Dinner meetings pushed warming initiative

Alberta’s new climate change policy is partly rooted in a series of low-profile dinner meetings that took place well before the election of Premier Rachel Notley and her fellow New Democrats.

In 2014, the province’s environmental reputation was creating increasing resistance to its energy products and the Progressive Conservative government of the day, led by Jim Prentice, had made it clear that something had to happen, said Chris Severson-Baker of the Pembina Institute.

“He actually started talking about climate change in a different way,” said Severson-Baker of the clean energy think-tank. Prentice “opened a space.” “It started to create a sense that maybe we could agree on some things, or at least understand what would work and what would not work.”

People on different sides of the fence started getting together for dinner. Environmentalists behind some of the loudest anti-oilsands campaigns met with executives behind some of the largest oilsands expansions, just to talk.

“We weren’t even speaking the same language,” recalled Cenovus spokesman Brett Harris.

“You’ve got to learn to speak the same language. It’s a matter of moving from that environment of conflict to that of cooperation.”

“It was testy,” Severson-Baker said. “There were a lot of things that pushed each others’ buttons ... (but) the result of them was that people started to understand each other’s point of view.”

The talks got more intense when the New Democrats came to power last spring with a promise to address climate change.

Dinners evolved into meetings between technical experts. Issues were thrashed out.

The hardest topic was emission levels.

“The whole notion that emissions would rise before they peaked was really hard for (environmental groups),” Severson Baker said.

Industry fought any sort of emissions cap, fearing that would strand projects already under construction.

“(Environmentalists) recognized that it’s going to be very, very hard for the government of Alberta to put in place policies that would actually result in projects that are under construction today never going into production,” Severson-Baker said.