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Everyone needs a good energy villain to blame these days
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Chris Varcoe • Calgary Herald Alberta Premier Jason Kenney (left) and environmental activist David Suzuki (right). Photo by Gavin Young / Postmedia and Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press Article content
Everyone needs a good energy villain to blame these days.
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David Suzuki deals with the oil and gas industry.
The Government of Alberta has Suzuki. Environmental groups have Jason Kenney.
The Biden administration has OPEC. And the Keystone XL supporters have the US President.
The finger pointing season has arrived in an increasingly chaotic energy transition.
“There is a tremendous amount of political theater around energy policy right now,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University.
“It’s going to get worse.”
Let’s start with Suzuki in this hectic week of the energy blame game.
During a march organized by Extinction Rebellion in Victoria last weekend, the well-known environmentalist rebuked “resource-ism, a state of mind that sees everything around us as a potential opportunity for us.” “. . But what people like Jason Kenney and these people out there don’t understand is that nature doesn’t care about human boundaries. There is no Albertan air or Jason Kenney air. . . Net-zero by 2050, ha! What joke. Canada has never achieved a single goal that it promised to achieve.
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It is true that Canada has not honored its climate commitments, a point underlined by the publication on Thursday of a report by the country’s environment commissioner.
But in speaking to CHEK News, Suzuki went further.
“The next step after that is that pipelines are going to explode if our leaders don’t pay attention to what is going on.”
Suzuki later told the National Post that he did not support the bombing of energy pipelines, but added, “The violence is coming from the authorities.”
On Thursday, after the start of a public backlash, Suzuki apologized for his comments. In a statement, he said that “any suggestion that violence is inevitable is false.”
Talking about whoever blows up pipelines is divisive to say the least.
For the premier of Alberta, this is downright dangerous.
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“It’s like in a gangster movie, where they say, ‘Nice little pipeline that you have there, that would be terrible if anything happened to him.’ It’s totally irresponsible of David Suzuki, ”Kenney told reporters.
“It creates a context that some people could use to rationalize violence. “
Within 24 hours of Kenney’s departure on Suzuki, a coalition of environmental groups blasted the premier over his government’s remarks and comments about the public inquiry into the anti-Alberta energy campaigns.
The groups, which include Environmental Defense Canada and Greenpeace Canada, ask the province to apologize for statements on the government website that say the Allan investigation “confirms the existence of well-funded campaigns and a decade based on disinformation “.
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The investigation determined that environmental groups opposed to oil and gas development in the province received donations from outside Canada, at least $ 54 million over 16 years.
However, the final report noted that this is neither illegal nor inappropriate.
In fact, the investigation did not come to any conclusions “as to whether an organization disseminated false or misleading information.” Such a conclusion is not required by the mandate (of the investigation) ”.
Environmental groups say they are considering filing a libel suit and want an apology by November 30.
“We cannot allow this kind of misinformation to come from a leading forum,” said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada.
In response, Kenney’s office said it would “react vigorously” in court, if necessary.
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In other words, don’t hold your breath while waiting for an apology.
Steve Allan, UCP Anti-Alberta Energy Inquiry Commissioner. Photo by Jim Wells / Postmedia, File
Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced this week that it will release crude from the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to lower gasoline prices after the president failed to persuade OPEC + to increase oil production.
Gasoline prices in the United States have skyrocketed in recent months as travel resumes, averaging US $ 3.40 per gallon on Monday. This is a third more than during the same period in 2019.
“Much of the reason Americans face high gas prices is that oil-producing countries and big business haven’t increased the supply of oil quickly enough to meet demand,” he said. lamented Biden.
This comes from the same president who shredded the necessary permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day on the job.
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Now, Keystone XL would not have solved a short-term supply crisis, but would have shipped 830,000 barrels per day of western Canadian crude to U.S. refiners by 2023.
The project, in which the Kenney government invested $ 1.3 billion to start construction last year, is now the subject of a NAFTA claim by developers, Calgary-based TC Energy. .
TC Energy on Monday filed a formal request for arbitration under the investor-state dispute settlement provisions of NAFTA to recover damages related to the abandonment of the project.
Fuel analyst Dan McTeague, president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, said releasing oil from the reserve will not tame high gasoline prices, but it does strengthen “anti-fossil fuel policies in the world. ‘administration comes at a cost’ and projects such as Keystone XL are needed. .
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“What we are seeing is the reality that ends up crushing the narrative in this country and many other parts of the world that you can somehow do without fossil fuels,” said the former Liberal MP.
Miles of unused pipe for the Keystone XL pipeline in 2014. Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty Images files
Pointing the political finger at politics is not unusual, but it is more than mere signs of a polarized debate in an era of decarbonization.
Energy economist Peter Tertzakian calls this a time of “disorderly transition,” driven by the belief that we are moving rapidly away from fossil fuels and that the oil industry does not require more investment, but the lure of oil and natural gas remains strong.
Soaring natural gas prices in Europe and an energy crisis in Asia signal a bumpy road ahead and reinforce the need for consumers to access reliable and affordable supplies.
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“Instead of grappling with assumptions and figuring out how we’re going to move the transition forward, we’re just pointing fingers,” Tertzakian, deputy director of the ARC Energy Research Institute, said in an interview Thursday.
“So be careful, because it’s not necessarily true that people are going to point fingers at some of the root causes of what’s going on. They tend to look for easy scapegoats. Government is easy; the oil and gas industry is an easy scapegoat.
“So we are living in turbulent times. “
And, it seems, it’s a tumultuous time of blame in the search for a place to land.
Chris Varcoe is a columnist for the Calgary Herald.
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