Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
From a climate and economic perspective, Canada clearly needs a different plan than expanding oil and gas. Such a plan means standing up to the oil industry’s unrelenting lobby and recognizing the oil sands, which already produce 2.91m barrels a day and climbing, are more than big enough.
The Alberta government has known for more than a decade that its oilsands policies were setting the stage for today’s price crisis. Which makes it hard to take the current government seriously when it tries to blame everyone from environmentalists to other provinces for what is a self-inflicted economic problem.
A managed decline of the tar sands isn’t a popular idea in Alberta, or in Canada for that matter. The idea of sunsetting the tar sands industry is about as polarizing as it gets. The problem is that people have been led to believe that a managed decline undercuts a booming oil industry that is on the cusp of bouncing back after a few bad years. It’s not. The only real alternative to a managed decline is something much worse: an unmanaged decline.
Canada can’t increase tar sands production or build more pipelines if the world is to achieve the targets on global carbon emissions set by the Paris Agreement on climate. That’s the central conclusion of a new report by Oil Change International(OCI), a U.S. research and advocacy group dedicated to exposing the full costs of fossil fuel extraction.
Currently lower oil prices due to a combination of increasing oil supplies and subdued demand come at a high cost to the environment and the climate.
