CONTRADICTION AT THE CORE OF CANADA’S ENERGY POLICY
Promised boost in production at odds with Copenhagen
Diplomacy is about give and take, not feeling good. Its morality is based at least as much on the expected outcome as it is on the process to get there. Chasing an ideal in world affairs is typically fruitless and costly. Adam Chapnick
It’s now a fairly safe bet that by the October 2015 federal election, it will be fairly obvious that there has been an elaborate shell game going on involving Alberta’s oilsands, a bewildering array of pipeline megaprojects, and the postKyoto climate commitments Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to keep under something called the Copenhagen Accord. It should not come as a surprise if by voting day, it will have occurred to quite a few Canadians that all along, in all these matters, they have been taken for chumps.
All it’s going to take is a resort to the most straightforward kind of calculations and it will be impossible to avoid the conclusion that certain formulations of “national interest” that we have hectored about over the past several years have never really added up. People don’t like the feeling that they have been lied to.
In his single-minded devotion to realizing the grand vision he revealed in his 2006 declaration in London, that Canada’s destiny was to become an “energy superpower” among the G8 nations, Harper is going to have an exceedingly difficult time explaining away the appearance that he has been rather less than truthful in even the general outline of things.
The stuff that just doesn’t add up, which is also the stuff that a team of scientists from a variety of disciplines has addressed in a paper published only this week in the prestigious British journal Nature, involves a central contradiction at the core of Canada’s energy policy (to the extent that there is such a thing) under Harper’ s guidance and direction.
An irresistible force meeting an unmovable object is not the kind of weirdness that can be easily concealed in the ordinary course of partisan apologetics, adversary-rubbishing and the usual punditaided polemics that the current crop of Conservatives and their oil-industry friends have come to rely upon. And just such a contradiction is at the heart of the Conservatives’ energy policies.
On the one hand, Harper made a promise to Canadians and to the rest of the world in his 2010 commitments under the Copenhagen Accord that by 2020, Canada’s economywide greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 17 per cent below 2005 levels. But that promise flies in the face of the prime minister’s obviously more heartfelt commitment to breaking the American-market monopoly on Canada’s oil production (well, monopsony, to be perfectly accurate) to allow as much as a tripling of Alberta’s oilsands production by 2020.
Under that latter scenario, Harper’s Copenhagen promise cannot be kept, period. It’s almost certainly impossible even now, with oilsands production having already roughly doubled from 2005 levels to about two million barrels a day. The oil and gas sector is the largest contributor to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the rise in those emissions is mostly
The oil and gas sector is the largest contributor to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the rise in those emissions is mostly attributable to the expansion of Alberta’s oilsands.
attributable to the expansion of Alberta’s oilsands.
The government of Canada expects its citizens to speak about Albertan bitumen as though it were a precious national asset, the wholesale unprocessed export of which is to be understood, strangely, as the highest of civic virtues. In the United States, however, the practice of exporting crude oil is considered a vice, and it has been illegal to send unrefined product out of the country ever since the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
It is for this reason that a special U.S. Commerce Department permit was required last month to clear the way for a cargo of Canadian crude oil to be re-exported out of the Texas Gulf coast via the terminus of the Seaway line at Freeport. Bound for Spain and the refineries of the conglomerate Repsol, the shipment consisted of 600,000 barrels of the heavy blend known as Western Canadian Select. This marks the first time that Canadian crude has made it out to world markets via the Texas Gulf coast. This is a very big deal.
Just how Albertan crude got to Freeport in the absence of the Keystone XL pipeline, the completion of which we’ve all been told would be necessary to the purpose of getting Alberta’s crude to global customers, appears to involve mainly a simple reconfiguration of an Enbridge-partnered pipeline system from the bottleneck of Cushing, Okla., to Freeport, Texas, via the JV Seaway pipeline.
To begin with, what this means is that among the many and various sympathetic compound adjectives that all decent and patriotic Canadians are expected to employ in deferential references to Alberta’s oilsands — fairly traded, shade-grown, grassfed, gluten-free, whatever — “land-locked” must now be jettisoned from the lexicon.
It’s also going to become increasingly difficult to use the term “necessary infrastructure” to apply to Enbridge’s recently approved but politically toxic Northern Gateway pipeline from Bruderheim, Alta., to Kitimat on the British Columbia Coast, or to the much-delayed Keystone XL pipeline itself, or to Enbridge’s planned Line 9 reversal, or to the Energy East pipeline project to Saint John, N.B. “Necessary” is a term rendered redundant by recent developments, unless the term is meant only to mean “necessary” to break our promise at Copenhagen.
“A key step is a moratorium on new oilsands development and transportation projects until better processes and policies are in place,” the scientists who co-authored this week’s paper in Nature modestly assert. “Reform is needed now: decisions made in North America will reverberate internationally, as plans for the development of similar unconventional reserves are considered worldwide.”
This has been absurdly obvious all along, and it is heartening to see it spelled out so clearly and unambiguously. Nothing has been allowed to restrain the expansion of Alberta’s oilsands, and now, all the conventional sources of international capital have been tapped out. This is why the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has had to be courted so passionately. Canada’s labour supply has been all but tapped out. This is why the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has been exploited as a conduit to bring 85,000 indentured labourers into Alberta.
It has been a jolly escapade, but by next October, you can count on quite a few voters remembering that certain Conservative politicians in faraway Ottawa took everyone for a bit of a ride, confident that they could get away with breaking promises they never intended to keep in the first place.
It’s going to be very awkward.