Still waiting for credible alternative

Neil Young is probably no more, and no less, a moral coward than the next person. But he is a moral coward.

That’s because — like most of the rest of us — he declines to face the logical consequences of his beliefs. He fails to extend. The failure to extend is endemic in the broadening debate about sources of energy, their cost and follow-on effects. It reduces this debate, for the most part, to hyperbolic babble, in which combatants trade volleys like medieval theologians debating whether angels have mass.

Does Young have the right to use his celebrity to stick it to Big Oil? Clearly he does. As Stephen Maher of Postmedia News has pointed out, this is a poet’s classic role — to act as goad, inciter and rabble-rouser. Artists are like Shakespearean court jesters. They get away with saying things no one else will or can, and they should. But let us, for a moment, talk turkey about the politics of oil, and energy, and the related moral choices that we each make.

As many have noted previously, fossil fuels are not going away, in our lifetime. The International Energy Agency predicted in its World Energy Outlook 2013 that global energy demand will grow by a third between now and 2035, with emerging economies accounting for 90 per cent of net new demand. China, India, Brazil and the Middle East are expected to be the loci of this growth. Though fossil fuels are projected to over time comprise a lessening share of the world’s total energy supply — from more than 80 per cent to about 75 per cent by 2035 — they will remain dominant in the mix. And this assumes rapid growth in electricity generation from renewables.

Of course, demand for energy is a function of economic growth. We know from experience — 2009, 2001, 1991, 1987 — that economic forecasting is a dark art, not a science. That being said, we can accept, via educated guesswork and the record of history, that the 173 billion barrels of oil embedded in the oilsands will be extracted. We can also accept that such extraction is on balance, despite environmental negatives that must be mitigated, a social good.

That’s because, to perhaps state the obvious, energy and the work it allows us to do underpin our standard of living — not just in Canada but everywhere. More concretely, the oilsands create demand for labour and skills, which fuels private prosperity and funds public services. The numbers, as I have written before, are eye-popping; $100 billion invested in the past decade, with another $364 billion projected over the next two decades — with a sizable chunk of that spinning out, eventually, into the public purse.

This bears repeating: The Conference Board of Canada estimates the federal government’s take from the oilsands, between now and 2035, is just over $45 billion, from a total tax spinoff of $80 billion. That’s setting aside all the other economic benefits. It’s pure public money invested in government programs. To put this in context, total federal health spending transfers in 2011-2012 amounted to about $27 billion. So, if you follow the back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, two decades of oilsands investment equals nearly two years of total federal spending on health care, at 2012 rates.

There is just one existing source of energy that has the potential to shoulder fossil fuels aside in a massive way, while dramatically slashing carbon emissions, and that is nuclear. But nuclear power is mired in a symbolic political war all its own, scarcely less toxic than the one around oil. Thorium-based nuclear power could change all that. It hasn’t yet.

Thus, the question for Neil Young, perhaps best addressed to his publicist: If the oilsands are shuttered and Fort McMurray, Alta., becomes a ghost town, what then? How does he provide for revenue to replace what is lost? Will it come, say, from income tax hikes? Or by seizing the assets of the wealthiest? Perhaps the shortfall could be made up via carbon tax? Or a surcharge on gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks?

But we’ve been down that road. It was called the Green Shift. It was advanced in 2008 by a federal Liberal leader named Stephane Dion, who rapidly became a former federal Liberal leader. Dion’s plan was revenue neutral — all tax increases related to carbon emissions, in other words, were to be offset by tax reductions elsewhere. That episode showed the extent to which individual Canadians, when we get beyond the level of flicking an upraised Bick lighter at an outdoor concert, are prepared to sacrifice for the cause of mitigating global climate change.

We aren’t — at least we weren’t in 2008, and probably aren’t yet — because the cost-benefit of moving away from fossil fuels has not yet been made explicit, to the point where it moves individual decisions in a massive way, despite some evident sacrifices. It really is that simple.

It is not nice, for us collectively, to think of ourselves in this way. But it is the truth.