How the Liberals and the Conservatives Jumped Into the Bag for the Fossil Energy Giants

They'll feed you no end of horseshit about how fossil fuels are critical to the Canadian economy. They don't want to tell you why they never have much, if anything, to show for it. They prefer not to dwell on why they collect minuscule royalties a fraction of what other nations demand. It's absolutely off-limits to delve into the hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for cleaning up the West's Tar Sands, tailing ponds and orphan wells.

Leaving bitumen out of the equation entirely, Alberta has shipped more conventional oil than even Norway. Yet Norway has translated their oil bounty into the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Alberta, by contrast, bounces like a pinball between prosperity and poverty. It doesn't make any difference how much they gross, they can't hold onto it. They simply can't handle money.

When Justin Trudeau talks oil, it's horseshit. When Andrew Scheer or Jason Kenney or Scott Moe talk oil, it's horseshit. All of them are in the bag for the fossil energy industry.

The Guardian's George Monbiot explores how the world's filthiest industries managed to corrupt politics.

The tragedy of our times is that the gathering collapse of our life support systems has coincided with the age of public disservice. Just as we need to rise above self-interest and short-termism, governments around the world now represent the meanest and dirtiest of special interests. In the United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many other nations, pollutocrats rule. 

The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly. Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.

...A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires. 

The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.

The Trudeau government admits to subsidizing fossil energy producers to the tune of a couple of billion a year.  The International Monetary Fund pegs the real value of those subsidies at $46 billion every year.  The IMF is accurate and honest. The Trudeau government is peddling horseshit.

As for Monbiot's comments about retiring fossil fuel assets (beginning with the dirtiest of them all - thermal coal and bitumen), that's not happening.  Recent projections by the International Energy Agency, OPEC and academics at the University of Calgary all conclude that the fossil fuel industry is looking at a rosy future into 2040 and beyond.

In 2011, the IEA gave this grim warning.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure. 

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

OPEC added this in 2018.

Opec expects global oil demand to reach nearly 112m barrels per day by 2040, driven by transportation and petrochemicals. That is up from almost 100m today and higher than last year’s projection.

Coal will continue to be be burned in record amounts, despite concerns about its impact on climate change. Opec estimates that coal usage in the OECD countries will plummet by a third by 2040, but it will increase by 20% in developing countries to reach five times the volumes burned in the west.

In its 2018 World Energy Outlook, the IEA added this.

In the New Policies Scenario, global energy needs rise more slowly than in the past but still expand by 30% between today and 2040, the equivalent of adding another China and India to today’s global demand. A global economy growing at an average rate of 3.4% per year, a population that expands from 7.4 billion today to more than 9 billion in 2040, and a process of urbanisation that adds a city the size of Shanghai to the world’s urban population every four months are key forces that underpin our projections.

George Monbiot continues:

An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.

But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest.

It was Trudeau's own minister, Carr, who suggested the Liberal government was ready to call out the army to deal with concerned British Columbians who might obstruct development of the Justin Trudeau Memorial Bitumen Pipeline.

Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.

We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.

It couldn't be more obvious. We're at a crossroads, perhaps our final crossing. We are supposed to be going left, slashing emissions, instituting the "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry as Schellnhuber cautioned in Paris in 2015. Instead our leaders have chosen to turn right, ramping up production and distribution of ever more fossil energy, including the dirtiest varieties - coal and bitumen.

If they won't even shut down the worst fossil fuels, the highest carbon, lowest value, garbage stuff - by which I mean bitumen and thermal coal - then they're in the bag. And, yes, your government is in the bag. It isn't even thinking of intervening to stop this climate-wrecking madness. That pipeline isn't going to pay for itself. Their goal is to ramp up bitumen production and to flood world markets with this low-value, high-carbon garbage. What does that say except "let'er rip" and "burn baby, burn"?

They're at war with life on Earth. They're at war with humanity. Ultimately they're at war with us - you and me. And, right now, they're winning.