Alberta’s UCP government may like to pretend it sees the world differently than Saudi Arabia but when it comes to their biggest industry, they speak the same language. Both have said the International Energy Agency’s predictions about the imminent arrival of peak oil demand are massively overblown and that consumption will remain strong for decades to come. That’s why the kingdom’s recent announcement to abandon plans to increase its maximum sustained production capacity should have gotten Danielle Smith’s attention. The explanation that Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman offered at a recent industry conference, meanwhile, should have stopped her cold.
“I think we postponed the investment simply because … we’re transitioning,” bin Salman said. “And transitioning means that even our oil company, which used to be an oil company, became a hydrocarbon company. Now it’s becoming an energy company.” They might not ring a bell at the top of a market, as the saying goes, but his statement is about as close as it’s going to get for fossil fuels.
So far, Smith has refused to reckon with this reality. In a world where global demand for oil is in the process of starting to roll over, she actually seems to think Alberta can double its production by 2050. As she told Tucker Carlson (during his brief stopover in Alberta en route to his date with Vladimir Putin in Moscow), “I think we should just double down and decide we’re going to double our oil and gas production because truly, where else does America want to get its oil from?”
She tried to play this card again during her recent visit to the United States, where she met with some of the most notoriously retrograde Republican senators in an apparent attempt to drum up business for Alberta. “Serious question for America,” she posed on Twitter. “Would you rather get your energy from Iran and Venezuela or your friends in Canada?” Here’s one serious answer: America currently imports almost no oil from Venezuela and has only registered imports from Iran in six months over the last 32 years. There is, in other words, almost nothing for Canada to replace here.
This wasn’t the only aspect of America’s energy system she doesn’t seem to understand. In a video posted to social media, Smith suggests the United States is actually behind Canada when it comes to climate policy, and we should avoid getting too far ahead. “I know that there are often proposals for what decarbonizing might look like on a number of fronts,” she said, “but I’m not seeing that America is moving as quick as Canada. That’s one thing I’m hoping we can bring in sync.”
That might have been true back in 2020 or so, but in the years since Donald Trump begrudgingly left office, the Americans have surged past Canada and most of the rest of the world. In 2021, the Biden administration announced a net-zero electricity target by 2035, the same one that Smith has said time and time again is simply impossible for her province to reach. And while Canada has committed to a 40 per cent reduction from 2005 levels in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the United States is aiming for 50 to 52 per cent.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was passed in 2022, is already doing the heavy lifting there. In a recent report, Macquarie Investments described the IRA as the “most ambitious piece of climate legislation in the history of the United States” and noted that it has already fundamentally rewritten the economics of renewable energy and triggered a massive surge of new investment in it. “In the 12 months after the IRA was passed, its provisions — including investment and production tax credits — resulted in more than $US110 billion in new investment in clean technology manufacturing alone,” it noted.
Maybe Smith’s biggest misunderstanding of all is her continued belief that net-zero targets are somehow compatible with growing Alberta’s oil production and exports. If the United States was to reach its net-zero climate targets by 2050, that would eliminate upwards of 10 million barrels per day of oil demand and require far, far fewer barrels of Canadian supply. Even under global energy analyst Wood Mackenzie’s less ambitious “base case,” U.S. demand will still drop by seven million barrels per day by 2050.
All of this isn’t just writing on the wall. It’s a message painted in bright red graffiti that says the world is going in a different direction. After all, if Saudi Arabia — a petro-dictatorship with immediate access to tidewater and some of the cheapest and most easily accessible oil on Earth — isn’t trying to grow its production, what makes Smith think Alberta has any business trying?
Then again, this is the same person who claims hydrogen is going to be the passenger vehicle fuel of the future right as Shell is closing all its pumping stations in California. When it comes to climate and energy, she seems determined to serve as a reverse bellwether, pointing her province away from where things are actually headed. In time, that will be obvious to all but the most blinkered partisans. By then, though, the race to reach net zero will be lost. Maybe that’s been her goal all along.
The carbon tax keeps getting deader and deader
Back in October, I wrote that Justin Trudeau’s decision to create exemptions for his carbon tax marked the beginning of its eventual end. Well, the first week of the Alberta NDP leadership race just offered another data point in support of that thesis. Former justice minister Kathleen Ganley was first out of the gate, but it was Rakhi Pancholi — who, full disclosure, I support — making the real waves with her proposal to cut the party’s losses on the consumer portion of the carbon tax and find a better way to reduce emissions.
This is a pretty bold departure from Alberta NDP orthodoxy, given Rachel Notley’s government introduced a carbon tax as part of its Climate Leadership Plan — one that formed the blueprint for the federal government’s Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. What’s even more striking is that Ganley, who has served in Opposition as the Alberta NDP’s energy critic, wasn’t interested in defending her former government’s position. As if to put an exclamation mark on all this, former deputy premier Sarah Hoffman also declined to criticize Pancholi’s idea. The consumer portion of the carbon tax, she said, is “dead in the water.”
Well, then.
Some people have misunderstood this idea as being opposed to the carbon tax. Instead, it’s a realization that it’s now a dying political letter, one that costs enormous amounts of political capital to defend and debate. That distracts from other potential ways to reduce emissions, whether it’s through regulations or tax incentives like the ones in the Inflation Reduction Act. The goal, remember, is to reduce emissions, not impose a specific instrument that achieves that. That clearly won’t happen unless and until the NDP wins another provincial election. And with a growing majority of the public openly hostile towards the consumer carbon tax, it’s probably time to abandon that hill for some higher political ground.
NDP versus NDP
Speaking of winning elections, New Democrats in Western Canada must sometimes feel like their federal cousins are actively trying to prevent that. The latest example is a private member’s bill from Charlie Angus that aims to treat oil and gas advertisers like cigarette companies, and explicitly draws its inspiration from the 1997 Tobacco Act. "They're shifting their propaganda with false claims of producing cleaner products, claiming they can be part of the climate solution," Angus told reporters this week. "That's like Benson & Hedges telling you that they can help end lung cancer."
The metaphor is more wobbly than folks like Angus would like to admit, not least because there isn’t — yet! — a way for most people to truly “quit” oil and gas. Yes, there are technologies and solutions that can help us reduce our carbon footprint, and governments can and should be helping people deploy those in their own lives. But take it from someone who needed eight attempts to finally quit smoking: the two things just aren’t the same.
We already have legislation that prevents companies from peddling falsehoods, and the Competition Bureau of Canada is actually investigating claims made by the Pathways Alliance, a group of large oilsands companies that enjoys telling Canadians how hard they’re working on climate change solutions without actually doing much in the way of applying them. More to the point, it’s not at all clear how their ads are going to dissuade people from doing things like buying an electric vehicle or taking public transit more frequently.
But the real problem here is the damage this bill does to the electoral fortunes of the provincial parties that can actually move the needle on this issue. Canada’s ability to make meaningful progress on climate change depends on electing progressive governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and this bill — along with the entirely predictable weaponization of its language about prison terms and million-dollar fines — gets in the way of that.
Nagwan Al-Guneid and Aleana Young, the NDP energy critics for Alberta and Saskatchewan, are trying to mitigate some of the damage here. "It is not helpful to pick fights that just polarize people and get in the way of the real solutions we need," they said in a joint statement. "Energy companies are important job creators in Alberta and Saskatchewan and shouldn't be singled out by advertising restrictions. We already have legislation around false advertising, and we are more interested in advancing ideas that can actually help people."
If the federal NDP is interested in winning an election at some point, it would do well to more closely study the version of its politics being practised in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Those provincial parties have decided to trade grand gestures and ideological virtue signalling for pragmatic popularism, and it’s put them either in government or close to it. In British Columbia’s case, it has them poised to deliver the biggest electoral victory in NDP history.
There’s a lesson in that, if the federal NDP wants to learn it. If not, it might be time for its provincial cousins to cut the formal ties that bind them together — and keep getting used by provincial conservatives to choke off their supply of political oxygen.
This week in schadenfreude
At long last, Michael Mann has some measure of revenge. It’s very much of the cold variety for the University of Pennsylvania climate scientist given that it happened more than a decade after a pair of conservative American writers attacked his reputation and even compared him to a molester. But now, with a $1-million judgment against Mark Steyn and an additional $1,000 from Rand Simberg (who, of course, worked for a libertarian think tank at the time), he gets the last laugh at their considerable expense. "It feels great," Mann said last week after the six-person jury delivered its verdict. "It's a good day for us, it's a good day for science."
It’s a bad day for Steyn, the Canadian polemicist who has written for most of the western world’s biggest conservative outlets, including the National Post. For some reason — arrogance, perhaps — he decided to represent himself in court, a decision that appears to have cost him far more than any lawyer might.
This isn’t the first time a climate scientist has gotten justice in the courts from a National Post writer. Back in 2015, future BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver won $50,000 in his defamation suit against Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, Kevin Libin and Gordon Fisher. As the judge said in their decision, the defendants “have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts” and were “more interested in espousing a particular view than assessing the accuracy of the facts."
Gee, you don’t say.
Speaking of the facts…
As someone who appreciates the role that good journalism plays in upholding our democratic foundations, I reflexively go to bat whenever anyone suggests it doesn’t have value or can be taken for granted. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the failures that can happen on my side of the fence here. And with all due respect and apologies to the folks who have been laid off by Bell Media, the remaining folks at CTV need to get their act together.
Last week, in the wake of the Alberta government’s decision to announce a suite of policies aimed at the province’s trans community, a pro-life organization decided to see if they could sell a push poll to the media. Journalists are supposed to be trained to sniff this sort of stuff out but for some reason, CTV News Calgary decided to treat it like a legitimate poll and run a story on it — and even quote the person who organized it.
The poll, which was supposedly conducted by a firm called “National Public Research Canada,” drew the attention of Prime Contact, which has a similarly named subsidiary called Canadian National Public Research. “It is our opinion that CTV has irresponsibly published findings from a highly dubious source, identified as ‘National Public Research Canada,’ a ‘company’ with absolutely no ties to our organization, Canadian National Public Research,” Prime Contact’s James Collins said in a statement.
More to the point, he said, “the poll in question blatantly lacks the methodological rigour and transparency that are hallmarks of our decade-long commitment to excellence in research. The audacity of CTV to circulate such a questionable poll under the guise of legitimate research is not only disappointing, but also deeply concerning.”
CTV Calgary eventually updated and amended their story, as the Progress Report detailed in a good piece on the incident.
But amazingly, this wasn’t CTV Calgary’s only journalistic flop of the week. Just a few days later in its coverage of a poorly-attended “rally” to recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek, its coverage failed to properly contextualize what was behind the event. The recall, after all, is numerically impossible. As Global Calgary’s far superior story noted, the threshold a recall needs to reach is “around 64,000 signatures per week, or a signature from every household.”
It’s not actually about recalling Mayor Gondek, though. Instead, it’s about generating a fresh list of motivated opponents and disgruntled citizens, which can then be mined for donations and volunteer hours. And bizarrely, the CTV coverage tries to help on that front. “PLEASE NOTE,” it says at the end of the piece. “You cannot sign the recall petition online, and must do so in person.” Bizarrely, it includes (and concludes with) the email address of the petition organizer.
This is, again, borderline professional malpractice. Right now, more than ever, journalists need to be building a case for their relevance. Pandering to obvious conservative political agendas is no better than pandering to obvious progressive ones. In both cases, they should be sidelined in favour of the facts.
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