Your Government Will Sit By as Its Petro-Pals Do In Your Grandkids.

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!

Is It Time We Chaperoned Our Politicians

Where Alberta Fossil Fuelers Go to Shop

Yes, Christy, this is about you - and the rest.

Christy Clark, Canada's  Queen of Cash has been known to be a grateful recipient of campaign contributions from those friendly funsters known as the Calgary Petroleum Club but, of course, that doesn't mean that her government's acceptance of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion had anything to do with cheque-stuffed envelopes.  Still, the skeptical might just wonder.

Hell, even the New York Times has taken notice of Grifty Clark and splashed her around on the pages of The Grey Lady.

It's fair to say that Canada is a nation of petro-pols. Our House of Commons is chock full of them save, perhaps, for that little lady way over there in the corner. And provincial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia are also sinking under the weight of their own petro-pols.

It's timely help then from a friendly Deutscher,  Arne Jungjohann, an energy analyst from Germany.  His message - if Canada wants to make progress on climate change, if Canada's governments are remotely serious about that, they have to get fossil fuel money out of politics (and, I might add, government subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry).

There are no two ways about it, according to German political scientist Arne Jungjohann: if you want to make meaningful progress on climate change, you have to get big money out of politics.

“Then you get fossil fuel money out of politics,” said the author and energy analyst. “It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create this stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people.”

Hold on a minute, Arnie. Fossil energy is already a non-partisan issue. Did you ever hear of the industry's latest Alberta champion, Rachel Notley? The Tories are in the fossil fuelers' bag.  So too is environmental hypocrite extraordinaire and Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This is already a non-partisan issue and that is the problem. 

Jungjohann offered “lessons" from the German clean energy story, also called the Energiewende. It’s the German word for the country’s clean energy transition, and Jungjohann co-wrote a book about it: Energy Democracy — Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables.

If Canada has anything to learn from Germany's Energiewende, he said, it's that corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan. He called it the "democratization" of clean energy.

What works in Germany won't work in Canada. At the federal and the provincial level our fossil energy corruption is now institutionalized, embedded.

We Have to Take Down the Fossil Fuel Industry. That Includes Our Own.

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.