But climate-banking rules could still kill it, warn Friends of Science.

By Probe International

Prime Minister Mark Carney just put the Pacific Link oil pipeline on the national-interest list and talked up Canada as an energy superpower in conventional and so-called clean energy.

Friends of Science — Calgary earth scientists, engineers, and citizens — say climate-obsessed central bankers may still sink it.

In a Sept. 30 open letter to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) and the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), they argue the NGFS Guide on Climate Scenario Analysis is built on outdated climate science. They point to the catastrophe scenarios used in bank stress tests — SSP3-7.0, SSP5-8.5, and RCP 8.5 — that have been retired by the modelling community as implausible.

Climate policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr. has been blunt: those high-end pathways “were always implausible.”

Environment and Climate Change Canada keeps using them anyway. The damage math looks worse.

Friends of Science highlights Kotz et al. (2024), the highly publicized paper that claimed climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049, and its retraction by the journal Nature in December 2025 — after it had already become the basis of NGFS’s climate damage function.

That should matter to lenders, notes Friends of Science, who cite Pielke’s commentary “Taking Us for Fools,” and his view that “climate policy — however construed — cannot reduce the number or intensity of extreme weather events in any meaningful or detectable way in my lifetime, or even my future grandkids’ lifetimes.”

That is how you get banks and insurers pressured to refuse conventional energy financing, or to demand punitive rates and Net Zero plans, say Friends of Science.

They name two concrete cases: Senator Rosa Galvez’s Bill S-238 and RBC’s Net Zero posture. Both, they argue, sit outside the plain rule in section 627.03 of the Bank Act: “No institution shall communicate or otherwise provide false or misleading information to a customer, the public, or the Commissioner.”

It may not move a single approval. It does show how far the policy has drifted from the old rule that banks should tell the truth.

Energy expert Prof. Emeritus Vaclav Smil’s scale check still stands: full decarbonization will not happen in a few decades, even with sustained, extraordinarily costly effort.

The U.K.-based energy analyst Tammy Nemeth is right, concur Friends of Science: energy security is national security. Beijing already acts like it.