The offensive in Ukraine by Russia, the major hydrocarbon producer on which the countries of Europe depend, has given new life to the old conservative discourse on ethical oil.
In the wake of the Ukraine invasion, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney took to social media to say it was not too late to revive the Keystone XL pipeline project abandoned by President Joe Biden upon his accession to power.
Alberta hydrocarbons can help reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas, also support Jason Kenney. Not only is it important to ensure Europe’s energy security, but more generally, it is necessary to replace the oil coming from countries ruled by potentates like Vladimir Putin. Oil from the tar sands is not dirty oil, as François Legault once said, it is clean oil because it is not the product of a dictatorship. This was the argument made under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in the early 2010s.
In tune with Jason Kenney, the candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada Pierre Poilievre has pledged to build new pipelines, a way, according to him, to weaken Putin. In the Conservative ranks, we are pleading for the LNG Quebec liquefied natural gas export project, rejected by the Bureau d’audiences sur l’environnement (BAPE), to rise from its ashes. Last week, Conservative MP Michael Chong introduced a motion in the Commons on measures to approve and build gas pipelines in the east of the country, because energy “is vital to the defense and security of Canada and from Europe “.
Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault responded by saying that the solution to the world’s energy problems is not to increase our dependence on fossil fuels, but to reduce it. He is absolutely right.
The invasion of Ukraine, and the upheavals it caused on the hydrocarbon markets, quickly overshadowed the latest alarming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warned, it It’s not even two weeks since humanity is in the process of annihilating its chances of having a viable future, while global warming attributable to fossil fuels has already caused irreversible impacts and is affecting the lives of “billions of Human being “. Climate change is accelerating and “any delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of global warming will cause us to miss the brief window of opportunity […] which closes quickly”. How easy it is for the Conservatives and the oil and gas industry to ignore this reality. They can no longer deny the existence of climate change, as they did just a few years ago. Today they are content to put their heads in the sand and defend, whenever the circumstances allow it, the insane idea that we must increase oil production in Canada.
Of course, the problem with these proposals for the construction of oil and gas pipelines is that these projects take time to complete. They therefore do not represent a solution to remedy the critical situation in which Ukraine and Europe find themselves at the present time.
This is one of the arguments put forward by Steven Guilbeault. But he himself will soon know his moment of truth. The Minister postponed for 40 days the decision he was to announce on March 6: will he give his approval or not to the project of the Norwegian Equinor, which aims to extract up to one billion barrels of oil from off Newfoundland and Labrador?
Liberals are divided on this. Some note that this project is much less polluting than the exploitation of the bituminous sands and that it constitutes the typical example of an efficient oil project which emits the least possible greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Newfoundland, whose public finances are in dire straits and which is led by a Liberal government, can hardly do without this source of revenue.
The fact remains that if the star environmentalist who has become a minister approved a project whose consequence is to increase the production of oil in the country, he would attract the wrath of his former comrades in arms and of a good part of the population. It is to public obloquy that one would dedicate it, it is to the torture of tar and feathers that one would like to subject it.