Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun
– Pink Floyd, High Hopes
“I love discordancy. It makes people ill at ease and wakes up a part of their brain that’s normally asleep.” – John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten vocalist for Public Image Ltd. and ex-Sex Pistols
Yes, the ‘Division Bell” rang long ago, and yes, we have discordancy. We have almost nothing but discordancy. What to make of it?
As usual, it all depends on which particular plane of reference. Local? City-wide? Province-wide? Country-wide? International? There seems to be chaos and animosity and gridlock at all of them.
All are important but often progress at the lower levels requires clarity or vision or reaction to what’s happening at the higher ones. If the particular ailments, or successes, at the local or provincial level are determined by a vision much higher up the chain, then that is where one would hope the focus of attention is.
That observation is admittedly about as obvious as they come, and it’s obvious the general population knows that as well. Over the past year, Canadians from coast to coast to coast, gave kind of a collective dry-heave that was so forceful it actually dislodged objects in the nation’s power corridors. At the same time, south of the border arrived one Donald Trump to make things interesting, because Trump is to stable international trade relations what a tornado is to a trailer park.
Through it all, Canada must find a path forward.
The nation’s new government is promising one, though it ran on a platform largely swiped from the opposition, while through the campaign repudiating much of the detritus that that very party had created over the past decade. Regardless, Canadians voted, and that’s that. There is much talk so far that ‘things are different this time’ and they might be; we have to wait and see.
As a backdrop to that suspense, we may have hit the nirvana that Johnny Rotten spoke of in the quote above. Discordancy reigns supreme. We’ve had discordancy forever in the country, but thanks to the crescendo and chaos of the last year, both in Canada and the US, we are seeing something truly wondrous: Canada’s premiers are showing a unity and strength like never seen before.
It’s not just the prairie petroleum provinces banding together either, which often comes across as simply talking one’s book. No, the other provinces see act all the prairie fuss is about, and they agree. The premier of Nova Scotia has come out strongly in favour if interprovincial hydrocarbon pipelines, touting Energy East and Wind West – dual goals to move hydrocarbons eastward and wind power westward on national resource corridors. Wab Kinew from Manitoba is likewise promoting a “one Canada trade corridor”. Most powerful of all, in one sense, was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s insistence that the federal government start showing Alberta and Saskatchewan more respect, because the previous administration had (obviously) been glaringly short in that department. While not a statement that promotes a specific project, Ford’s comment was particularly meaningful, since Ontario has the votes and political clout to, in general, define what our federal government achieves.
There are other hopeful signs. Mark Carney met this past weekend in Calgary, in downtown Calgary in the heart of the oil patch, or halfway between the heart of the oil patch and Chinatown in the Harry Hays federal building but anyway, he came right to the epicentre and met with a few dozen top oil and gas executives to discuss “partnerships”, a move that escaped his predecessor for a decade. Carney even thanked them for the joint letter they had sent a few weeks prior.
All very encouraging stuff. It’s great to see the premiers working together and pushing Ottawa. There was great hope, from myself included, that after Monday’s Saskatoon meeting that some sort of energized and wise proclamation would be forthcoming.
Hate to rain on parades, but the joint statement was not all it could have been. It has it’s moments, but some sickeningly familiar ones as well: evidence that energy ignorance still reigns supreme in the corridors of power.
An excerpt from the joint statement shows some of the problems, particularly with respect to energy [emphasis added]: “First Ministers agreed that Canada must work urgently to get Canadian natural resources and commodities to domestic and international markets, such as critical minerals and decarbonized Canadian oil and gas by pipelines, supported by the private sector, that provide access to diversified global markets, including Asia and Europe. First Ministers also agreed to build cleaner and more affordable electricity systems to reduce emissions and increase reliability toward achieving net zero by 2050. “
Sigh. Here we go again. First off, “decarbonized oil and gas” is just a profoundly dumb phrase. Oil and gas are fundamentally composed of hydrogen and carbon, so ‘decarbonized oil and gas’ would be just hydrogen, which surely none of them meant. And that’s what’s troubling: this statement indicates that the people that agreed to the script either don’t know or don’t care that the phrase is not just dumb but pandering to the lowest common denominator; it is symbolic of the continued bad habit we’ve developed of apologizing for providing fuel.
Want some irony? That phrase, “decarbonized oil and gas”, if used as it literally states, violates federal law under Bill C-59, the greenwashing legislation, because no one will be decarbonizing oil. Now that’s a nice exclamation point on the fiasco, isn’t it.
Yes, of course they meant something else; by decarbonization in the hydrocarbon sector, or any sector, they meant, for example, that the means of production have ‘net-zero’ emissions such as if the Pathways Alliance sequestered the CO2 from natural gas burned to generate steam to produce bitumen. It is the attempt to reduce emissions created in the production of a product, and it doesn’t really matter if the product is oil or cement or wind turbines.
To talk of “decarbonized oil and gas” is poorly thought out nonsense. The people that want to decarbonize want oil and gas dead and gone. They want it eradicated from use. That is the hallmark of any net zero plan or attempt to address a ‘climate emergency’ or fast-dated energy transition plans (more on that in a sec). That sort of sloppiness with respect to ‘energy transition’ bunkum is what’s gotten us into such trouble in the first place. We have terrible legislation like Bill C-69 because we’ve allowed the nonsense to become part of everyday vernacular.
And speaking of nonsense, here we go again with Net Zero 2050. That bone’s been thrown in to pacify to the nearly-extinct Net Zero 2050 crowd, who obviously hold a lot of sway, which casts doubt on whether Alberta’s demands for anti-hydrocarbon federal acts to be halted will bear any fruit. Because to be very clear, Net Zero 2050 means virtually no hydrocarbon combustion; any attempt to describe the concept of Net Zero 2050 almost invariably includes the words “rapidly phase out fossil fuel consumption.” So no one should pretend Net Zero 2050 includes massive bitumen production and consumption; this communique implies that all will be well if the Pathways Alliance succeeds in sequestering CO2 used in bitumen production. It won’t be. The climate emergency crowd, including Carney four years ago, defines the problem as the combustion of the product itself, not cleaning up the emissions in getting it out of the ground. Subtlety matters, and it matters like hell when talking about fuel supplies.
You’d think that the past few years worth of global energy evidence – shaky electrical grids that rely too heavily on intermittent power, the persistent growth of coal usage, the rise of ‘energy security’ as an imperative, and on and on – would have buried that vapid scheme once and for all. Apparently not. It made no sense in 2020, and makes less sense with 5 years gone towards the deadline.
There is no plan or roadmap to Net Zero 2050; it is a hollow slogan for an arbitrary date. The only semi-serious entity that tried to pen a true roadmap to Net Zero 2050 – the IEA – included in their report that half the technology required for their roadmap’s success doesn’t even exist yet in commercial state, and a few weeks after their “road map” built on non-existent bridges was published, they followed up with a critical minerals report that pointed out that there aren’t enough critical minerals to achieve their plan anyway. And yet here we are braying about it. (To be clear: Net Zero 2050 could, in theory, happen, if there is some technological breakthrough that we have not seen yet. But you can’t build a roadmap, one that will define capital expenditures of a nation, based on a theoretical concept that can only exist if an as-yet-unknown precursor must come into existence. No one does that. Anywhere. You can’t say something must happen by a certain date, then set about burning all the bridges behind, then turning to engineers and saying “It is possible, isn’t it?” No one is saying let’s stop developing alternative energy; but anyone with any energy sense at all is saying “let’s not rip off the shingles until the new ones have arrived.”
As an absolute minimum, Canada and it’s leaders need to stop apologizing for the existence of our production, and state clearly and unequivocally that the world doesn’t just need oil and gas, it demands both, because every aspect of our way of life depends on them. It is immoral not to provide fuel if you have it to a desperate world, it is immoral to fly in jets and tell Africans to be happy with solar panels and forget about fridges, and it is actually bad for the environment if a hundred million people or more keep burning dung and wood to accomplish what natural gas could if allowed.
Say it.
A great many people, a lot of whom could and did vote, were of the opinion that Carney would toss his value system into a dumpster because it was impossible to run a country that way. And now here we are. Facing into the storm, almost alone, in the quest for a 2050 holy grail which exists only in fanciful (mostly European) minds and in Canadian legislation.
So now, here we go. Among us walk many that truly have had enough of Canada’s permanent power imbalance, where elections are continuously decided in an area that is about 5 percent of Canada’s total, where ‘the hinterlands’ will never matter much because few people few votes, where energy ignorance runs so deep that our very freaking leaders can issue a joint statement that includes as a key plank a commitment to policy gibberish.
Many have slipped into a binary mindset – the only way forward is out. Separation. It’s not just an Alberta thing, that is for certain; as soon as the word ‘separation’ appears, people from far more than one province express their affiliation with the idea.
As a democracy, that is there prerogative. They have the right, as do most electorally-irrelevant regions, to feel anger at repeated snubs and disinterest. Hey, I grew up in Saskatchewan where the problem is even worse; if Calgary feels neglected by Ottawa, imagine how Moose Jaw feels. And if if Moose Jaw feels neglected, imagine Moosomin. That’s how it works. But not all jurisdictions are as powerless as Moosomin. The discordancy will not soon be going away, if the joint premiers’ statement is any indication.
It is imperative that we find positive energy, and there are good things happening – many provinces voting support for pipelines, joint statements of cooperation between Alberta and Ontario, etc. Wonderful stuff. But the path forward is not yet clear.
Explore the lighter side of energy, and think of it as you never have before in The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here.