions can as easily be achieved using the natural gas technologies already available and under development at a fraction of the cost of total electrification. And the industry already has the infrastructure in place to deliver lower-carbon energy solutions.

“Utilities have been painted as the organization that are trying to argue for the status quo, but what the industry is more accurately making the case around is that these policies stymy our ability to innovate, and that’s what we do best,” Lapato said. “If you really are concerned about emissions reductions, don’t take any tools off the table.”

With energy experts already setting off alarm bells as U.S. demand for electric power surges due to the proliferation of data centers, the “reshoring” of U.S. manufacturing, and the growth in the use of electric vehicles, continued efforts to restrict the use of natural gas risk sacrificing the safety, reliability, resilience and affordability that Americans have come to expect from their energy system.

That’s a message U.S. utilities – with the help of the AGA and industry friends – can be expected to prioritize as they continue to position natural gas and the industry’s infrastructure as a critical piece of the emissions-reduction puzzle.

David Coburn is a strategic thinker, writer, media relations expert and communications consultant leveraging 30-plus years of print journalism and agency public relations experience.

Enbridge’s announcement in September that it was acquiring three U.S.-based utilities for USD$14 billion saw Canada’s largest energy company also become North America’s largest gas utility. The deal is significant not only on its own merits, but as part of a bigger trend: Canadian energy companies that are looking for growth prospects are finding them south of the border.

The trend is not new. In 2016, Canadian utilities went on an American shopping spree. Fortis acquired ITC for USD$11.3 billion; Ontario-based Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp acquired Missouri-based Empire District Electric Company for USD$2.4 billion; and Nova Scotia-based Emera acquired Florida-based TECO in a USD$10.4 billion deal.

Pipelines were in the mix too, with TC Energy acquiring Columbia Pipeline Group, a gas transmission network, that year for USD$13 billion.

In 2017, Hydro One purchased U.S. power supplier Avista for USD $3.4 billion, and AltaGas took over WGL Holdings (which supplies natural gas to the White House) for USD $4.6 billion. More recently, TriSummit acquired the Alaska gas distribution, transmission, and storage assets of SEMCO Energy for US$800 million in March.

As such, the Enbridge utility megadeal can be seen less as a harbinger and more of a culmination.

What is behind this Canadian appetite for American utilities and pipelines? At one level, it is a response to the inherent limitations of the Canadian utilities sector, which is heavily regulated and often provincially owned. Add in Ottawa’s torrent of climate policies aiming to cut growth in Canadian oil and gas, and pastures look greener elsewhere.

But it also speaks to the confidence the sector’s biggest players have in the long term prospects for natural gas. The Dominion deal adjusts Enbridge’s earnings from a 60-40 mix between crude oil & liquids, and natural gas & renewable energy respectively, to something closer to a 50-50 split. Enbridge, like many energy companies, is betting on natural gas being a bridge fuel in the energy transition rather than being phased out. And whatever fuel mix we use in the future, it will require pipelines and distribution, whether in the form of natural gas, renewable natural gas (RNG), hydrogen or otherwise.

“…it also speaks to the confidence the sector’s biggest players have in the long term prospects for natural gas.”

Two phenomena are worth emphasizing here. The first is that the United States is seen as a jurisdiction for growth; Canada, not so much. Our biggest energy companies are expanding to the south, but the reverse is not true. Enbridge and TC Energy are leading the way, but Cenovus, Cameco, Hydro-Québec and others are also making moves, on top of the long list of utilities above.

This is not just anecdotal. According to the U.S. State Department,¹ Canadian foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States was about 26% higher than their reciprocal FDI in 2022, or USD$528 billion compared to their USD$406 billion. This is part of a broader trend that has been worsening since 2014. In that year, Canadian investment abroad was only about CAD$100 billion more than foreign investment in Canada. By 2022 the imbalance had grown to a whopping CAD$725 billion.² Canadian companies are generating wealth; they are just generating a smaller proportion of it at home.

The second is that the Canadian and American energy markets are highly interdependent, and growing more so. In fact, 2022 saw record energy trade between our two countries, reaching USD$190 billion, almost triple what it was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beating the last high water mark of USD$178 billion in 2008. From natural gas and liquids pipelines to refineries and electricity grids, fundamentally we have a single North American energy system.

As such, we should be developing and coordinating energy and climate policy much more closely. It is inefficient, not to mention painful for the energy sector, when Canada and the United States – and many provinces and states on top of that – propose substantially different standards, goals, and regulations.  Energy is an area that needs closer policy collaboration and alignment between our two nations in order to achieve sustainability, reliability and affordability of supply.

This need is manifesting itself in a growing Canadian presence in the US capital. In the past year or so, TC Energy has established a policy team in Washington DC, and Cenovus and the Business Council of Canada have opened up offices there (as has my own think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute). As entreaties to Ottawa fall on deaf ears, businesses are looking for reception elsewhere.

The Canadian energy sector is betting big on natural gas, be it through retail, pipeline transportation or LNG exports. Where possible, it’s betting on Canada too. But the United States and other markets are where growth is on offer.

We should all celebrate the success of Canadian companies abroad. But we should be creating a policy and business environment that allows them to grow in our own back yard too.

Heather Exner-Pirot is the Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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¹ “2023 Investment Climate Statements: Canada” (2023), online: U.S. Department of State <www.state.gov/reports/2023-investment-climate-statements/canada>.
² “Canada’s foreign direct investment position” (last updated 28 April 2023), online: Statistics Canada <www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230428/cg-b001-eng.htm>.

It all began in early January 2023, when a member of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, asked about studies linking the use of gas stoves to childhood asthma, told Bloomberg News that “any option is on the table” and that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

The agency moved quickly to walk back the remarks from commissioner Richard Trumka Jr., a Biden appointee, and assure the public that nobody was coming to haul away their stoves. But it was too late: The Jan. 9 story already had set off a new skirmish in America’s culture wars and a media feeding frenzy.

News outlets had a field day competing for most cliché-filled coverage. The Economist observed that a “fiery debate has ignited in America” over a proposal that has “inflamed some Republicans.” Politico opined that the “stove flap gave Republican lawmakers an opening to put Biden’s energy policies back on the front burner.”

All in all, “it was a very stupid news cycle,” as a spokesman for one House Democrat put it. “So little of it was based on fact.” Nobody agreed with that assessment more than the U.S. gas industry, which swiftly launched a public effort to refute the validity of the report that triggered the gas stove kerfuffle.

The report in question was published in December 2022 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and claimed that nearly 13% of current childhood asthma cases in the U.S. could be traced to gas stove use and the impact on indoor air quality from release of nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter.

In a statement released a day after the Bloomberg story, The American Gas Association (AGA) disputed the findings and noted that the report was funded by non-governmental organizations, including clean-energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), “to advance their agenda to remove consumer energy choice and the option of natural gas.”

The AGA issued another statement a few days later announcing that RMI “finally admitted” that the study “does not assume or estimate a causal relationship between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves.”

AGA President and CEO Karen Harbert pointed out in the initial coverage that neither the CPSC nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) present gas ranges as a major contributor to negative air quality, or health hazard in their technical or public information literature, guidance, or requirements.

“This conversation was largely fuelled by a study which collected no data and made no assumption of causation and relies on reports that did not test natural gas stoves and have ignored research that found no association between gas stoves and asthma,” Harbert said. “For an issue as important and personal as children’s health, sound science matters.”

As part of its response, the AGA pointed to a 2022 study by GTI Energy that actually tested gas and electric stoves in a lab. The study found no difference in particulate emissions, but it did demonstrate the importance of good ventilation for all types of stove because emissions from food and oil are produced during cooking regardless of the fuel source.

Three days after the Bloomberg story, Harbert suggested on a call with reporters that one reason for the furor was the simple fact that Americans really like their gas stoves. Indeed, an estimated 38% of U.S. households have gas stoves and surveys show professional chefs overwhelmingly favour gas for cooking.

“StoveGate”, with its focus on health and indoor air quality, is just a sideshow to the larger and rapidly expanding push for wholesale prohibitions on new natural gas hookups by activists who see total electrification of the U.S. energy system as a key to halting climate change.

As of late January, nearly 100 cities and counties across the country had adopted electrification ordinances that ban or discourage gas hookups for new buildings in favour of electric appliances and heat pumps. That number is startling considering it was just four years ago that Berkeley, California, became the first U.S. city to approve a ban on natural gas hookups. The law took effect in August 2021.

“For an issue as important and personal as children’s health, sound science matters.”

– Karen Harbert, President and CEO, AGA

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul jumped into the fray just as the gas-stove controversy was cranking up. Her plan announced Jan. 12 would ban gas hookups in new construction starting with new homes in 2025 and expanding to large buildings by 2028 — a move the AGA said would “raise costs to consumers, jeopardize environmental progress and deny affordable energy to underserved populations.”

Gas advocates have pushed back, with (so far) 24 states — many with bipartisan support — passing “fuel choice” legislation preempting municipalities from banning natural gas use in buildings. Those states account for nearly one-third of U.S. residential and commercial gas use. Similar legislation has been introduced in several other states.

The industry also has notched victories in court, notably a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit April 17 overturning the Berkeley ordinance on the grounds that city officials overstepped their authority in adopting the ban. The ruling was expected to be challenged, but experts say other bans may not be affected due to the ruling’s narrow focus on specifics of Berkeley’s law.

Even without bans, proponents of building electrification as a path to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have plenty of tools at their disposal to encourage desired shifts in consumer behaviour. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for example, created rebates of up to $840 off the cost of an electric cooktop, range or wall oven — as well as rebates and tax credits for heat pumps and electric vehicles.

The uproar over gas stoves offers an object lesson in the difficulties of winning in the court of public opinion even when the facts are on your side. Sound science matters, but it’s not going to win the PR war when the folks you hope to persuade are leading with their hearts instead of their heads.

While Trumka’s boss at the CPSC insisted after the blow-up that no outright ban or restrictions on gas stoves were on the docket, the agency in December already had committed to considering new safety regulations. The CPSC planned to open a public comment period in March to solicit input, but Trumka said in his Bloomberg interview that any action or new proposals this year were unlikely.

Just a few years ago, the idea of a nationwide ban on gas stoves in the U.S. would have seemed preposterous. Short of a total ban, however, new appliance efficiency standards proposed by the Department of Energy earlier this year would make half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market today ineligible for sale.

While it may be too soon to predict how much the nation’s love affair with gas cooking will be curtailed by unsubstantiated claims about air quality, efficiency regulations and the drive for total electrification, one thing seems certain: As a culture-war staple symbolizing the seemingly unbridgeable chasm dividing America’s political factions, the gas stove is here to stay.

Expect to see the burner tips under the gas-stove ban issue ignited over and over in the runup to the 2024 U.S, Presidential election.

In the polarized hyperpartisan atmosphere that pervades American politics, there’s little room for a thoughtful, reasoned debate over the relative merits of gas versus electric cooking, or for that matter over the best way for the U.S. to ensure continued access to affordable, reliable energy while reducing emissions to meet targets set by governments. And the affordability and reliability elements are getting more and more attention as both are seriously at risk with an electrification agenda. But political discourse is all about ginning up the base and reducing complex issues to slogans that fit on a t-shirt, hat, or in this case, apron.

David Coburn is a strategic thinker, writer, media relations expert and communications consultant leveraging 30-plus years of print journalism and agency public relations experience.

In the year since Russian hackers forced the shutdown of a major liquid fuels pipeline, U.S. gas utilities and pipeline operators have become more focused on building defenses against cyber threats, but compliance with federal security mandates has proven a nettlesome distraction.

Weeks ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, cybersecurity expert Cisco Talos Intelligence Group already was warning of cyber operations by malicious actors in the U.S. and elsewhere aimed at eroding support for Ukraine. Attacks, Talos predicted, likely would target critical infrastructure with a goal of creating disruptions that were serious but relatively easy to recover from.

It sounded like déjà vu all over again. Russian hackers behind the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in May 2021 targeted the operator’s enterprise systems while leaving operational systems intact, yet forced Colonial to shut down a major network delivering gasoline, jet fuel and diesel to the East Coast and pay $4 million ransom in cryptocurrency.

Nearly a year later, are U.S. oil and natural gas operators better equipped to defend themselves against such attacks from a variety of state-sponsored and independent cyber criminals? Perhaps, though some industry advocates are concerned many operators have had to redirect their focus to meeting new federal security mandates rather than actually strengthening cyber defenses.

Colonial certainly got the attention of gas industry executives and helped to reprioritize cybersecurity for some. Soon after the May incident, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued two security directives intended to fortify about 100 TSA-designated critical pipeline systems against ransomware, malware and other threats.

Both directives list several requirements. The first directive asked operators of these systems to designate a cybersecurity coordinator to serve as a point of contact for TSA and report cybersecurity incidents to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The second, more nettlesome directive requires operators to take specific mitigation measures to protect against cyber threats and develop and implement contingency and recovery plans.

“Have we become more secure? I’m not going to say we haven’t,” said Kimberly Denbow, Managing Director of Security and Operations for the American Gas Association (AGA), which represents more than 200 energy companies. “I’ll say yes, in a nutshell we’ve become more secure, but at the same time we’re distracted by compliance.”

On a recent call with TSA administrator David Pekoske, Denbow said, one natural gas CEO told the regulator how the mandates had forced his company to “add so much more cyber staff, not because they had a poor cyber program by any means, but so they could come into compliance by checking the boxes that need to be checked.”

Bolstering threat alert capabilities

For its part, the AGA has made strides in the past year in improving the Downstream Natural Gas Information Sharing and Analysis Center (DNG-ISAC), the industry’s premier alert system for both physical and cyber threats. The system serves members of the AGA, the Canadian Gas Association (CGA) and pipeline operators represented by the Interstate National Gas Association of America (INGAA).

The AGA enhanced the DNG-ISAC platform in 2021 to make it more secure and user-friendly, with a mobile app and better push notification capabilities for threats and information submission opportunities. The platform posted 1,200 alerts last year, including information on hundreds of cyber-related threats, potential vulnerabilities, and actual cyber intrusions of relevance to pipeline operators.

David McConkey, Director of Operations, Safety and Security for the Canadian Gas Association, said the DNG-ISAC is an important complement to the Blue Flame Program, a near real-time threat information and analysis sharing system established by CGA last year in partnership with the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre).

The CGA helped facilitate the close working relationship that now exists between the DNG-ISAC, the Cyber Centre and other organizations on the Canadian side, “so they have a really healthy and active flow of information there, which benefits our members because the information coming out of the DNG-ISAC has a Canadian flavour as well,” McConkey said.

The threat alert system is just one area where cross-border collaboration is boosting cyber defenses. This fall, the AGA will pilot its first NGX event, a cybersecurity planning exercise that will include U.S. and Canadian participants from natural gas utilities, transmission pipelines and government. It will be a scaled-down version of GridEx, a planning exercise that originated in the electric industry but now includes gas operators. Denbow’s plan is to grow NGX over time.

A new twist on cyber vulnerabilities?

Cybersecurity concerns tend to focus on the bag of tricks malicious foreign actors and domestic “hacktivists” can use to wreak havoc on critical infrastructure in pursuit of their agenda, but U.S. industry advocates say the potential impact of total electrification of the energy system on cybersecurity deserves more attention.

Going all-electric will not just make the overall energy system less resilient in terms of physical threats such as severe weather events or activist attacks but could also simplify the playbook for those planning cyber mayhem, they say.

The electric grid already is stressed: There were 182 major disruptions to the grid in 2020, compared to fewer than two dozen in 2000, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis published earlier this year. Culprits include the age of the U.S. transmission system, the inherent vulnerability of an aboveground transmission system, and the vagaries of wind and solar.

“Everything is tied to having electricity, and yet we’re not focusing on the reliability of the grid. That’s absurd and that’s frightening,” Curt Morgan, CEO of electric power wholesaler Vistra Corp. told The Wall Street Journal in February. “There’s such an emotional drive to get where we want to get on climate change, which I understand, but we can’t throw out the idea of having a reliable grid.”

AGA’s Denbow tied total electrification to increased cybersecurity risks at a recent meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). Denbow cautioned against pursuing policies that reduce resilience by “putting all of our energy eggs in one basket” and at the same time ignore the impact on the cybersecurity landscape.

“Energy policy continues to be made in siloes,” Denbow said. “Cyber becomes an afterthought: Operators are asked ‘What about the cyber?’ I reply, ‘Well, what about the energy policy that increased our cyber vulnerability?”

Like so many other aspects of the total electrification debate — like its impact on climate change, resilience, and affordability — it comes down to what is lost by not including natural gas as part of the solution.

“I think the message there is the natural gas sector is doing a lot, we’re on top of things, we’re a great asset from a physical and cybersecurity standpoint and we’re leading in many respects,” the CGA’s McConkey said. “You throw our industry out and you’re losing an asset from many, many perspectives.”

“Like so many other aspects of the total electrification debate — like its impact on climate change, resilience, and affordability — it comes down to what is lost by not including natural gas as part of the solution.”

Still working the kinks out

The AGA and its member companies have been working with TSA since July to address aspects of the “one-size-fits-all” security directives that have created problems for operators — for example, multifactor authentication requirements that aren’t compatible with control systems and various components now in use.

Issues persist and new vulnerabilities are being created in the process. TSA in February requested that the designated pipeline operators submit their cybersecurity incident response plans to the agency electronically — a request that was greeted by operators with grave concern.

“TSA has collected all of these sensitive plans in a single database,” Denbow said. “In a threat environment when we’re worried about nation states compromising our networks, storing all these playbooks in one location does not give operators a warm-fuzzy feeling, regardless of security assurances provided by the government.”

Around the time the second TSA directive was issued last July, federal officials simultaneously released previously classified documents revealing that 13 of 23 U.S. natural gas pipeline operators were successfully compromised by a Chinese “spear-phishing” campaign from 2010–2013 that could have allowed hackers to gain control pipeline operations.

In combination with the Colonial incident and the TSA directives that followed, those disclosures no doubt had a salutary influence on oil and gas operators that lagged on their cybersecurity efforts, but those likely were already in the minority.

“For the majority of the companies subject to the security directives, cybersecurity has been a priority for a long time,” Denbow said. “For those that may not have been giving cybersecurity the level of attention needed, the attention is certainly there now.”

David Coburn is a strategic thinker, writer, media relations expert and communications consultant leveraging 30-plus years of print journalism and agency public relations experience.

Canada and the United States Pursue Hydrogen Economies

Will hydrogen fuel cells provide an energy storage solution for heavy vehicles in the transportation sector and compensate for the intermittency of wind, solar, and other energy sources? In recent months both the United States¹ and Canada² have issued federal strategies for the development of hydrogen economies, from hydrogen production to fuel cell applications, that are framed as an essential element in reaching net zero carbon emissions.

The technology for fuel cells dates to the 19^th century, when William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle managed to “break” water into its two elements, hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity. This process, called electrolysis, was used by William Grove to create the first functioning fuel cell in 1839 when he generated electricity from an electrochemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen using platinum as a catalyst. Getting electricity out of the fuel cell showed that fuel cells could function as a battery.

Research subsequently produced several types of fuel cells with different properties that make them suitable for a variety of applications. Hydrogen is the fuel in the fuel cell, but when combined with oxygen, usually air, it produces electricity from a chemical reaction rather than combustion. The byproduct is water.

A few fuel cell types³ are suitable for applications that reduce the amount of fossil fuel combustion and therefore provide a means to displace carbon emissions. Governments seeking to make good on pledges to reduce carbon emissions to “net zero” (where carbon emissions are matched by carbon emission reductions) have led the development of national hydrogen strategies.

Hydrogen is an abundant element, but typically found in combination with oxygen (water) and carbon (hydrocarbons). Each hydrogen source has vocal proponents and opponents and although the resulting hydrogen is the same, the political debate over hydrogen has become colourful — literally.

When a hydrocarbon is split into its constituent elements, hydrogen and carbon, the carbon byproduct can be released into nature or captured. Carbon captured can be used in industrial processes or stored to prevent negative environmental impacts. Hydrogen from hydrocarbons without carbon capture has been labeled “gray.” When the carbon is captured, the hydrogen is called “blue hydrogen.”

Blue hydrogen is clearly better for the climate than gray hydrogen, but there is also green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is produced through electrolysis, the process Nicholson and Carlisle pioneered. Green hydrogen proponents envision electricity produced by zero-emission methods — solar cells, wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants — as a promising method for decarbonizing economies without starving them of energy. Currently, the cost of producing green hydrogen is higher than the cost of producing blue hydrogen — and while the economics of green hydrogen may improve over time as technology advances — there will likely always be a cost disadvantage given the fact that there are multiple energy conversions involved.

This is the second reason for governments to develop national hydrogen strategies, beyond their net zero pledges. The science is indifferent to the choice between blue or green methods of producing hydrogen; the economics of the two methods favour blue today, but green is working to close the gap. And so the choice is a political one.

For regions with large hydrocarbon resources, like Alberta or Texas, blue hydrogen production offers a way to participate in national and international efforts to address climate concerns. People in these places often have a conservative political outlook. The boom-and-bust cycles typical of commodity markets provide enough risk and uncertainty. Sticking with the tried and true, striving to live up to the values that reflect good character, are virtues that prove their worth in hard times when you learn who you can count on, and who your true friends are.

Leaders in Ottawa and Washington in 2021 are progressive and green hydrogen production has appeal for them because it reflects the power of technology to allow nations to reach ambitious climate goals. The urgency of those goals justifies major changes, overriding objections and riding over naysayers.

And yet, both Canada and the United States have adopted hydrogen strategies that contemplate the full spectrum of colours in hydrogen production. In part, this ecumenism on hydrogen supply reflects the problem of demand. Hydrogen fuel cells will advance the electrification of transportation and help electrical grids to balance intermittent generation.

The significant investments in fuel cell vehicles and fuel cell installations by electric utilities — and a major expansion of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution capacity across the continent — will be difficult while economies are still recovering from the pandemic. Building back better will require broad support and will be harder if advocates of blue and green methods of producing hydrogen start fighting now.

Member companies of the Canadian Gas Association will be pivotal in the debates over hydrogen in North America. Hydrogen supply logistics are more likely to resemble those for natural gas than for oil, since hydrogen can be produced in many places and transporting hydrogen by ship requires a maritime fleet that does not exist yet. Like gas, hydrogen may develop supply hubs that connect to consumers through pipe and some land transport of hydrogen in the form of ammonia or methanol for transit.

Adding hydrogen in existing gas pipelines is an option but carries risks because adulterating the gas affects the pressure in the pipe. A network of dedicated hydrogen pipelines would cost more now but make more sense over the medium term while demand is established. Separate pipelines for green and blue hydrogen would exponentially increase cost and provide no real benefit since the hydrogen they deliver is the same.

Washington and Ottawa will try to navigate their economies to a hydrogen transition to reach net zero. Given the recent track record of politicians agreeing on anything, the hydrogen economy might never take off. The blue versus green debate could stall the hydrogen economy, too.

CGA members know what it takes to move hydrogen as a component of methane. They understand the importance of equipment in enabling demand, and reliability in convincing consumers to choose to invest in equipment to use their product. In a rational world, the natural gas sector would be managing the transition to hydrogen if that is what consumers want.

“CGA members know what it takes to move hydrogen as a component of methane. They understand the importance of equipment in enabling demand, and reliability in convincing consumers to choose to invest in equipment to use their product.”

Progress in vaccinations and beating back COVID-19 might make our energy debates in Canada and the United States a bit more rational, but both countries’ hydrogen strategies will remain political, and therefore uncertain, as long as net zero goals are a zero-sum equation for blue and green hydrogen.

Christopher Sands is director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Canada Institute and a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, both in Washington D.C.

 

In the United States where voter turnout is rarely as high as it is in Canada, American politicians nearly always claim that the election at hand is the most important election ever. This year is no exception as candidates from the two major parties try to motivate voters remotely during the COVID-19 quarantine.  To listen to either side, the 2020 election is a choice between the candidate before you and the triumph of pure evil. Who could be sanguine about that?

Yet, this election year, hyperbole does suggest that something important is happening in the United States. The political polarization of the electorate that has been evident for decades has intensified. Each side accuses the others of breaking norms and conventions that once set limits on rhetoric or public behavior. New rules of a “cancel culture” police the public square in America now, but somehow violence for political ends is uncancelable, and even in some quarters lauded.

Take a step back from the roaring flames and burning embers of American political debates and it is possible to see the conflict along another dividing line, not between right and left but between the Baby Boomer generation that has dominated American politics from the 1960s and the Millennials who became the largest generation in the American electorate in 2016 when, arguably, the tenor of U.S. politics took a sharp turn for the worse.

The Boomers and the Millennials are activists as well as idealists. In the United States today, they agree that the status quo is not acceptable. But they don’t agree, even within each generational cohort, about the direction of change that is needed.

Since 1992 when Bill Clinton became the first Boomer President of the United States, voters unhappy with the present have turned each election into a referendum of sorts, with the ultimate winner promising to deliver change. All of the presidents since Clinton have won two terms, with the incumbent pledging to deliver even more change to hold on to office. This makes the loss harder for the idealists of the other party to bear. When Republicans win, pundits ask if the Democratic Party will die out; when Democrats win re-election, it is Republicans who are said to be on the way to extinction.

Politics in the United States are, in this sense, quite unlike Canadian politics. True, some of the rough tactics and harsh language common in the United States are copied by Canadian politicians. But the parties compete for the middle of the electorate. Justin Trudeau and Erin O’Toole may debate and compete, but neither sees the other as the embodiment of evil.

U.S. politics used to be more like Canada’s in tone and temperament and may be that way again soon. The reason is sheer exhaustion from the extreme rhetoric and outrages that now mark public life in the United States. As in recent elections, voters want change – even if they cannot agree on the direction of that change on specific policy questions confronting the country. For Canadians, the most important aspect of the 2020 elections is not who wins, but rather what clues does it provide about the direction of future change in the United States?

At the presidential level, whoever wins the White House will be a transitional figure. This is almost certainly the last election in which the leading candidates will be Boomers. Should President Donald Trump be re-elected, the next four years are likely to see policy debates continue in the same manner as they have since 2016, with debates over the legitimacy of the election outcome, protest marches and sadly, continued violence on American streets. Should former Vice President Joseph Biden win, his advanced age and health will make a second term unlikely and it is unclear that the energetic progressives in the Democratic Party will be able to pass legislation or implement their policy agenda with uncertain support from a centrist president and a divided electorate. In both scenarios, frustration and violent disagreement will lead many Americans and Canadians, too, to look for rising stars among the younger politicians who could run in 2024.

Personally, I am optimistic that the 2024 election will bring change and even a revival of centrism to American politics. When all the shouting and threats subside, there is a surprising degree of public consensus on policy questions that our pundits claim divide the United States irreparably. We oppose racism and police brutality, value protests, and abhor riots. We want science and public policy to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control.

And on the international scene, bipartisan majorities support the mix of trade liberalization for our competitive sectors and protection for declining industries and workers that is embodied in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. After the Obama and Trump administrations sought to pull the military back from wars and nation-building abroad, few miss the interventionism of the Clinton and Bush years. The recent fiscal approach that combines tax cuts with more spending may dishearten free market mavens, but it is popular in Congress and with voters.

What characterizes each of the areas of agreement on policy is compromise, which is at odds with the “all-or-nothing” rhetoric of both the right and the left in politics and political activism in 2020. While breathless commentators warn that Trump’s re-election or a Biden victory will mean the end of all and a policy apocalypse, and many Millennials despair that 2020 will amount to nothing but more of the same, looking past this election to 2024 offers hope for the end of all-or-nothing politics and a rediscovery of compromise that would render U.S. politics more Canadian. We can only hope.

Christopher Sands is director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Canada Institute and a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, both in Washington D.C.