Spill focuses fresh attention on fossil fuel folly
Recent poll shows majority of public expects to move to cleaner energy
At first glance, last week’s massive oil spill into the North Saskatchewan River might seem to be the worst possible news for anybody trying to tie Saskatchewan’s longterm economic future to expanded fossil fuel extraction. And there are certainly few more damning combinations of facts for anybody tasked with convincing the public that pipelines are anything but a serious risk to human and environmental well-being.
The spill originated from a major operator’s pipeline, sending large quantities of oil into a vital waterway. Both the operator’s detection systems and its initial cleanup efforts fell far short of expectations, resulting in highly visible environmental damage and an extended loss of drinking water for a large number of people and their communities. And all of this is taking place under the watch of a provincial regulator that is being slashed by an industry-sponsored government in favour of self-reporting.
Rather than trying to deal meaningfully with how the spill affects the public interest, Brad Wall’s response was primarily to tell us not to let the materialization of a near-worst-case scenario intrude on any assessment of the risks of pipelines. As Frankenstein’s monster was let loose along the shores of the North Saskatchewan, Wall’s reaction was to implore people not to let the imminent danger affect their perception of reanimation technology. But as starkly as the North Saskatchewan River spill highlights the immediate dangers of mixing oil and water supplies, we shouldn’t expect that the longer-term future of the oil industry will be meaningfully altered by a single incident.
More severe spills elsewhere caused by tanker shipping and offshore drilling have not led to any lasting decline in the activities that produced them. And it’s doubtful a single spill (however damaging to the people and areas affected) will serve as a turning point if people are satisfied with a stagnant, carbon-based economy.
As a result, the more important news for the fossil fuel sector may be this: rather than seeing a carbon economy as a viable longterm plan, the Canadian public expects to see a dramatic shift away from it.
This week, Abacus Data offered a look at polling results on Canada’s future over a 20-year time span. And its noteworthy findings include the fact that over the next two decades, a majority of respondents expect wind and solar power to be stored for future use, electric cars to outnumber cars running on gasoline and carbon emissions to decline sharply both in Canada and around the globe.
The last of those points may be the most remarkable. After all, Canada’s federal governments have regularly either loudly proclaimed unambitious emission reduction targets without bothering to develop plans to meet them, or labelled as traitors anybody who so much as hinted at the concept of shifting toward cleaner energy.
Yet it appears the Canadian public is far ahead of our political class in expecting that we’ll transition away from a fossil fuel-dependent economy.
To be sure, the carbon energy industry and its political spokesflacks will do everything possible to pitch inertia as being more desirable than progress — including dismissing public concerns about transportation safety and other health and environmental risks, as well as trying to pretend there is no alternative.
But if there’s sufficient public demand to build future infrastructure around a growing supply of cleaner options, then any attempt to paper over the problems with fossil fuels may well prove irrelevant. And there’s little reason for either government or industry to stake their future on what Canadians see as the technologies of the past.