Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As I noted in 2012, 2014 and 2015, nothing will change in Alberta’s petrostate until its citizens embrace representative taxation (and pay their own way), shut down the oil revenue roller coaster and save for a rainy day. Or months of wildfires.
The results of Alberta’s tumultuous election once again demonstrate how petrostates can shift political baselines. And last night they shifted mightily in the bitumen-rich province and in this mining republic called Canada.
These skirmishes illustrate how deeply interwoven petroleum politics has become with the culture and geopolitics of Russian’s foreign policy. This is not the Cold War. Oil dependence is Putin’s bane, and ours.
Canada so far has a consistent record in the “litany of broken climate promises” department – it has missed every carbon emissions reduction goal it has set.
Vladimir Putin’s ugly war of annihilation in Ukraine has probably ended globalization as we know it, along with our culture’s ignorance of the reality of depleting finite resources.
If oil has been laid low by the coronavirus, then the nations whose economies most depend on it might soon be on ventilators. By any prognosis the great oil price collapse of 2020 has pushed the world’s most volatile commodity into Code Blue.
While most Canadians have been worrying about the COVID-19 pandemic, the drama of collapsing oil prices has upended markets and shaken the budgets of Canada’s petro-dependent provinces: Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C.
A changing energy system is posing “critical questions” for many of the world’s largest oil and gas producing countries, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.
The “oil curse” refers to a long-studied phenomenon in which states that adopt petroleum as a significant foundation of their economy tend toward dictatorship. Of the top ten oil producing countries in the world, nine are oligarchies.
That Donald Trump is a grand disruptor when it comes to international affairs is now a commonplace observation in the establishment media. By snubbing NATO and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, we’ve been told, President Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II.
Oil has fueled a bully bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Economists, an irrational tribe of short-sighted mathematicians, are now calling Canada’s declining economic fortunes "a perfect storm."
