Fossil fuel wealth can’t be left in ground: Carr
Two federal cabinet ministers danced around the issue of approving new oil pipelines at this week’s climate conference in Ottawa, but both concede that Liberal policy decisions will upset some Canadians.
“We’re not going to make everybody happy,” Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr said Friday to the Canadian Climate Forum, packed with green-technology advocates, environmental economists, NGOs and climate scientists.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has made climate policy a central motif since taking office last November but is now trying to pivot to resource development amid slumping economic numbers.
The Liberals approved controversial permits for a contested hydroelectric dam on the Peace River in B.C., this summer and then conditionally approved a massive liquefied natural gas complex last month near Prince Rupert, B.C.
A decision on Kinder Morgan’s proposed expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline from Alberta to Burnaby, B.C., has been promised by mid-December amid speculation that the Liberals will approve the project.
Carr told the climate forum in Ottawa that some people cannot be convinced that fossil fuel development can continue.
“People say, ‘Leave the oil in the ground,’ they don’t want any development,” he said. “Our view is: we use the wealth of the old economy to finance the new energy economy.”
A day earlier, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna tiptoed her way through a response when the conference moderator asked her directly about “moving hydrocarbons from Alberta elsewhere.”
“People want to know they’re going to have a job,” McKenna replied. “A lot of people are just trying to get by every day, figuring out how they’re going to put food on the table.”
She then described herself “as much an economic minister as I am an environment minister.”
The Liberals have been grappling with the oil-pipeline conundrum ever since they took power in part by promising both to cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and get natural resources to international markets.
The policy paradox was personified Friday by Green party leader Elizabeth May, who delivered an address to the climate conference that simultaneously praised the Trudeau Liberals and Rachel Notley’s Alberta New Democrats while excoriating the new fossil-fuel infrastructure both governments advocate.
May said climate scientists have determined that to keep the planet from warming more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, mankind can put only 800 more gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. Currently operating coal, oil and gas supplies add up to more than 900 gigatons of carbon, she said.