Climate Change, Alberta style

Warming the Planet, Alberta Style

Alberta Oil Sands

In fact, the Tar Sands account for 40 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Alberta, with just 10 percent of Canada's population, emits 40 percent of our country's greenhouse gases. If we don't do anything to stop it, the Tar Sands could be producing 142 million tonnes of GHG by 2020, about 25 percent of the entire country's emissions could come from this one project. Even if the rest of Canada goes crazy embracing the climate-change mantra, it doesn't matter, because Alberta's policies will ensure that we won't meet any environmental commitments we make. In fact, Canada's emissions are growing at a rate that exceeds any other country, and the Tar Sands are playing a huge roll.

It's true that Canada's Conservative government has crafted new regulations that call for industry-wide reductions in carbon emissions, phased in slowly over many years. However, for the next 12 years, industry emissions need only decrease in intensity, so producers are expected to reduce the CO2 footprint per barrel of oil produced. If oil production increases dramatically over the next dozen years — and some pundits are suggesting that Alberta Tar Sands production will triple — then overall emissions will spike outrageously.

So what does Alberta owe the rest of Canada?

It's a complicated issue. Canada has unfortunate regional disparities, with the wealthiest three or four provinces giving money to federal government to distribute to the six or seven less-wealthy provinces. It's part of the fabric of this country, but it's created acrimony. People understandably don't like parting with hard-earned cash. Back in the 1980s, when iconoclastic Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau enacted a National Energy Program that taxed oil revenues at a rate higher than other natural resources, thousands of Albertan bought bumper stickers that proclaimed the west should Let the eastern bastards freeze together in the dark.

It is funny, but if you're one of those eastern bastards, it hurts too.

But it's also short-sighted. Alberta is a wealthy province by dint of its geology, not because Albertans are more industrious or brighter than anyone in Atlantic Canada or Manitoba. Some Albertans understand that, even if our illustrious Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not, chastising Atlantic Canada for wallowing in “a culture of defeat.”

I wonder if he would have said the same about his adopted province's brothers and sisters two generations ago? As many Canadians know, Alberta was a have-not province until oil was discovered in the 1940s.

Should wealthy Alberta, where the standard of living is high, taxes are low, and everyone can find work, be made to clean up its act? After all, so many Atlantic Canadians are forced to move there to find jobs.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Perhaps a few other facts will help you see this dilemma as I do. The first is that the technology exists to clean up Tar Sands oil production. It's called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and it can work, though it's just in its infancy. You can pull most of the GHG from the oil and store them safely underground — in fact, the carbon can be liquified and stored in the deep empty wells that once held oil. Norway's Statoil strips one million tons of carbon from North Sea Oil every year and pumps it into a saline aquifer, proving that you can be a responsible oil company and still make money.

Admittedly, oil companies don't want to embrace CCS because it's expensive. They can make a lot more money simply by pouring their carbon waste into the atmosphere. Of course, they'd still make money by employing CCS technology. Just not as much. The Alberta provincial government has put $2 billion in public money aside to fund CCS research and development.

Why is so much money going to prop up a highly profitable industry?

Imagine if that $2 billion was used to jumpstart the wind power industry in the province, and oil producers were given the option of cleaning up their act, and paying progressive carbon taxes to support clean technology.

Dollars to donuts they'd still want to do business in Alberta. And with oil at $110 a barrel, they'd still make huge profits. In 2006, Suncor made $3 billion in profits. The Canadian Oil Sands Trust, which owns one-third of Syncrude, made $834 million. Imagine how much money they would make if oil eventually hits $200 a barrel in two years, as CIBC analysts predict! Even if they were forced to deploy CCS, or pay high carbon taxes.

What do those companies owe the rest of us? A few well paying jobs? Or has the time come for more corporate social responsibility?

After all, the resources belong to all of us, and to Albertans in particular. Why should any company make huge profits by destroying a huge swath of the country.

Our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, doesn't believe our natural resources belong to Canadians, just to the highest bidder. And he's positively weak-kneed and ineffective at protecting our environment. In his 2008 budget, Harper could have taken steps that would have killed two birds with one stone; he could have encouraged carbon and spurred renewable energy investment.

Instead, he offered a wink and a nudge, telling the oil and coal industries to start their engines.

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