Former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed is predicting a "war" between the federal government and Alberta over pollution caused by the growing oil sands industry. He says the conflict could be a threat to national unity that will likely escalate to the Supreme Court of Canada as Alberta fights for the right of the province to develop its natural resources as it sees fit.
It doesn't get more dramatic than that.
Lougheed has a history of being an outspoken critic of provincial and federal politics since leaving office in 1985. He's also let his own concern about the oil sands be known, calling the pace of development "haphazard" and a threat to the environment.
Albertans themselves will hold the key to the conflict. If they make the greening of the oil sands a top political issue, the provincial government will likely be forced to negotiate ways to address this with the feds. Greenhouse gas emissions can start to be brought under control, water diversions can be minimized, and the province can avoid turning nearly a quarter of it's landspace into an open pit oil mine. If they choose to hang their hat on their "right" to develop the oil sands "as they see fit", then Canadian greenhouse emissions will spiral, entire ecosystems will be lost, and the country will be locked in a political turf war that will last decades.
In related news, Imperial Oil announced first half net income of $1.49 billion, up from $1.43 billion for the first half of 2006.
One of the biggest criticisms of the Conservatives' climate change plan is that it relies on "intensity based reductions" in greenhouse gases. In the real world, this means that industry has to use less energy for every unit (ex. one barrel of oil, one car, one tonne of steel etc) it produces. Emissions will go down, but only if production doesn't go up by too much.
As it turns out, we have already been lowering our emissions intensity for decades, and the result has been spiraling greenhouse gases and unchecked global warming.
The latest UN report on climate change was released today, and in the intro of the main report is this handy little factoid:
The effect....of the decrease in global energy intensity (-33%) during 1970 to 2004 has been smaller than the combined effect of global income growth (77 %) and global population growth (69%); both drivers of increasing energy-related CO2 emissions.
In a little over three decades, overall energy intensity has been reduced by 1/3rd. At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed by 70% - thanks to more people, using a greater total amount of energy, to buy more stuff.
Next to wages, energy costs are one of the biggest liabilities facing many industries. Business people are smart leaders who understand this fact, and that each dollar saved in costs is another dollar in their pockets as profit. So the real reason why industry is so quick to say yes to intensity targets is because they are already using them.
What Environment Minister John Baird and his Conservatives have done is waste tax payers' dollars creating a climate change plan that tells Canada's oil sands industry to keep doing exactly what it is already doing. On top of that, if energy intensity has already decreased 33% in recent decades, what makes Baird think that making a "mandatory" decrease of 26% by 2015 is going to solve global warming, particularly when oil sands production is going to triple by that same year?
It's about the same as someone spending their way out of debt, or eating their way out of obesity.
Canada's oil producers will gladly accept the Conservative's emissions targets, pocket the efficiency gains as increased profits, and leave Canada saddled with more greenhouse gases.
A feisty 85 year old grandmother from Colorado is finding herself in the middle of a David vs. Goliath media battle with oil sands giant Syncrude regarding a website she built to demonstrate the environmental impacts of the company's operations.
Last summer, Liz Moore took a tour of Syncrude's operations during which she photographed various standard sights such as big trucks, oily sand and bison grazing on reclaimed land. However, after seeing the devastation caused by oil sands extraction first hand, she became convinced that Americans needed to see what their thirst for oil was doing to the Canadian environment. Syncrude disagreed, and in April they responded with legal action stating that they owned the photos that Ms. Moore took and that she must be immediately remove them from her website. Ms. Moore complied.
Syncrude was quick to defend its actions, stating that Ms. Moore had signed a waiver that gave the company ownership over any photos she took. That's nice and tidy from the legal standpoint, but like most legal technicalities it completely misses the point. First of all, Syncrude's "private operations" are one of the most destructive industrial processes in the world, and affect people well beyond the borders of their sights. Impacts of Alberta's oil sands include:
- 359 million litres of water diversions authorized from the Athabasca River - twice the volume used by the city of Calgary in an single year.
- the return of less than 10% of that volume to the river. The rest remains contaminated and is stored in vast tailing ponds which already total 50 square kilometers in area.
- massive increases in rare cancers among the Fort Chipewyan First Nations near Syncrude's operations.
- greenhouse gas emissions that are currently the second highest in Canada.
- Syncrude is the 6th largest emitting company in Canada.
- oil production is expected to triple by 2015.
The second point is that the folks at Syncrude are acting like a bunch of wankers by thinking that they are actually accomplishing anything by launching legal action against senior citizens. To prove it, here's my own photo montage showing what's going on in Alberta's oil patch and its affects on Canadians and the environment.
Globe and Mail link courtesy of DeSmogBlog
A special committee of the House of Commons will table a report telling the Conservatives to end of federal tax breaks to oil sands development and implement hard caps on the sectors greenhouse gas emissions.
The opposition dominated natural resources committee drafted the report calling for an end to the $1.4 billion in tax subsidies that go to the oil industry and asserts that for every dollar the government invests in the oil sands, the private sector kicks in just $1.18 - a ratio the committee says should be roughly 3:1 on the side of private investment.
However, the report was delayed in being released, and now that MPs are to begin their two week spring break it risks coming too late. The Conservatives will soon be announcing their emission reduction target for the sector, which is expected to be an intensity based target. This means that reduction targets are based on per unit production, not overall pollution. With Canada's rapidly expanding oil production, this will likely mean huge increases in greenhouse gases.
See this handy equation for further explanation of intensity based targets.
Regardless of the delay, the report will add further fuel to this ongoing fire. Most recently before these announcements we saw the Pembina Institute report that stated the oil sands could be carbon neutral by 2012 with a cost increase of just $1 per barrel.
Here's a thought. If you need $1.4 billion dollars to get a business off the ground, maybe you're the wrong businessman for the job.