Oil and COP26 | This is not a Newfie joke

At the 2021 Glasgow Climate Change Conference (COP26), Liberal Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Andrew Furey created unrest on both sides of the Atlantic by announcing to the world that the oil exploitation was at the heart of its ecological transition strategy. Without any irony, Furey went to COP26 to promote his oil industry. How to explain such buffoonery?

Furey argues that Newfoundland oil is so clean it would be a great option for consumers looking to reduce their carbon footprint. In other words, Newfoundland oil is like no other and its exceptionalism deserves international recognition.

This idea is best articulated in the economic stimulus package released by the Newfoundland government last May, The Big Reset, which reads that the carbon emissions per barrel of oil from the Hibernia platform are indeed low in a comparative perspective, three times lower than those of some Alberta operating sites. It is in this context that the province made a commitment in 2018 to double its oil production by 2030.

No justification

Of course, this posture of good conscience is in no way justified. First, Hibernia is only one of the province’s four oil platforms. The said recovery plan remains unclear on the carbon footprint of the Terra Nova and White Rose platforms and explicitly indicates that we ignore that of Hebron, which was responsible for around 40% of production in 2019 (the last year with available data).

Second, as environmental activists point out, there is no such thing as low-emission oil, since most emissions occur when oil is consumed (for example, as gasoline) rather than when it is produced, transported and produced. transformed.

Finally, carbon emissions represent only one dimension of the ongoing ecological crisis.

However, it should be noted that Newfoundland’s oil fields are located at the heart of a marine ecosystem characterized by extraordinary biodiversity recognized by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. In his work entitled Fossilized (UBC Press, 2020), the political scientist Angela Carter measures all the inadequacy of the environmental policies currently in place to protect this biodiversity, highlighting the risks associated in particular with oil spills, legal discharges of hydrocarbon waste, underwater noise, light pollution and flaring.

Federal dynamics

Obviously, Furey’s strange intervention in Glasgow can be explained less by the properties of Newfoundland oil than by a Canadian federal dynamic that doesom Newfoundland to playing the king’s fool. In Glasgow, as Justin Trudeau took on the role of urging his counterparts to do more to fight climate change, Furey inherited the dirty work of selling oil.

Yet the one who masters the real levers of the exploitation of Newfoundland’s offshore oil (which the Supreme Court of Canada had clarified in 1984 as falling under exclusive federal jurisdiction from a strictly legal standpoint) is Trudeau, not Furey. .

In the past two years alone, the Trudeau government has offered $ 320 million in assistance to the Newfoundland oil industry, in addition to exempting new exploratory drilling in the marine environment from the environmental assessment process that was in force before June 2020, and to authorize 40 additional boreholes. Clearly, Trudeau is weighing all his weight to achieve the goal of doubling the province’s oil production by 2030.

The dark side of the Trudeau government

In short, behind Furey’s diplomatic amateurism, a dark side of the Trudeau government is revealed. During the 2015 election campaign, on the heels of the Paris climate agreement that urged rich countries to immediately cut carbon emissions, the Liberals promised to gradually remove subsidies for fossil fuel production.

The least that can be said is that the promise has been brilliantly broken. According to a report from the UN environment program released last October (Production Gap 2021), Export Development Canada has, over the past five years, granted an average of more than $ 13 billion per year to the fossil fuel industry.

That there remain Canadians who are politically resigned to retort that the situation would be even worse under the Conservatives says a lot about the standards we are able to impose on those who govern us.