The headlines framed it as one other Trump tariff story: Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatening a 25 % retaliation on American vitality exports. However the true story of the Northeastern vitality disaster is greater than cross-border drama and goes again properly earlier than the tariffs and trumpeting.
Ford’s risk is the most recent lash in a decades-long ritual of vitality self-flagellation. U.S. regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping American electrical energy manufacturing with regulation after regulation, smothering new initiatives within the identify of preservation, wetlands, or the northeastern bulrush sedge—typically earlier than they even break floor. As a substitute of build up capability, we import Canadian energy to maintain the emissions off our ledgers like mafia accountants, cleverly skirting the regulation whereas they persuade the world they’re making us cleaner, greener, and smarter, even because the lights flicker and the payments climb.
The individuals paying the value are usually not in press conferences or coverage conferences. They’re at dwelling, selecting between groceries and the gasoline invoice. I met them final winter in North Philly. I used to be there to run focus teams on the affect of rising vitality prices.
A father talked about changing Olive Backyard dinners with SpaghettiOs, ashamed that Little League wins now not earned an evening out. A grad scholar turned her one-bedroom condo right into a boarding home—three individuals sharing the area simply to maintain the lights on. A restaurant proprietor described her kitchen working in winter coats as a result of they could not afford to run the warmth. These weren’t sob tales. They had been quiet portraits of sacrifice and grit.
Since then, costs have jumped one other 7 % regardless of our reliance on Canadian imports.
In 2024, the U.S. imported 27,200 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy from Canada—sufficient to cowl as much as 20 % of New York’s provide or 15 % of New England’s whole winter load—as a result of we have made constructing new energy right here almost not possible and incentivized imported energy by regulatory loopholes that permit us to disregard any emissions that occur exterior the U.S.
It is a easy formulation: export emissions, import advantage. In the meantime, home vitality initiatives within the Northeast stall, sputter, or collapse.
We’re sitting on 469 billion tons of coal, 2.9 trillion cubic toes of gasoline, and centuries of nuclear gasoline. However within the U.S., constructing energy vegetation now requires a authorized workforce and a decade of hearings. We have turned energy era right into a theater of guilt—the place producing vitality within the U.S. is simply too sinful to allow however importing it from some place else lets us really feel pure. It isn’t coverage. It is penance.
In 2021, New York shut down the Indian Level nuclear plant—considered one of its final sources of zero-emissions baseload energy. That very same 12 months, the state started ramping up electrical energy imports from Canada to fill the hole, bringing in 7,600 gigawatt-hours. Hydroelectric energy alone could not deal with the demand, so Ontario’s gasoline vegetation fired as much as meet the demand, releasing an estimated 1 million tons of carbon dioxide. However as a result of these emissions occurred north of the border, New York claimed a drop in its personal energy-sector emissions.
And that is the sport: When Canadian hydro falters, Canadian gasoline steps in—however the emissions vanish on U.S. local weather ledgers.
Vermont (importing over 80 % of its electrical energy), Massachusetts, and far of the remainder of New England function from the identical playbook. The grid operator they belong to (ISO-NE) imports round 15 % of its winter peak from Canada. When hydro output dropped 18 % as a result of drought, gasoline peaker vegetation and fossil fuels saved the day. In 2023 alone, utilities in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick generated an estimated 13.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—none of which seem on the emissions ledgers of states like Massachusetts and Vermont, regardless of their heavy reliance on imported energy from these provinces. In the meantime, the 1,200 megawatt Commonwealth Wind undertaking was canceled outright after the developer paid $50 million to stroll away, citing monetary infeasibility and allowing delays.
This isn’t a glitch within the system—it is the system.
A 1999 rule by the Environmental Safety Company permits states to deal with imported electrical energy as emissions-free, no matter the way it’s generated. It is a handy accounting trick that lets politicians hit local weather targets with out lowering precise emissions. On the similar time, home vitality initiatives face a labyrinth of authorized, regulatory, and activist roadblocks—because of legal guidelines like Title V of the Clear Air Act and a allowing system that treats any new infrastructure as a risk till confirmed in any other case.
We have constructed a political tradition that worships the optics of fresh vitality whereas punishing the act of really producing it. Throughout the Northeast, home vitality initiatives do not simply battle—they’re buried. Offshore wind collapses underneath lawsuits over fishing rights and ocean views. Small modular reactors collect mud in regulatory limbo. Pipelines are killed over silt and wetlands. Nuclear vegetation drown in litigation.
In 2016, New York vetoed the Structure Pipeline, leaving the Marcellus Shale untapped. Two years later, throughout a brutal chilly snap, Massachusetts imported liquefied pure gasoline—from Russia—somewhat than lay pipe from Pennsylvania. A proposed 42-megawatt biomass plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was blocked on a technicality in 2021 after years of allow delays and issues over “environmental justice.” Clear, native vitality was too controversial. Imported emissions? No remark.
Altogether, the area has canceled sufficient initiatives to generate 42,000 gigawatt-hours a 12 months—greater than 50 % above the ability we imported from Canada in 2024. We’re not out of vitality. We have simply outlawed actuality.
We faux it is progress. We faux the air is cleaner. We faux that exporting emissions is environmentalism. It isn’t. It is theater for local weather lobbies, marketing campaign soundbites, and activists who measure success in press releases, not energy output. The emissions stay. Solely the guilt is outsourced.
So no, Ford’s tariff risk is not the story—it is simply the headline. The true story is what made that risk doable: our habit to imported advantage, our refusal to construct, and a regulatory tradition that punishes the very act of manufacturing vitality. We’re not quick on energy. We’re simply too sanctimonious to generate it.
