Alberta reacts

April 22, 2019
“Albertans need to look forward and begin to plan, in earnest, for a future where our oil and gas are not in demand,” wrote Joshua Buck, Alberta climate program manager for Environmental Defense, in the Jan. 17 Calgary Herald.

“Albertans need to look forward and begin to plan, in earnest, for a future where our oil and gas are not in demand,” wrote Joshua Buck, Alberta climate program manager for Environmental Defense, in the Jan. 17 Calgary Herald. He was responding to a Dec. 18, 2018, column in the same newspaper by radio commentator Rob Breakenridge, who wrote, “If, a year from now, Alberta has a government that has abandoned carbon pricing, a population that is even more supportive of building pipelines, and continued increases in oil-by-rail, then groups like Environmental Defense will only have themselves to blame. This is their legacy.”

Albertans have refuted Buck and made Breakenridge look prophetic. In provincial elections Apr. 16, they voted for prosperity rather than Buck’s insistence that projections for increasing oil demand represent “a future that cannot come to pass—not if we want glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, fewer forest fires, and a safe future for our children.”

Carbon price reversals

The United Conservative Party led by Jason Kenney won at least 60 of 87 contested legislative seats, relegating the National Democratic Party, led by incumbent Premier Rachel Notley, to opposition status. Kenney has promised his government will scrap the carbon tax unveiled by its predecessor months after Notley’s election in 2015.

Alberta will not be the first Canadian province to put a price on emissions of carbon dioxide only to rescind it later under political pressure. Ontario supplemented its already aggressive support for renewable energy in 2016 with a cap-and-trade scheme designed to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The energy manipulations boosted electricity prices to levels that hurt individual consumers and businesses. And in elections last June, the Ontario Liberal Party government of Premier Kathleen Wynne was defeated so soundly by the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Doug Ford, that it lost official party status. Ford scrapped the cap-and-trade scheme and joined Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe in a legal challenge to the federal government’s “backstop” carbon pricing for provinces deemed not to be punishing energy consumers sufficiently. Kenney’s election bodes ill for the federal program and possibly for prospects of its champion, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in elections due next October.

Notley’s fate differs from Wynne’s. The former Ontario premier embraced the absolutism of groups like Environmental Defense. Notley sought middle ground. She imposed a carbon tax and a cap on greenhouse gases from oil sands operations hoping to win federal support for new pipelines to tidewater. The bargain failed. With pipelines stymied in every direction and transportation congested, prices of blended bitumen and synthetic crude from Alberta fall painfully below competitive crudes. Investment in Alberta’s oil industry has plummeted. Most major oil companies have left the province. The economy teeters. Inevitably, voters have replaced Notley with someone less inclined to seek compromise with Liberal prime ministers and uncompromising environmental groups.

With commendable candor in his January article, Buck explained Environmental Defense’s undiscriminating opposition to new pipelines: “Pipelines allow for the growth of the oil industry, which leads to increased carbon emissions.” The Apr. 16 vote makes clear that a strong majority of Alberta voters support pipeline construction, want the oil industry to grow, and doubt that Planet Earth faces doom by climate change. They thus align themselves with political reactions against climate extremism elsewhere, such as “yellow jacket” protests in France and the political party that finished as a surprisingly strong runner-up in Finland’s Apr. 14 parliamentary elections after campaigning against aggressive climate remediation.

Doomsayers doomed

Breakenridge was right. By demanding sacrifice as questionable precaution against worst-case climate outcomes, the doomsayers doom their own agenda. Attached to socialist thrusts like the Green New Deal in the US, moreover, that agenda loses further ground by looking increasingly like a stratagem for the expansion of government. Most voters dislike power plays.

Regrettably unanswered remains the question whether politics, now swaying between extremes, can find a practicable approach to a real—though not apocalyptic—problem.