Mark Carney Is Wrong: Canada Cannot Become an Energy Superpower

Canada can produce more oil, more LNG, and more electricity—but production alone will never make us an energy superpower

There are moments in a country’s public conversation when an idea becomes so deeply embedded, so widely repeated, and so culturally unexamined that it takes on the feel of common sense. In Canada, the belief that we are destined to become an energy superpower is one of those ideas. It crosses party lines, appears in campaign speeches, animates provincial rhetoric, and sits comfortably inside the federal Liberal government’s economic messaging. It is simultaneously a fossil-fuel story and a clean-energy story. And until Canadians let it go, we cannot build a realistic energy or industrial strategy for the 21st century.

This essay makes a simple argument: Mark Carney is wrong. Canada cannot become an energy superpower—neither in oil and gas nor in clean energy. And the reason he is wrong reveals something fundamental about how the global energy system is changing, and what Canada must do instead.

Carney is not alone. Many economists, policy makers, and business leaders continue to view the global energy transition through a familiar lens: fossil fuels will remain a dominant and valuable part of the world economy for decades to come; Canada’s vast reserves and political stability give us a durable competitive advantage; and our path to national prosperity runs through steadily increasing production and exports. This is the conventional wisdom.

But conventional wisdom becomes dangerous when the world has shifted beneath it.

Columbia University energy economist Chris Bataille offers a definition that cuts through decades of political rhetoric:

“To my mind, an energy superpower is a country or jurisdiction that can supply as much as they want of some energy commodity at a price that’s lower than the going price,” he says. “They can keep increasing supply and putting it on global markets, and in that way they start to influence the global price… you have leverage. You set the global agenda.”

That kind of power belongs to a handful of countries—Saudi Arabia for crude, the United States and Qatar for LNG. But it has never belonged to Canada.

To further understand why Canada cannot become an energy superpower, we must first understand why this story persists, and then we must confront the deeper reality: the global energy transition is not unfolding according to the logic of commodities. It is unfolding according to the logic of disruptive technologies. Once that is understood, the superpower narrative collapses.

The Oil and Gas Superpower Myth

Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, has impeccable credentials. He understands global finance, macroeconomics, and the relationship between capital and climate risk better than almost any Canadian on the political stage. When he speaks about the long-term future of oil and gas, people listen. And his message has been consistent: world demand will remain strong through at least the 2030s, perhaps into the 2040s; oil and gas will continue to generate enormous profits; and Canada should not forfeit the opportunity to supply that demand.

It is a reasonable argument if you believe the energy transition is linear. If you believe fossil fuels will face slow policy-driven decline while the world gradually adopts cleaner alternatives. If you imagine a path where oil consumption peaks sometime in the 2030s but levels off gently for decades.

But that is not how technological disruption works.

Clean energy technologies—solar, wind, electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, and digital grids—do not behave like oilfields or natural gas basins. They follow the economics of electronics: rapid cost declines, rapid performance improvements, increasing returns to scale, and accelerating adoption once they reach cost parity.

They follow S-curves, not straight lines.

Every wave of disruptive innovation—from smartphones to LEDs to streaming—looks the same: slow at first, then suddenly transformative.

The global energy system is now inside this pattern. And clean energy is outcompeting fossil fuels on cost, speed, and technological momentum.

Oil and gas do not decline because governments hate them. Oil and gas decline because they are being outperformed.

This is the piece Carney has not fully internalized. Few economists have. The transition is no longer primarily about climate policy. It is about technology substitution driven by market forces.

The evidence is overwhelming:

• Electric vehicles are now cheaper to own than gasoline vehicles in most markets.

• Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new electricity in 90% of the world.

• Battery costs have fallen more than 90% since 2010.

• Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for the first time last year.

• Global investment in clean energy now doubles global investment in fossil fuels.

When a disruptive technology reaches these tipping points, decline in the incumbent industry is not gentle. It is structural and rapid.

Once oil demand peaks—and every credible model shows this happening before or by 2030—revenues fall faster than volumes, investors flee, capital becomes scarce, and producing countries enter a race to the bottom. In that kind of market, high-cost producers suffer first. And Canada is a high-cost producer.

Our bitumen, LNG, and even conventional oil cannot compete with low-cost regions like the Middle East. Long pipelines, remote geology, high labour costs, high carbon-intensity, and capital-heavy infrastructure make our barrel expensive. An expensive barrel is a vulnerable barrel.

Bataille is blunt about the implications:

“Saudi Arabia is very definitely a global superpower when it comes to crude oil because they’re the swing producer. I would argue the United States is a superpower with LNG because they’ve been able to put so much on the market they’re influencing the global price… Canada is not in that position.”

This is the structural disadvantage Canadian politicians refuse to confront.

You cannot be an energy superpower by exporting a product the world is abandoning.

Bataille summarizes the reality in a single sentence: “Canada is a price taker, not a price maker.” No country in that position can ever be an energy superpower.

That is the first flaw in the superpower dream.

The Clean Energy Superpower Myth

Having wholeheartedly accepted Carney’s oil and gas superpower narrative, Canadian politicians unquestioningly accept his claim that Canada can also become a superpower in clean energy. We have enormous hydro resources, vast land for wind and solar, strong innovation ecosystems, and a skilled workforce. This narrative is attractive because it sounds modern. It sounds like a country leaning into the future.

But this second version of the superpower story rests on a misunderstanding every bit as deep as the first: It assumes that producing a lot of clean electricity confers economic power. It assumes that if Canada builds enough wind farms, solar farms, hydro dams, and nuclear reactors, we will become more prosperous, more resilient to trade and political pressure from the United States.

But clean-energy superpowers are not defined by electrons. They are defined by control over the technology supply chains that use them.

This is why China—not Canada, not Norway, not Brazil—is the world’s clean-energy superpower.

China is an electro-state. It has built industrial capacity at a scale no other country can match, dominating the manufacturing value chains for the entire clean-energy system:

• 80–90% of global solar manufacturing

• 70–80% of global battery materials and batteries

• more EV production than every other country combined

• 50–60% of global wind turbine production

• 35–40% of global heat pump manufacturing

• global dominance in grid power electronics, inverters, transformers, and rare earth processing

You become a clean-energy superpower not by producing electricity, but by producing the technologies that create, store, move, and use electricity.

Canada cannot replicate this model. Not because we lack intelligence or talent, but because we lack the scale, the industrial strategy, the supply-chain depth, and the geopolitical orientation. Our domestic market is small. Our manufacturing base is fragmented. Our industrial policy has been reactive rather than strategic. Our export markets are integrated with the U.S., which, despite Donald Trump’s best efforts, is lurching along to build its own clean-tech supply chains.

We can expand hydro. We can add wind and solar. We can modernize the grid and electrify the economy. All of this is necessary and good.

But producing electricity—even vast amounts of it—does not make a country a superpower.

Electricity is not oil. It cannot be exported at scale except to the United States. It does not produce geopolitical leverage. And the technologies that matter most, the technologies that define the next global energy order, are not made here.

The honest truth, stated plainly: Canada can become a clean energy success, but not a superpower.

That is not a failure. It is simply a realistic understanding of our place in the global system.

The Superpower Narrative Collapses from Both Sides

Now, as the conventional narrative fails, we see the full shape of the argument.

Canada cannot become a fossil-fuel superpower because oil and gas are entering structural decline driven by clean-tech disruption. The market is shifting away from our products, and high-cost producers cannot thrive in a shrinking market.

Canada cannot become a clean-energy superpower because modern energy power comes from manufacturing and technological dominance, not electricity production. That path belongs to China, the United States, and the European Union—not to a nation of 40 million with limited industrial depth.

When both stories collapse, the entire superpower dream dissolves.

This is a good thing. Once we stop believing we are destined for superpower status, we can finally begin the real work of shaping a serious industrial strategy—one aligned with our strengths, our scale, and the actual structure of the 21st-century economy.

What Canada Can Become

Abandoning the superpower myth does not mean abandoning ambition. It means trading fantasy for strategy.

Canada can be prosperous in the clean-energy world. But our path is different from the path of superpowers.

We can build one of the world’s cleanest, most reliable electricity systems, an enormous competitive advantage for domestic industry. We can electrify transportation, buildings, and heavy industry, reducing costs and improving resilience. We can develop competitive niches in the global supply chain: critical minerals processing, battery components, carbon-free steel and aluminum, advanced geothermal, advanced materials manufacturing using bitumen as the feedstock, carbon management technologies, and advanced nuclear engineering.

We can nurture world-class research ecosystems in artificial intelligence, energy systems modeling, material science, and industrial automation, areas where Canadian talent already excels.We can modernize our grids, accelerate permitting, and reduce the chronic delays that prevent clean energy projects from being built. We can design a regulatory and fiscal environment that attracts investment rather than repelling it.

None of this requires us to be an energy superpower.

It requires us to be smart, decisive, and aligned with reality. The countries that thrive in a disrupted energy system are not the ones that cling to outdated stories about their place in the world. They are the ones that recognize disruption for what it is and retool their economies accordingly.

A New Canadian Narrative

The idea that Canada is destined to become an energy superpower was always more aspiration than analysis. It confused abundance with advantage, and production with power. It misread the nature of technology, the structure of global markets, and the speed of disruption.

But Canadians are ready for a new story—one grounded in evidence, imagination, and a clear-eyed understanding of the future.

A story that says, we can build a prosperous, clean, modern economy. We can lead in some things, important things. We can improve the lives of Canadians and strengthen our democracy. We can partner with allies and compete globally in strategic niches. We can avoid the mistakes of the past and embrace the opportunities of the future.

But we do this by moving forward, not by blindly embracing a myth.

Canada’s opportunity is not superpower status. Our opportunity is success in a world where clean technologies win.

But we can only seize that opportunity if we stop believing a story that was wrong from the start.