The fossil energy giants have taken the pulse of their political enablers and what they see is clear sailing ahead.
The world’s 50 biggest oil companies are poised to flood markets with an additional 7m barrels per day over the next decade, despite warnings from scientists that this will push global heating towards catastrophic levels.
New research commissioned by the Guardian forecasts Shell and ExxonMobil will be among the leaders with a projected production increase of more than 35% between 2018 and 2030 – a sharper rise than over the previous 12 years.
The acceleration is almost the opposite of the 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that scientists say is necessary to have any chance of holding global heating at a relatively safe level of 1.5C.
The projections by Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy regarded as the gold standard for data in the industry, highlight how major players seem to be ignoring government promises, scientific alarms and a growing public outcry so they can pump more fossil fuels – and profits – out of the ground.
How is that even possible? If you're asking yourself that, don't. This is exactly what Schellnhuber meant when he told the delegates to the 2015 Paris climate summit that whatever hope we had of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius demanded an "induced implosion" of the world's fossil energy giants.
And what have we got? A government that shells out billions on a pipeline to triple the flow of high-carbon, toxin-laden, low-value bitumen to world markets and then pretends that's the key to a green future for Canada. Bollocks!
The only surprising part is that anyone would be surprised by the report or its findings. They closely mirror reports that we've been getting, at least weekly, for the past several years.
To the Trudeau government, this is core-mission stuff. Last week, scientists from the environment department were brought in to the Prime Minister's Office for briefings. The report will be public and online Tuesday, and Justin Trudeau and members of his cabinet will be pushing the issue as something bordering on a national emergency, which is not an unreasonable way to characterize it.
Think of it this way. If your house was on fire and you wanted to save your home would you douse the flames with gasoline? I'll bet that wouldn't be your first choice. You would realize that could only make your problem vastly worse.
Okay, now let's consider climate change as a national emergency and it is. A national emergency is something that you expect the national government to fight with all of its strength and means. Only despite this gestural farce of carbon taxes, our government is actually dousing the flames with gasoline.
That Trans Mountain pipeline? Perfect example. We've been told that Athabasca tar sludge has to be left in the ground. Trudeau has said no, we've got to get it out, fast, as much as possible while we still can. He even paid Kinder Morgan, the former owner and Enron alumni, a massive profit to make that happen. He's already sunk 4.5 billion into that pipeline and he's got easily another 7 billion to go.
Does that sound like somebody who's worried about climate change?
He's still paying billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel giants. They admit to a couple of billion per year. The IMF has priced not only direct subsidies but also "in kind" benefits such as minuscule royalties, grants, deferrals and other benefits at a whopping $46 billion.
Does that sound like somebody that sees shutting down the highest-carbon fossil fuel projects as "core mission stuff"?
Cast your mind back to the heady days of early December, 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals had just been installed in office. Justin and his enviro-min, Dame Cathy McKenna, strode onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit and proclaimed "Canada's back." The dark days of the Harper era when Canada was regularly rebuked as a climate change pariah were over. No, under new Liberal management, Canada was going to put its shoulder into the fight against climate change.
Perhaps Justin and Cathy were too busy fitting their wreaths of laurels to hear the warning from a climate scientist who was also at the Paris summit, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, then head of the prestigious Potsdam climate institute.
As the political types were high-fiving each other with bold promises to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, max, Johnny Schellnhuber said achieving that goal would require nothing less than the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry. Not milquetoast carbon taxes, no, nothing short of petro-states shutting down their fossil fuel producers and hastening the transition to alternative clean energy.
Do you believe that Justin is undergoing some epiphany over the dire threat of climate change? If you do I sure hope you're right and I'm wrong. Even if he had the moral spine (and he doesn't) he lacks the courage to reverse course and steer Canada to another direction.
What's the difference between all-out nuclear war and catastrophic climate change? So far we haven't been stupid enough to resort to all-out nuclear war.
Both of them can end civilization, indeed most life on Earth. The way we're going it's unclear which will get the job done first.
Canada, of course, doesn't field a nuclear arsenal but it sure as hell is doing its bit on the other threat, runaway global warming. We have huge proven reserves of the filthiest, most dangerous, high-carbon ersatz oil on the planet, Athabasca bitumen. And we've got two provinces and a succession of federal governments hell bent on getting as much of that deadly crap as conceivably possible to foreign markets.
When challenged on this, our prime minister pops a fuze and says the only thing he can come up with. Here's what he told an angry crowd yesterday in Nanaimo: "We wanted a national carbon reduction plan, a national emissions plan that is going to allow us to reach our climate goals, to reach our Paris commitments but in order to do that, part of moving forward is approving the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It is something many people feel very strongly about on either side, but that is the nature of the compromise we had to make in the best interests of Canada."
That's some ripe horseshit to be sure. Flogging Black Death is "part of moving forward." It's "in the nature of the compromise" that the Liberal government "had to make in the best interests of Canada."
If that's "moving forward," in what direction exactly is Canada heading? Well, given that Trudeau's climate goals were set by Stephen Harper and we're not on track to even meet those, you can probably figure out where Justin is taking us.
One of America's top climate scientists and advocates, James Hansen, had this to say five years ago about the Tar Sands.
"To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It's still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future. Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn."
Hansen isn't alone. Climate science backs him up. When Justin Trudeau and his environment minister burst onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, they scored big by urging that the old target for maximum global warming, then at 2 degrees Celsius, be cut to a humanity-saving 1.5C. McKenna and Trudeau didn't hear, nor heed, the warning of another top world climate scientist at the Paris Summit, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber's warning that any hope of holding global warming to 1.5 C would depend on an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry.
Schellnhuber said if we want to do this we can if the petro-states move quickly to shut down their fossil fuel resources and rapidly transition to alternative energy. It doesn't sound like Hans had Trudeau's let 'er rip energy policy in mind.
Here's the thing. Trudeau, Notley and their Oil Patch patrons, frame this as a purely economic issue. Schellnhuber argues it goes way beyond economics.
“In the end it is a moral decision. Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.”
Oil field experts say that these new pipelines are 30-year investments. Barring some collapse of markets, those investing the hundreds of billions of dollars into these pipelines have confidence that they'll reap their rewards. And, so long as the Oil Patch has reliable and indulgent governments like Harper's and Trudeau's, they're probably taking a safe bet.
Trudeau sees calls for real action to fight climate change as "sanctimonious crap." Ask David Suzuki:
Trudeau called him personally June 28, 2015, to talk about the Liberal platform on climate change that was to be revealed the next day. “I didn’t call Justin, he called me,” Suzuki said. “He wanted an endorsement and he wanted to tell me exactly what his program was.”
The program includes support for the Keystone XL pipeline, a rejection of the Northern Gateway pipeline and a commitment to work with the provinces to establish a cap-and-trade system.
“I said, ‘Justin, stop it, you’re just being political, you just want to make headway in Alberta,’” Suzuki says he told Trudeau. “You’re for the development of the tar sands, you’re for the Keystone pipeline, but you’re against the Northern Gateway, you’re all over the damn map!”
Suzuki went on to advise Trudeau that taking the target of a two-degree rise in temperature seriously means 80 per cent of the oil sands has to stay in the ground. Suzuki believes stopping oil sands development will mean “no debate about pipelines or expanding railways or shipping stuff offshore—none of that comes into it.”
Suzuki says this is when the exchange turned nasty. “He said, ‘I don’t have to listen to this sanctimonious crap.’ I proceeded to call him a twerp.”
Mr. Trudeau obviously won't be talking about this but if you want to know how Athabasca bitumen impacts humanity's chances of averting climate catastrophe, a good place to start is this 2012 U. Vic. paper by Neil Swart and Andrew Weaver. I suppose, in Trudeau's mind, that's just more sanctimonious crap.
Hansen, Schellnhuber, Suzuki, and Weaver, there are plenty more voices backing them up. You can't reconcile their science with Mr. Trudeau's political bafflegab.
Schellnhuber is right. This is a moral issue. It's a deadly serious moral issue. Deadly as in lethal. Remember how we used to export asbestos to sketchy markets offshore even though we knew it would condemn people in the Third World to a horribly painful end? Well, we're doing something along those same lines with bitumen.
Climate change is already claiming innocent lives, predominantly in the poorest, most vulnerable corners of the world. They're dying from heatwaves, drought, flooding, severe storm events, sea level rise, crop failures and more. We've now got a new phenomenon, climate wars - wars that are triggered in whole or in part by the devastation of climate change. The civil war in Syria began as the result of famine caused by crop failure. And this is just the early onset stuff. There's a lot more coming their way. These people are collateral damage to our economic imperative.
I'm one of a growing number of British Columbians steadfastly opposed to the machinations of Harper-Trudeau, Klein-Notley, the Tar Sanders and their very sketchy dilbit pipeline operators with their horrible accident track record. They've shown us what these pipelines do to the territories they cross. Ask the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan. That, of course, was Enbridge. But what do you know about the current contender, Kinder-Morgan? Let's put it this way. If they were operating school buses instead of pipelines you would probably wind up home-schooling your kids.
And when it comes to an armada of lumbering, dilbit-laden supertankers navigating British Columbia's very challenging and dangerous coastal waters, there are many problems. The odds aren't on our side. We've had Coast Guard and RCN officers, merchant mariners, all advise Trudeau's National Energy Board that a supertanker calamity isn't a matter of if but when and how often.
It was March 24, 1989, nearly 30 years ago, that the Exxon Valdez came to grief in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Ten million gallons were spilled. But that wasn't dilbit. It was conventional crude oil, kid's stuff. That spill covered 1,300 miles of coastline, 11,000 square miles of ocean. More than a quarter of a century later the oil still isn't cleaned up.
On March 24, 2014, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the spill, NOAA scientists reported that some species seem to have recovered, with the sea otter the latest creature to return to pre-spill numbers. Scientists who have monitored the spill area for the last 25 years report that concern remains for one of two pods of local orca whales, with fears that one pod may eventually die out.[33] Federal scientists estimate that between 16,000 and 21,000 US gallons (61 to 79 m3) of oil remains on beaches in Prince William Sound and up to 450 miles (725 km) away. Some of the oil does not appear to have biodegraded at all. A USGS scientist who analyses the remaining oil along the coastline states that it remains among rocks and between tide marks. "The oil mixes with seawater and forms an emulsion...Left out, the surface crusts over but the inside still has the consistency of mayonnaise – or mousse."[34] Alaska state senator Berta Gardner is urging Alaskan politicians to demand that the US government force ExxonMobil to pay the final $92 million (£57 million) still owed from the court settlement. The major part of the money would be spent to finish cleaning up oiled beaches and attempting to restore the crippled herring population.
The Exxon Valdez spilled conventional crude oil and yet Trudeau and Notley want to put us to that very risk only with something vastly worse, dilbit, diluted-bitumen. Bitumen, a persistent sludge laced with acids, abrasives, toxins, heavy metals and carcinogens, that will head right for the sea bed where it will remain for decades contaminating the coastal waters, devastating the marine ecology. To borrow Hansen's words, "they just don't give a damn."
The Trudeau government put the lie to its vaunted "world class oil spill clean up" preparations when Dame Cathy's environment ministry was caught having approved an incredibly dangerous chemical, Corexit, for use in BC waters as an oil dispersant. We know a lot about Corexit from its use during the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills.
If you don't know about this chemical that our federal government has cleared for use in British Columbia's coastal waters, watch this.
If you've got the stomach for it and want to watch the entire Vice expose on Corexit, you can watch it here.
This is the reality of what Justin Trudeau wants to do to our coast, intends to do to our coast, tells us he is going to do to our coast.
Pushing ever more bitumen onto world markets is morally reprehensible. Worse yet, it's a betrayal of our own kids and grandkids. Shipping it in the most lethal possible form, dilbit, rather than requiring that it be refined on site, in Athabasca, to remove the most odious components - the acids, the abrasives, the heavy metals, the carcinogens, the pet coke, and the sludge - is equally reprehensible. To even imagine using Corexit in British Columbia's coastal waters is fiendishly reckless. And they're doing it all just to put a few extra bucks in Rachel Notley's and her Oil Patch patrons' pockets.
He's probably the most prominent climate scientist most North Americans have never heard of but you can get caught up by reading his Wiki entry here. He's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and when he speaks, serious people listen - closely. This is a man not given to hyperbole.
That introductory remark is intended to help you take the measure of his latest warning, this one concerning the global fossil fuel industry.
An “induced implosion” of the fossil fuel industry must take place for there to be any chance of avoiding dangerous global warming, according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists.
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an adviser to the German government and Pope Francis, said on Friday: “In the end it is a moral decision. Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.”
The Paris conference was attended by more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries. Schellnhuber told the delegates: “In order to stay below 2C (36F) [the internationally agreed limit for global warming], or even 3C, we need to have something really disruptive, which I would call an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20-30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous, climate change.”
“The promise of the fossil fuel age has never been fulfilled,” he said. “We still have 2bn people living on $2 (£1.30) a day – that is crazy.” He called for two strong messages to come from December’s UN summit: that “the age of carbon is over” and that “it is not the poor of the world who will pay for the transition”.
To achieve these outcomes, Schellnhuber said: “We need a global social movement and it is already happening.” He said the best analogy for the transition from dirty to clean energy was the abolition of slavery, which was fundamentally driven by ethical concerns.
Schellnhuber's remarks points to an ominous reality. The fossil fuel companies will not act voluntarily. We have to shut them down. They need to implode and it has to be induced - by us. Big Oil, Big Gas, King Coal - they all stand blocking the path to any hope of a viable future for our grandchildren and all the generations that may follow them.
This is an ethical and moral responsibility that all of us owe to the future, one that we cannot ignore. That goes for all the Petro-Pols in Parliament on both sides of the Commons. Schellnhuber is right. This issue is in many ways akin to the abolition of slavery and, right now, it's not just the Tories who are on the side of the slavers. The Liberals and the New Democrats are in on it too and, if you support them, I'm sorry to say this but so are you.
