Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Creating a Buzz appeared first on Alberta Views.

Aly Hyder Ali says YES

Program Manager, Oil and Gas, at Environmental Defence

Canada is running out of time to meet its climate goals, and the biggest obstacle standing in the way is unchecked pollution from the oil and gas industry. Despite being responsible for nearly a third of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint. While other sectors have reduced theirs, oil and gas emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990. The solution is clear: Canada needs a strong, enforceable emissions cap on the oil and gas industry—one that ensures real reductions, not more delay.

The global energy transition is accelerating. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for oil and gas will peak this decade, then decline. Other countries are ramping up investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean technology. If Canada continues to lean on an emissions-intensive, high-cost, fossil-based economy, we’ll be left behind. An emissions cap would send a clear message that we’re serious about transitioning to a clean, future-ready economy. It would drive innovation, create opportunities in renewable energy and reduce the risk of stranded assets.

But this isn’t just about future markets; it’s about protecting Canadians right now. Pollution from fossil fuels is linked to thousands of deaths each year and contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Communities near oil and gas facilities face higher risks of exposure to toxic pollutants. Wildfires, droughts and floods—driven by rising temperatures—have become a costly reality across Canada. Cutting oil and gas emissions is a direct investment in public health and safety.

Then there’s the climate responsibility. Canada can’t meet its GHG emissions reduction targets without addressing its largest source of pollution: the oil and gas industry. Voluntary measures from the sector have been largely non-existent. Companies have spent millions of dollars to talk a good game, but data tells us a different story. Investments in decarbonization remain a fraction of what’s needed, while capital spending continues to expand fossil fuel operations. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies in Canada are actively lobbying against climate regulations, all while recording massive profits.

A cap isn’t about punishing the oil and gas industry. It’s about fairness and responsibility and building the kind of nation we want to be. We need to invest in a healthier, sustainable future, not cling to outdated, polluting systems that benefit the few at the cost of the many. Every sector must do its part. Canadian households are already adapting to reduce their carbon footprint. It’s time Canada’s biggest polluters followed suit to help build a stronger, cleaner and more equitable country.

We can’t afford more delays. This is a pivotal moment for climate leadership and for real nation-building. For the health of our economy, our environment and future generations, it is time to make the emissions cap a reality.

heather exner-pirot says no

Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Director of Natural Resources, Energy and Environment

Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change, and it’s in our self-interest to reduce them. By doing so we would also improve air and water quality. I’m for reducing emissions. But the question is whether Canada should cap oil and gas emissions. I say no, and the main reason is that oil and gas isn’t under Canada’s jurisdiction; it’s under Alberta’s.

Section 92A(1) of the Constitution Act affirms that provinces have the “exclusive” ability to make laws for the “development, conservation and management” of non-renewable natural resources. This was tested with the Supreme Court’s October 2023 ruling in Reference re: Impact Assessment Act. The majority identified that the federal government’s broad scope of “effects within federal jurisdiction” under the IAA would allow them to deny projects solely based on their GHG emissions. They determined that this eroded the balance inherent in the Canadian federal state and was unconstitutional.

Indeed, Alberta has already exercised its jurisdiction on this issue and does have a cap on its oil sands emissions. It passed legislation in 2017, under the Notley government, and limits total oil sands emissions to 100 megatonnes (MT) annually. Currently the oil sands emit about 80.1 MT, and there is no foreseeable future where they would exceed that cap. Emissions intensity—the amount of CO₂e per barrel produced—has declined in the oil sands for six straight years.

So, Canada has no jurisdiction to cap oil and gas emissions, and Alberta has already capped its oil sands emissions. This should be the end of the debate. It’s not, however, because the federal government has expressed its intention to impose an emissions cap on Canadian oil and gas and has proposed draft regulations to that effect. These would be a disaster on every front: economically, politically, legally and technically.

It would be hard to imagine a more expensive or divisive policy. The regulations are a relic of Trudeau-era ideology rejected in the 2025 election. They wouldn’t just cut emissions but would cut production too: of oil sands oil, conventional oil, natural gas and liquids such as propane. They would result in less investment, fewer jobs, a diminishment of royalties and corporate taxes, no new LNG terminals, no new pipelines, no Atlantic offshore development and no new export markets. Just the threat of them has already harmed the economy.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer determined that the cost of the emissions cap to Canada’s GDP would be $20.5-billion by 2032 and that the cap would cut 7.1 megatonnes of GHGs. That’s an implied carbon price of $2,887 per tonne. Prime minister Mark Carney “axed” the consumer carbon tax of $80 per tonne. If our goal is to cut emissions, it could be done more cheaply by means other than an oil and gas emissions cap.

Canadians want to build infrastructure, grow the economy and diversify trade. No policy threatens this more than the proposed emissions cap does. It needs to be quashed, for good.

Aly Hyder Ali responds to Heather Exner-Pirot

Heather Exner-Pirot argues that Canada should not cap oil and gas emissions, citing constitutional overreach, economic harm and lack of necessity. But closer scrutiny shows these claims don’t hold. The oil and gas sector is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, its voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed, and a federal cap is both legally justified and economically necessary.

Exner-Pirot references provincial powers under Section 92A of the Constitution and the 2023 Impact Assessment case. But this misrepresents the scope of federal powers. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the federal government has authority over matters of “national concern.” GHG emissions are transboundary pollutants, which means that what Alberta emits affects Quebec, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. The 2021 Supreme Court reference case on carbon pricing explicitly upheld Ottawa’s right to regulate GHG emissions, calling this a national concern. A federal cap on oil and gas emissions targets pollution, not resource extraction, making it constitutional.

Yes, the oil and gas industry has made some progress in reducing emissions intensity. But total oil and gas emissions continue to be Canada’s largest source of climate pollution. Since 2005 oil and gas emissions have increased significantly, even as other sectors have shrunk theirs.

Exner-Pirot also foresees job losses and GDP decline under an oil and gas emissions cap. But global markets are already shifting: the International Energy Agency projects global demand for fossil fuels will peak this decade. Supporting fossil fuel expansion is bad for the environment and economically irresponsible. Conversely, clean energy investments are surging worldwide.

She also highlights the cost per tonne of reductions but ignores the massive economic and health damages tied to climate inaction. Climate disasters are increasingly expensive: 2024 was the costliest year for severe-weather-related insurance losses in Canadian history, at over $8-billion. And this is only expected to get worse, as 2025 is already our second-worst wildfire season ever. Furthermore, the Canadian Climate Institute estimates that climate impacts will reduce Canada’s GDP by $25-billion starting this year. The damage will only spread if we ignore climate change.

Oil and gas is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, and voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed.

The health costs too are staggering. Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 34,000 premature deaths annually in Canada, with direct economic and societal consequences. Additionally, a recent study published in the journal Science shows that air pollution from the Athabasca oil sands may be up to 6,300 per cent higher than industry-reported figures. This pollution would rival all other human-made sources in Canada combined, and it raises dire health concerns for nearby communities.

The harms of oil and gas emissions aren’t evenly distributed. Air pollution disproportionally affects communities—particularly Indigenous, racialized and low-income—that are closest to industrial sites or lack resources to protect themselves. Indigenous communities near the oil sands face higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses linked to industrial emissions.

A cap is not an extra burden. It’s risk mitigation and protection for public health and the economy.

Exner-Pirot says an oil and gas emissions cap would be divisive. But depending solely on households and small businesses to shoulder Canada’s emissions-mitigation burden while oil and gas companies continue to pump out vast amounts of pollution with no accountability is inequitable. Rather than divisive, an oil and gas emissions cap would share responsibility fairly. It would ensure that industry’s operations align with national and international climate goals. If industry were to support a cap, they would show they’re serious about reducing emissions. This would send clear signals to investors, workers and communities that a smooth, fair transition is possible—rather than a chaotic collapse.

Exner-Pirot calls a cap unconstitutional, economically damaging and unnecessary. But constitutionality is established by a Supreme Court ruling. An early transition is far more economically prudent than clinging to fossil-fuel dependence, as renewables offer stronger long-term returns and avoid risk of stranding assets. Emissions data contradict the promise of voluntary emissions reduction from the oil and gas industry. And the health and environmental costs of delay are crippling, with climate disasters and pollution already exacting a heavy toll.

Canada promised in 2021 to cap oil and gas emissions. Fulfilling that commitment is not about ideology but about survival. Implementing an enforceable federal cap is about safeguarding our climate, economy and communities. It is time to deliver on that promise.

Heather Exner-Pirot responds to Aly Hyder Ali

What’s the case for capping oil and gas emissions According to Aly Hyder Ali, it boils down to some tried and true environmentalist warnings: we can’t meet our Paris Agreement commitments without a cap; companies won’t reduce emissions without a cap; and we’ll be left behind in the energy transition if we don’t do it.

I’ll grant him that our efforts to meet the Paris goal are all but certain to fail. That doesn’t preoccupy me much. For those people who still prioritize that goal, however, I reiterate it could be achieved at less cost to the Canadian economy than through imposing an emissions cap.

Hyder Ali argues that “the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint” and that “emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990.” The first point is demonstrably false, and the second is a red herring.

Emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector peaked in 2015, even though we’ve added over a million and a half barrels of production since then. How was this accomplished Through industry’s sincere efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, including through methane capture, electrification and efficiency measures.

Emissions intensity per barrel in Canada has decreased by over one-third since 2000. This kind of achievement takes significant human, physical and financial capital, and yet it is totally dismissed.

It’s unfair for Hyder Ali to point to 1990 as a benchmark year. Emissions rose sharply between then and the early 2010s because a couple hundred billion dollars of investment in the oil sands came to fruition and production grew dramatically. But ever since 2015—the year of the Paris Agreement—we have seen a decoupling between production growth and emissions. We know that the oil sands can meaningfully reduce GHGs.

Not only does the federal government not have the jurisdiction to enforce a cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

The argument that Canada will be “left behind” unless we turn to greener alternatives is rarely substantiated. The main markets for our oil, led by the US, do not pay a premium for lower-carbon products. And our LNG is already some of the least GHG-intense in the world.

We can plainly see Europe’s economic trajectory as it has tried to decarbonize its energy and offshore its industrial activity. This isn’t a path to emulate. Today most of the world isn’t ramping up its energy transition but rather plateauing—or, in the case of the USA, retreating. Bans on offshore drilling and fracking in New Zealand and Mexico have been reversed. Canada would be an outlier if it didn’t recalibrate some of its own expensive climate measures.

At any rate, there’s no reason to believe that a supportive environment for oil and gas production detracts from investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean tech. Quite the opposite: the revenues generated from a healthy oil and gas sector allow governments and corporations to invest in such technology. Starving the industry of capital and growth with a cap would inevitably result in it spending less on decarbonization, not more.

But my main criticism of Hyder Ali’s argument and those like it is they remain in the abstract, indifferent to the trade-offs involved. These are emotional and ideological appeals. They fail on the details. They’re impracticable. When the federal government proposed draft regulations and modelled the costs of an emissions cap, it was a hot mess. The assumptions made no sense, unintended consequences weren’t accounted for, the costing wasn’t logical and there were inherent contradictions.

How would a cap work with Alberta’s existing industrial carbon pricing and emissions trading system and comparable frameworks in BC, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland How can the energy sector meet ambitious targets without limiting production How can operators plan without knowing their exact compliance obligations We don’t know.

The proposed cap is emblematic of a policy approach that has put Canada’s unrealistic Paris commitment at the top of a hierarchy, with every other policy issue subordinate. This isn’t what Canadians want. We’re preoccupied with housing, the high cost of living, Trump’s threat to our economy. Prime minister Mark Carney ran on a promise to make Canada an energy superpower with the strongest economy in the G7. Paris and the 2030 commitment weren’t even mentioned in his platform. Nor was an emissions cap. Not only does his government not have the jurisdiction to enforce an emissions cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

We all want a healthy environment alongside a strong economy. We all want world-class environmental, social and governance standards. But it’s manifestly not in our interest to regulate our oil and gas to the point where production is so uncompetitive that other jurisdictions, likely higher-emitting ones, take up our market share. That’s the choice: produce oil and gas in Canada or let someone else—likely not a democracy or an ally—produce it instead. Hyder Ali is arguing for the latter.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Should Canada Cap Oil and Gas Emissions? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Chris Turner says Yes

The author of How to Be a Climate Optimist, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

I consider myself a climate optimist, even as an era of deepening climate disasters descends upon us. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season established a grim benchmark for the scope of the challenges humanity will face for the foreseeable future.

The engine of my optimism lies well outside the frame of news coverage of these disasters. But that doesn’t detract from its importance. That engine operates on the solution side of the equation, and it grows more powerful daily. I’ve been reporting on the global energy transition for 20 years and now routinely see numbers and details thought impossible only a decade ago. The one currently boggling my mind is 392 gigawatts—a rigorous estimate of how much new solar power was added to the world’s electricity grids in 2023 alone. This is virtually identical to the generating capacity of the world’s entire nuclear fleet. It’s also about four times as much solar as was installed on earth 10 years ago. That’s one year. Solar power alone.

And it’s very much not alone. The numbers are similarly staggering for wind power, electric vehicles, hyper-efficient heat pumps, energy storage—a comprehensive toolkit for climate action. All of it has quickly vaulted from margin to mainstream, defying even the rosiest estimates. And the 10 years just past show every sign of being mere prelude to the 10 years of transformative growth ahead, as prices continue to plummet and adoption curves for clean technology breach tipping points in one country after another (Bloomberg News counted at least 87 such countries as of October 2022).

The picture the International Energy Agency paints is an optimist’s dream. Electric vehicle use is expected to grow tenfold by 2030. Renewable energy will contribute at least 80 per cent of all new electricity generation worldwide from now until then as solar becomes the cheapest source of power virtually everywhere on earth. Electric heating and cooling (generated mostly by heat pumps) will overtake gas- and oil-fired boilers in market share. And fossil fuel use—first coal, then oil, then gas—will peak in overall demand before the decade is done.

Add that all up and it amounts to a clear victory. It likely won’t keep warming below 1.5°C, but credible analysis indicates the trajectory of current policies and pledges would land in the 2.1°C–2.4°C range by 2100. And there is every reason to assume ambitions will mount steadily as the energy transition toolkit becomes cheaper, more flexible and more familiar.

Let’s say modestly, then, that odds are at least even that the energy transition continues to accelerate over the next decade. That would surely generate the wherewithal to keep warming below 2°C (which until the 2015 Paris talks was seen as an ambitious goal). When I began searching for climate solutions 20 years ago, business-as-usual had a fossil-fuelled rocket strapped to its back pointed at 4°C or 5°C of warming—apocalyptic territory. That’s off the table now. The first generation of the energy transition has given us ample cause for optimism.

Andrew Nikiforuk Says No 

The author of Tar Sands, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Civilization has for 150 years burned cheap, portable fossil fuels to pave paradise and erect a complex network of concrete cities decorated by many parking lots. In the process we have eradicated wildlife, replumbed rivers, overpopulated the earth and changed the climate with the emissions from billions of our energy slaves, such as diesel trucks.

Many greens now propose to fill these parking lots with battery-operated vehicles and other digital gadgets highly dependent on energy-intensive mining. Climate optimists plan to either bury CO₂ emissions under parking lots or suck them out of the air with dubious, unproven and unbuilt technologies such as carbon capture or direct air machines.

But these techno solutions represent dead ends. Climate change, which is accelerating, is not a technical problem that can be solved solely by new technologies; it is social problem rooted in ruinous energy consumption patterns that will require behaviour changes. The “clean tech” transition won’t make a real dent in emissions until humans change our focus and embrace an energy descent by shrinking our energy footprint. That means fewer technologies, cars, people and parking lots.

In this age of the absurd, let me be clear. I’m not saying renewables aren’t needed, but rather that the material, money and time needed to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy with 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen isn’t feasible and won’t reduce emissions. Furthermore, I recognize climate change as just one symptom of what ecologist Bill Rees calls “overshoot.” Too many people are spending finite volumes of energy to replace natural systems on the planet with materially intense artificial ones run by energy-intensive robots. Electrifying the Titanic will not remove the many icebergs in our path. The scale of mining, for example, needed to support an energy transition boggles the mind. We can’t build more solar panels, windmills or electric cars without extracting more copper, lithium, iron ore and aluminum along with rare-earth metals. That means transforming the carbon-rich peatlands in Ontario’s Ring of Fire into $67-billion-worth of metals and radioactive waste.

Many techno-optimists ignore the costs of mining and argue we’ll cut emissions through more-efficient technologies. Economist William Jevons documented the flaw in this thinking in the 19th century. He observed that as the efficiency of steam engines improved, industries simply employed more of them to produce new goods for more consumers. Efficient tech leads to more energy consumption, not less. Jevons’s Paradox partly explains why the world is producing more fossil fuels than ever. Global coal demand reached record levels in 2023.

The much vaunted low-carbon economy promises a chaotic extension of the status quo. British philosopher John Gray recently characterized the problem aptly: “Net zero will be remembered like having cancer and using candle therapy.”

Chris Turner responds to Andrew Nikiforuk

In Andrew Nikiforuk’s argument against climate optimism, he cites three experts (besides himself): a philosopher, an ecologist and a 19th-century economist. This might be a fine start for the faculty of a liberal arts college, but I’m not much convinced it’s the braintrust needed to produce durable climate solutions.

I have nothing but respect for the liberal arts—I’m a lifelong practitioner—but philosophers and ecologists are nowhere near the top of my list when I’m looking for an installer for my new high-efficiency heat pump. And I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them to manufacture one, let alone the millions now being churned out to reduce emissions from heating and cooling buildings worldwide.

To be clear (and a little less facetious): the task of taming the climate crisis is primarily one of building new clean energy systems for a technologically advanced, mostly industrialized planet of eight billion souls. And I remain a climate optimist even when the esteemed John Gray compares that work to candle therapy, because, to use the lingo of his native Britain, John Gray evidently knows bugger-all about the global energy transition.

There are several big hairy statistics in Nikiforuk’s argument, but in the absence of citations I can’t speak to their accuracy other than to suggest they don’t pass the eye test. If Nikiforuk has an authoritative source on why it will take 586,000 wind, solar and hydrogen power stations to phase out fossil fuels, he ought to share it right away with the International Energy Agency, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and other professional trackers of the energy transition—who have already revised their estimates for new solar installations upward for 2023 several times to track China’s mounting ambitions. The figure also seems to deny the existence of geothermal, biomass and any number of other new technologies still in (increasingly rapid) development.

There is nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming.

I have to assume the point of citing this strangely precise figure—586,000, no more, no less—is not to offer recourse to facts but to point in alarm at a big scary number. See also Nikiforuk’s reference to exactly $67-billion in minerals and metals to be dug out of northern Ontario, which displays a level of certainty and foresight not even the Ring of Fire’s most enthusiastic boosters generally trade in. Researchers just discovered enough lithium for more than 300 million electric vehicle batteries under the Salton Sea in California, and Toyota has bet its electric vehicle fleet on a solid-state battery made from sodium instead—does that affect this $67-billion bonanza Never mind. It’s a large number, and it is allegedly borne to your front door on a great geyser of radioactive waste. And so you should not want it.

Beyond the specious numbers, I take exception to Nikiforuk’s use of the word “feasible.” In his estimation, the energy transition now well underway, the machinery of which I have personally observed on four continents, is not feasible. Whereas “behaviour changes” are feasible, even though the exact kinds remain unspecified, and he presents no evidence whatsoever of the political, social or economic mechanisms that might, in the space of a decade or two, unite all humanity in adopting such behaviour changes, presumably more or less all at once.

Perhaps this will be the year strict vegetarianism is adopted by everyone on earth. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rely on the concrete evidence of the energy transition itself as my compass of progress on the climate front. Which, to cite one fact regarding feasibility, has already shifted the behaviour of investors, developers and governments to the point where renewable energy is the source of the majority of the world’s new electricity generation as we speak.

Ultimately, Nikiforuk’s is not an argument about solving the climate crisis so much as an argument against industrial capitalism. Fair, I suppose. But I’ve found no evidence, in 20 years of searching, that there’s a way to solve this crisis at anything less than industrial scale—there are eight billion of us and nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming or the like. Nor have I discovered any mechanism more efficient at shifting the gears on the great industrial apparatus of the global economy in the direction of lower emissions than market capitalism, ideally but not always under the guidance of a liberal democracy. (Notwithstanding China’s role in building much of the transition’s essential equipment.)

How exactly would humans alter our many irredeemable behaviours in time What system of organization would emerge to guide eight billion of us in more enlightened patterns of behaviour Nikiforuk offers no answer. In my 20 years of reporting, meanwhile, the energy transition has offered me a clear answer. An optimistic answer. One that grows more feasible by the day.

Andrew Nikiforuk responds to Chris Turner

I appreciate Chris Turner’s enthusiasm and optimism about the future, but I don’t share it. My reading of events, history and numbers suggest the green transition is a grand illusion. Nor is it green. Over time, it will not become cheaper, flexible or more familiar as Turner claims. Nor will it stop the runaway train known as climate change. Instead, the transition will become more chaotic due to material limits, growth of the technosphere, unmanageable complexity, geopolitical chaos, environmental degradation and political instability.

First off, reality should temper Turner’s enthusiasm. Climate change is accelerating, and thousands of scientists have warned that life on the planet is under siege. Wrote data scientist Christopher Wolf in the journal Biosciences in 2023: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.”

Meanwhile the non-fossil-fuel system Turner envisions hasn’t even been built yet. In 2022 electric vehicles represented only 2 per cent of cars on the road. In 2022 renewable energy (excluding hydropower) accounted for only about 7.5 per cent of global energy consumption. In other words, the metals and materials needed to build the solar panels, windmills, power lines, electric cars and batteries envisaged by Turner haven’t been mined or processed yet. And they’ll come with extreme environmental costs. There is no such thing as a clean revolution.

Second, transitions don’t subtract energy; they tend to add new kinds of energy. When the industrial world started burning coal, it didn’t stop cutting down forests. When it switched to oil, it didn’t abandon coal. And so on. Despite the recent growth of industrial solar and wind facilities, civilization’s dependence on fossil fuels has not diminished one iota. This is due to increases in population and per capita consumption. Renewables, for example, only met 42 per cent of increased energy demand in 2019.

So the world is not using renewables to retire fossil fuels but simply to spend more energy.

The materials needed for solar, wind, electric cars and batteries come with extreme environmental costs.

US sociologist Richard York, writing in Energy Research & Social Science in 2019, warned that there will not be any meaningful subtraction of fossil fuel demand until civilization faces the challenge of economic growth. “The rapid and continuing growth of total energy consumption—which is connected with continuing economic growth—makes it so that removing an energy source like fossil fuels is very difficult, even when the production of other energy sources is growing.”

My third point concerns material limits. The so-called green transition shifts the problems of extraction from oil to minerals. Renewables can’t operate without rare metals. Battery-operated vehicles require six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle. Mining is a rapacious and dirty industry. Lithium mining destroys water; child slaves mine cobalt in the Congo; rare-earth minerals have left behind a trail of poisonous radioactive waste in China. Canada is now proposing to mine the hell out of the carbon-rich Hudson Bay lowlands in the Ring of Fire to put more battery-operated vehicles on the road. Destroying vital carbon sinks to save the planet doesn’t sound like a moral solution.

Turner’s enthusiasm also ignores the demands of the technosphere. Civilization has used fossil fuels to build a semi-autonomous offshoot of the biosphere composed of steel, bricks, plastic, glass and cement, managed by digital machines. This ever-growing system has an insatiable appetite for dense, fossil-fuel energy. It gobbles oil and materials to expand while spewing streams of waste including CO₂. Plastics alone now outweigh all wild animals. The growth of the technosphere explains why more electricity from renewables will not help. Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, writes the engineer Peter Haff, “the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil-fuel use.” Artificial intelligence, for example, is expected by 2027 to consume as much electricity as Sweden.

Lastly, the scale of the problem has been sorely underestimated. Total electrical power in the world is roughly 27,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). According to geologist Simon Michaux, the extra capacity needed to phase out fossil fuels is roughly 37,000 TWh. The green transition “proposes to construct an electrical system much larger than the existing grid, using energy that is more expensive and not as effective as what we have now.”

In sum we need a different plan that changes human behaviours, relies less on energy-intensive technologies, relocalizes life and accepts limits to economic growth.

The post Should We Be Optimistic About Our Climate Future? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Prior to the pandemic, I did an ethnographic study to address this curiosity. For the sake of simplicity, I assumed rural Alberta constitutes those areas beyond the province’s largest cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray and Medicine Hat and their corresponding bedroom communities. Following the lead of American political scientist Katherine Cramer, I immersed myself in the regular conversations of 23 groups of acquaintances in 16 communities throughout rural Alberta. I showed up at cafes and restaurants, I joined groups of young families in their living rooms or on their front decks, I met with women’s-only coffee groups, I shared a case of Pilsner with a rural men’s baseball team. All told I spoke with 138 rural Albertans about politics in conversations that lasted anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours.

Over the course of this exercise I heard a few good jokes, more than a few phrases in Ukrainian, one heated debate over a game-deciding measurement in the town curling bonspiel, and, I’m afraid to say, startlingly high levels of political anger and resentment. Rural Alberta is far from a homogeneous region, and many issues unique to particular towns were raised. But on the whole, a high degree of agreement exists on three particular points.

Many rural Albertans feel a visceral anger toward Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government, largely placing the blame for Alberta’s current fiscal woes at its feet. This is unsurprising—Premier Jason Kenney has been fanning this sentiment for some time. But more interestingly, rural Albertans are also increasingly disillusioned with politics in general, expressing widespread scorn at the behaviour of politicians and parties of all stripes (many wistfully imagining a politics completely free of parties, which, according to a coffee group in Fort Macleod, “just sour everything”) and strongly convinced that existing parties don’t care about “ordinary people.” Finally, many in rural Alberta are increasingly convinced they are unfairly treated, overlooked and even looked down upon by urban citizens and “their” governments.

An exchange in a McDonalds in Drayton Valley strongly encapsulated this particular view, which emerged again and again across the groups I met. Asked if people in cities understand rural areas or their struggles, one resident nearly jumped out of his seat: “Absolutely not! We might as well be from different planets. And the government workers, the politicians, the professors from Edmonton They’re the worst… they simply don’t understand what it’s really like out here.” Added his coffee companion, “Most of [them] see us as rednecks who can barely get our pants on by ourselves. I don’t have a college degree, so I’m an idiot. That’s what they’re thinking. I worked from nothing to a senior management position in an oil company. But I’ll always be a redneck in their eyes.” His wife chimed in, “Oh, yes, they think we’re rednecks… It’s nice that you came out here. Nice that someone wants to listen. Do you think anyone will listen to what you write?”

Overall, a growing anti-establishment sentiment tied to this resentment was evident, a desire for some type of upheaval to address these concerns. This is certainly not new. I’d argue a good deal of rural support for the Wildrose party over the past decade was driven moreso by this underlying alienation and a corresponding populist desire to “throw the bums out” than by hard-right ideology. For some in rural Alberta today, this translates into support for “Wexit.” But it’s not difficult to imagine such resentment being exploited for even more troublesome and divisive ends. Not only did most rural citizens I chatted with express a strong admiration for Donald Trump (“someone who’s finally listening to ordinary people for a change!” declared a woman from Westlock), some also linked their own frustrations, their own sense of being overlooked, with a palpable resentment aimed at refugees and especially Indigenous peoples, who are viewed as the chief beneficiaries of exorbitant state support. In an age of increasing polarization, misinformation and, in many cases, tribalism and xenophobia, the potential exploitation of this resentment most worries me.

In the context of contemporary Alberta politics, in which the United Conservative Party government unveils policies that don’t serve rural Alberta well, I’m left wondering how this alienation and resentment can be addressed. How can this region be authentically represented

The notion that rural Albertans aren’t adequately represented in provincial politics likely strikes most readers as absurd. Rural support forms the backbone of the UCP. In the 2019 election the UCP garnered well over 70 per cent of the votes cast across rural Alberta, easily sweeping every rural seat and ensuring several rural MLAs have prominent roles in cabinet. And this is par for the course in Alberta. Aside from a few blips (perhaps the first term of Peter Lougheed’s government, the relatively short reign of Alison Redford, and the recent single term of the NDP), rural Alberta has formed the electoral base of basically every Alberta government going back to 1905. Likely no constituency in Canada has been so closely connected to political power for such a long stretch.

For much of this time rural Alberta reaped many benefits. The UFA and Social Credit governments clearly focused on rural regions, the latter spending massively on rural infrastructure throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The PC party under both Lougheed and Don Getty followed suit, using resource-padded coffers to build roads, schools, hospitals, hockey rinks and seniors lodges across rural areas while also supporting a variety of loan programs and subsidies for farmers, ensuring grants flowed to rural community and agricultural societies, and footing the bill for more than a few community-specific projects in the constituencies of well-regarded rural cabinet ministers.

This all changed with the advent of a neoliberal approach to economic development in the 1990s, focused on deregulation and low taxes as keys to attracting investment and spurring growth. The relationship between the government and rural Alberta shifted. Few in Alberta, urban or rural, forget the impact that cutbacks in healthcare, education and infrastructure had across the province in the early years of Ralph Klein’s government. For rural Alberta in particular, these cuts, in combination with the broader changes to the economics of agriculture unleashed by neoliberal-inspired free-trade agreements, fast-tracked a decline in municipal and individual economic prospects across the region. Rural schools closed, healthcare centres either closed or reduced their offerings, multi-generation family farms were sold off, transfers to municipalities shrank and infrastructure maintenance declined, youth hightailed it to urban centres and local businesses struggled mightily.

More broadly this period represented a turning point for conservative parties across much of the western world. Suddenly the central goal was no longer “conserving” much of anything. Rather, the goal became sharply reduced tax rates and regulations to entice capital investment—an aim that created jobs (although often for low wages) but weakened the state’s ability to provide the services low-density and increasingly low-income rural areas rely on.

Of course, this shift was welcomed with open arms by the province’s resource sector, and, in an era of strong oil prices and hefty resource royalties flowing to the government, who could complain The “Alberta Advantage” was in full swing—low taxes, low unemployment and high per-capita government spending—the holy trinity of Alberta politics. But underneath these developments in conservative ideology, this wholehearted embrace of a low-tax regime and oil and gas-friendly public policies, was the sacrifice of any coherent policy concern over the future of rural Alberta.

Kyler Zeleny grew up on a farm in central Alberta. He is a photographer–researcher and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017) and Crown Ditch and The Prairie Castle (2019). Understanding the rural, he says, consumes him. Sleeping in his car, bathing in lakes, he tries to understand present-day ideas of the rural and how it has been visually represented. He has degrees from U of A and the University of London.

Since the Klein revolution, successive PC governments’ approaches to rural issues have been a mixed bag. The PCs did recommit, at least rhetorically, to the importance of rural Alberta in the last years of the Klein regime and especially under Ed Stelmach. Task forces were commissioned, reports were issued and money was spent, although these initiatives created little meaningful rural development. The Redford government did release a Rural Economic Development Action Plan in 2014, although this was derailed by the party’s historic loss in 2015.

The UCP has similarly failed to offer much in the way of a concrete rural development plan beyond its general province-wide pledge to “create jobs.” The UCP, to be fair, did announce in June 2020 a one-time $200-million allotment for rural infrastructure, although the president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta said “hundreds of millions” more was needed to properly address the infrastructure deficit that plagues the region. In fact, several rural municipalities are considering dissolving themselves entirely in the face of infrastructure upgrades they can’t afford.

In November Premier Kenney responded to concerned rural politicians by urging them to cut “red tape” to attract investment, as if the removal of a couple of forms or a less stringent approvals process is all that stands between rural communities and a cascade of new businesses knocking down their door, the beginning of a new golden age.

Even more surprising has been the UCP’s willingness to upset a large swath of rural voters with policy decisions. Rural regions witnessed scores of doctors threaten to leave their already underserved communities over a protracted contract dispute with the UCP government. Counties are warning citizens to expect drastic property tax increases as the province offloads policing costs and seeks to significantly reduce tax rates for oil companies. Many rural voices, most notably country music singers Corb Lund and Paul Brandt, were at the forefront of public opposition to plans to allow coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Taken together, it is increasingly difficult to see what lasting benefits rural Albertans have amassed over the last two or three decades in exchange for the rock-solid support they routinely granted conservative governments. Surely the oil and gas boom of the 2000s helped paper over much of this. Rural Albertans scooped up well-paying jobs in the industry, and companies contributed significant tax revenues for rural municipalities and extra income for farmers who had an oil or gas well on their land. But such opportunities are now few and far between, and some in the industry are refusing to pay taxes they owe rural municipalities. As of February 2021 they were over $245-million in arrears, with many companies additionally declining to honour their contracts with rural landowners.

Agriculture in Alberta does continue to generate billions of dollars of economic activity annually, although sharply declining profit margins have ensured that only the largest farms consistently reap strong returns. To make matters worse, the mega-size machinery now required by ever-growing farms is causing unforeseen, and expensive, wear to country roads.

Today the neoliberal chickens have come home to roost. Much of rural Alberta sits in a precarious position. Job opportunities are diminished, the population is rapidly aging, residents must travel farther to access schooling, healthcare and long-term care, rural students are more likely to drop out than their urban counterparts, rural infrastructure continues to deteriorate, revenue-starved municipalities are weighing drastic service cuts against significant property tax increases—while simultaneously facing the looming prospect of enormous liabilities associated with orphaned oil and gas wells—and, as the pandemic reminded us, decent and affordable internet often remains out of reach. Given the lack of interest from successive Alberta governments in authentically addressing rural issues, it’s no wonder citizens are feeling alienated and resentment is growing.

Rural Albertans routinely identify as “conservative” in opinion surveys; they vote overwhelmingly Conservative in provincial and federal elections; and in conversation they highlight fiscal prudence, self-reliance and personal discipline as characteristics they strongly value. Throughout my research, many scoffed at “political correctness,” were enraged by the salaries and pension benefits received by bureaucrats and politicians, and were very concerned with rural crime and the “soft” justice system that, in their view, condones such behaviour. Some are socially conservative, many are not. And above all, the majority do not like the NDP. This is a deep, essentially cultural, dislike.

But here is the rub. There is an important ideological disconnect between the political values of many in rural Alberta and those of the UCP, a disconnect even close observers of Alberta politics tend to overlook.

Not only have public opinion surveys shown that the majority of rural Albertans are actually “middle of the road” in their ideological leanings, I am convinced after having completed my ethnographic study (in addition to having lived in rural Alberta most of my life) that the conservatism most in rural Alberta abide by is not generally the anti-government, libertarian version that undergirds the UCP. Rather, most rural Albertans adhere to a more traditional version of conservatism that, to be sure, values fiscal discipline and self-reliance, but is also pragmatic and recognizes the value of prudent state investment in education and healthcare, in infrastructure and in sport and culture—the foundations of the healthy community institutions rural Albertans depend on. Furthermore, it is a conservatism largely built on a personal commitment to community, a willingness to volunteer and contribute to its well-being, rather than an obsession over the rights of the individual.

I have yet to hear a stampede of rural Albertans crusade for lower corporate tax rates or demand that oil and gas companies receive a property tax holiday, nor are many demanding the return of coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rockies or the sale of gas leases on the Milk River grasslands. I have yet to hear rural Albertans argue that we have too many nurses or teachers, or too many rural hospitals or schools. I have yet to hear rural Albertans suggest that existing supports for seniors in the region are adequate, or clamour for smaller provincial transfers to municipalities or regional economic development agencies, or an end to grants for community recreation or agricultural societies. I can also report that, despite frequent suggestions to the contrary on social media, the vast majority of rural Albertans are not aghast at the “loss of their freedom” inherent in requests to wear a facemask or adhere to “stay-at-home” orders in the midst of the pandemic. Indeed, there are blatant areas of tension between the policy preferences of most rural Albertans and the policy priorities of the UCP.

Rural Albertans, it is true, tend to harbour suspicions about government. But in talking with them it became clear that the crux almost always revolves around politicians “living-it-up in expensive hotel suites, jetting around on private planes, drinking $20 orange juice,” the relatively generous salaries and benefits of civil servants in Edmonton and, for some, the sense that newcomers to Canada and Indigenous peoples receive disproportionate state support (although several rural municipalities are making positive strides on these issues, creating “Welcoming Committees,” pursuing anti-racism initiatives and adopting treaty land acknowledgements at community events).

One can legitimately question the disconnect between a desire for government services and a refusal to acknowledge the role played by civil servants in providing these services, or the inadequate understanding of “who” in fact “gets what” from government. The larger point, however, is that most rural Albertans are not simply opposed to government full stop. Rather, they resent that some groups seem to get more than their fair share, while rural areas receive the short end of the stick. This conclusion strongly echoes similar findings in rural America, where research shows resentment of this sort—rather than an ideological commitment to anti-government neoliberalism—explains such strong support for conservative politicians.

Of course, far-right libertarian voices also emanate from rural Alberta. Such people seem disproportionately to occupy positions in rural UCP constituency associations, some becoming candidates themselves.

Despite this ideological disconnect, it seems incomprehensible to imagine the UCP losing ground in rural Alberta. What gives

Part of this is basic party identification. The UCP is now the only legit conservative party in town, a last line of defence against a return to power by the NDP. But beyond that, the UCP has done well to play to the anxieties of the region. Few in rural Alberta seem much bothered by the UCP’s desire to shrink the civil service. Nor were they opposed to the party’s repeal of the provincial carbon tax. As the unofficial spokesperson for a women’s coffee group in Tofield told me, following a lengthy conversation outlining their environmental concerns, “I have absolutely no other option. I simply have to pay more. I can’t take the bus. I can’t afford an electric car. And I couldn’t plug it in anywhere if I could. How is this anything but an extra tax on rural people?”

Paradoxically, given that corporation-friendly neoliberal policies by previous conservative governments helped put rural regions on the path to precarity in the first place, many rural Albertans view the province’s immediate prosperity, and their own, as tied directly to the revival of oil and gas. Thus, they largely applauded the UCP’s doubling down in this direction, especially Kenney’s anti-Liberal rhetoric, his Canadian Energy Centre “war room” and the “Fair Deal Panel.”

The UCP further created the Rural Alberta Provincial Integrated Defence (RAPID) Response to address rural crime, replaced the labour standards codified in the NDP’s infamous Bill 6 with the Farm Freedom and Safety Act, and established the largely symbolic Alberta Firearms Advisory Committee to “hear concerns about the federal government’s firearms legislation.”

It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to see how well such moves play throughout the region. But do any of them address the fundamental issues facing rural Alberta Which will create long-term jobs in a global context of declining oil demand Which will ensure that rural schools remain open, that doctors stick around, that affordable high-speed internet becomes available Which will address the vast rural infrastructure deficit Where, in any of this, is a coherent, consistent, evidence-based rural economic and community development plan

Modern economic trends have clearly been unkind to rural areas worldwide. Yet rural development scholars have demonstrated that the “death of rural” is not inevitable. Real economic progress and enhanced service delivery for rural areas is possible, but at minimum it requires a long-term plan.

As Lars Hallström, who directed the Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities at the University of Alberta from 2009 to 2020, put it: “A dedication to rural sustainability should inspire thinking around the linkages that exist. The question of rural physicians and rural healthcare is connected to rural health inequities which are connected to rural social inequities which are connected to rural capital flight and the changing face of agriculture and who stays behind, the closure of rural schools etc. You have to think about all of this as a collective. But the policy response under all Alberta governments since forever has been to occasionally throw some money at rural regions without much thought to any broader development goals. How will this actually support rural communities in a sustained way?”

In tandem with an increasing sense of resentment, support for Wexit seems to be growing in rural Alberta. I suspect some smaller oil companies, eager to be free of federal restrictions, will chip in some cash to back such a venture. But perhaps rural Albertans might try something different in their quest to upend the status quo.

Rather than Wexit, imagine a rural-based provincial party emerging in Alberta, running candidates only in rural ridings and advocating, first and foremost, for the well-being of rural Alberta. A “Bloc Rural,” if you like. It would lean conservative, no doubt, but more importantly, rural would be at its core. An existing party (Alberta Party?) might support many of the same policies, but the lack of a rural core will prevent widescale buy-in. Rural identity is a powerful force outside cities.

The new party would probably support the UCP’s efforts to address rural crime, fortify property rights, shrink the salaries of Edmonton-based civil servants—whatever rural Albertans deem important. But the party would also work to ensure doctors are recruited rather than driven out of rural towns. It would advocate for an education funding model that ensures no student has to ride a bus for three hours daily. It would demand affordable high-speed internet for all, maintenance of basic infrastructure in rural municipalities, creation of a subsidized transportation network capable of delivering rural citizens to specialist medical appointments in Edmonton or Calgary. Above all, it would craft a well-designed social and economic plan that provides hope for the future.

Given the resurgence of the NDP in Alberta politics, a new party consistently occupying a large number of rural seats would make minority governments much more likely. In such a scenario, a new party could demand a meaningful policy commitment to rural Alberta in exchange for its support, improving conditions across the region. As importantly, it might help stem a growing tide of resentment in the region before it becomes destructive. And while the idea may seem unrealistic, even letting one’s mind wander in this direction could be a helpful exercise in focusing on what policies are in fact in the best interests of rural Alberta. 

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Rural Resentment appeared first on Alberta Views.

by James Wilt
Between the Lines
2020/$27.95/293 pp.

In his debut book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?, James Wilt, a former Calgary journalist now based in Winnipeg, systematically dismantles every conceivable anti-public-transit excuse. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with academics, transit planners and community activists, he largely focuses on how three recent “revolutions”—electric cars, private ride sharing companies and autonomous vehicles—are merely a continuation of the corporate manufacturing of car culture (which he terms “automobility”). Not only will these technologies not improve mobility, he argues, they actually increase congestion, deepen inequality, throw existing public transit into crisis and distract us from the real solution—which is, as Wilt persuasively argues with numerous examples, simply a properly funded, well-planned public transit system.

Countering politicians’ complaint that “public transit costs too much,” Wilt points to the high price of automobility: the costs to car owners (vehicle, fuel, insurance, maintenance, parking), plus costs we all pay (whether we own a vehicle or not) for road construction and maintenance; healthcare costs related to collisions, poor air quality, and isolation; and environmental costs due to pollution and land loss. Wilt reveals data showing that in Vancouver, for every $1 a car owner paid to drive, society paid $9.20. In comparison, riding the bus cost society $1.50, while cycling cost 8 cents, and walking 1 cent. This basic math is often disregarded by governments at all levels, including Alberta’s UCP government, which recently included new highway-building as part of its economic stimulus plan.

The automobility “revolutions” also cause harm to equality and democracy. Wilt outlines how private ride-sharing endangers women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and the elderly; exacerbates poverty; and exploits drivers and undermines worker rights. For example, Uber obligates drivers to be independent contractors rather than employees, meaning drivers have to pay all costs, and minimum wage and overtime laws don’t apply to them (some Uber drivers make so little income, they live in their cars). Wilt also details how autonomous vehicles risk our privacy by collecting and sharing personal data. Surveillance in all transit, he points out, reflects and reinforces systemic racism, disproportionately targeting poor people and people of colour.

Unfortunately, many people (including city councillors) have been fooled by the lobbying and marketing of Uber and Elon Musk—and also by Lime and Bird, whose scooters now clutter sidewalks in Edmonton and Calgary—into thinking we can rely on private ownership of transit. We cannot, and to this point Wilt pays good attention to buses, whose affordability avoids the public–private ownership issues plaguing even LRT. Wilt might, however, have noted that their affordability also enables transit implementation all at once as a system—which is necessary for public transit to actually work—rather than piecemeal construction. For instance, the Belgian city of Ghent changed its transportation system literally overnight; the result: car use fell, public transit use and cycling rose, congestion was alleviated, local business increased, noise levels dropped and air quality improved. Edmonton and Calgary could undertake similar overnight transformations, introducing truly convenient bus systems offering frequency, wide coverage, accessibility, heated main shelters and free fare. Who wouldn’t take the bus then And we too could enjoy healthy, livable cities. We could also improve buses between our cities—why wait for expensive rail?

As Wilt’s book makes clear, poor public transit is a political choice. We can’t afford not to implement public transit right, and right away.

—Kristine Kowalchuk is an instructor at NAIT and a co-founder of Edmontonians for Responsible Urban Public Transit (ERUPT).

The post Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? appeared first on Alberta Views.

The stories keep coming. Record sales of electric cars across Canada. A video of an electric Ford F-150 towing a freight train. A video of a Tesla CyberTruck defeating an F-150 in a tug-of-war. Electric vehicles are in the spotlight.

But despite the buzz, little more than 3,200 electric vehicles are registered in Alberta, compared to almost 31,000 in BC and 59,000 in Quebec. Why Because BC and Quebec have policies that incentivize citizens to buy and drive electric cars, from rebates to new charging infrastructure to requirements that automakers sell more of the vehicles. In fact, after 2040, automakers will only be able to sell electric cars in BC.

Alberta would benefit from doing the same.

But why bother, you ask If electric cars are as good as the headlines tell us, why ban gas cars Why not just let Albertans decide whether and, if so, when they want to go electric?

Consider the incandescent light bulb. Canada phased these out starting in 2014 to cut energy waste and carbon pollution. Is your life any worse for it Your energy bill is certainly lower. The old bulbs were inefficient. Similarly, gas cars waste four times more energy than electric cars do—only about 20 per cent of the energy created from burning fuel turns your wheels, compared to 80 per cent efficiency for electric vehicles.

As with light bulbs, gas cars are being replaced with more efficient versions. Indeed, electric cars already cut fuel costs by up to 80 per cent in Alberta (assuming an electricity cost of $0.08/kWh and a gas cost of $0.94/L). Many Albertans will recoup a higher upfront cost within the car’s lifetime. In Canada, vehicles are typically replaced about every six years.

Considering that BC’s ban doesn’t come into effect until 2040, and that electric cars are already near sticker-price parity, an eventual ban on sales of new gas cars will not be difficult for anyone. A phase-out by 2040 would simply prevent a few Albertans from making a decision that will not only cost them down the road (literally) but the rest of us too.

We’re facing a climate crisis. In 2019 Alberta experienced its worst wildfire season since 1981. Transportation is responsible for around 12 per cent of Alberta’s emissions. Electric cars can be a significant part of the solution.

It’s not as though Alberta would be the only major oil and gas producer to embrace electric cars. More than half the vehicles sold in Norway in the first six months of 2019 were electric. Texas, the biggest fossil fuel producer in the US, implemented an electric car rebate, doubling sales of the vehicles between 2017 and 2018.

The world has woken up to the benefits of going electric. As a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst recently put it, it’s likely “global sales of conventional passenger cars have already passed their peak.” Electric cars are here, delivering environmental and economic benefits alike. Putting the right policies in place in Alberta is a light bulb of an idea.

Oumar Dicko, the economist with the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, says no.

If I may go back to Adam Smith, the invisible hand is the notion that without external intervention, consumers and firms create an efficient allocation of resources in the market. The famous metaphor also suggests that government interference creates inefficiencies and results almost always in market failure. Even more problematic is when governments try to dictate consumer choice and preference.

New Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandates and targets in Quebec, BC and federally are glaring examples of well-intentioned environmental policies infringing on normal market mechanisms. Absent the power to directly tell consumers what vehicles they can buy—which quite rightly in a liberal democracy such as ours is a non-starter—governments are trying to achieve similar ends through the back door.

Over the past two decades the auto industry has drastically increased fuel economy and mitigated its environmental and carbon footprint. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested to this end. And it’s not just ZEVs that have improved; the eco-footprint of vehicles in all segments is smaller. Internal combustion engines (ICE) now use technology that makes them more fuel-efficient than ever. This trend has been driven by the market aligning with consumer demand.

Canadians’ demand for ZEVs is growing. However, phase-out targets such as BC’s (no new ICE cars can be sold in that province after 2040) are extremely ambitious and reflect neither the consumer rate of adoption for ZEVs nor the infrastructural capacity to handle such a fast transition. In 2018 nearly 45,000 plug-in EVs were sold in Canada, which comprised less than 2.5 per cent of all new vehicles sold. The federal government’s goal to increase consumer demand for ZEVs more than four-fold within the next five years is similarly unrealistic.

Some 97 per cent of our ZEV market is in Quebec, BC and Ontario—provinces with incentives to purchase these vehicles. As of late 2019, only 3,200 electric vehicles were on the road in Alberta. Since Ontario scrapped its rebates last fall, ZEV sales there declined by close to 15 per cent, indicating the strong correlation between incentives and the ZEV adoption rate.

Other impediments to consumer demand for ZEVs include higher upfront costs, lack of charging stations, range and technology uncertainty, a limited array of sizes and models, and lack of public awareness. While government targets are focused on increasing supply, it is as critical to overcome barriers on the demand side. Requiring that manufacturers and dealers sell a minimum number of EVs in a jurisdiction absent any evidence that such demand exists is not the way to do it.

Virtually every carmaker now offers a ZEV model. It is paramount for federal and provincial governments to work closely with industry to implement a realistic set of policies that support the growth of ZEVs in the market without limiting consumer choice and disrupting market trends.

Dan Woynillowicz responds to Oumar Dicko.

Two words of a lie at the crux of a proposed gas car phase-out: climate change. Economists estimate the impact of climate change, if we do nothing, could be a long-term 20 per cent reduction in the world’s GDP. The recession in 2007 saw a decline of around 4 per cent for two years. Climate change is arguably the biggest market failure in history. By failing to price a negative externality—in this case carbon pollution—we enabled its overproduction. In effect, we put all of that pollution on a credit card for the next generation, with a particularly brutal interest rate.

In the event of a market failure of this size, government intervention is not only warranted but essential. Business as usual isn’t an option, because the most disruptive scenario of all is to do nothing. Electric cars are as central to addressing climate change as gas cars are to causing it. Legislating a 2040 phase-out of gas cars is a reasonable, achievable and wise intervention.

First and foremost, a phase-out gives automakers clarity and time—two things every industry wants from regulation. Twenty years is a long way off. Automakers have options. And they have a serious competitor in Tesla, now the biggest automaker in US history by market capitalization.

It’s also not the first time we’ve traded one type of transport for a better one. There were few gas pumps and paved roads when Henry Ford unveiled his car in 1910. Within 15 years, annual sales of his Model T hit almost two million. Modern consumers are less afraid to adopt technologies to change their lives for the better. Especially when the economics make sense.

Electric cars are fast becoming the norm. In the Netherlands, electric vehicle sales exploded in 2019, rising to 54 per cent of overall sales in December. In China, market share grew to 5 per cent last year, meaning 2.3 million electric vehicles are on China’s roads. More than half of Albertan respondents to a 2019 poll said they wanted electric vehicles to become the majority of consumer vehicles sold here.

Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s interfering with the electric vehicle market in Canada more than anything, it’s a lack of supply. In 2018 only 40 per cent of BC dealerships had an electric car available, with most saying customers would face wait times of 3–12 months. And so the province required automakers to sell more electric vehicles and keep up with demand.

It’s fair to ask whether this intervention is truly required, since automakers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to shift production. But the speed at which automakers are evolving is too slow to keep pace with both consumer preference and the imperative to cut pollution. A study of ad spending by big carmakers in the US found 10 times more was spent on SUVs and trucks than electric vehicles. What’s optimal for their bottom line—selling SUVs remains markedly more profitable—can’t be allowed to serve as a brake on this transition.

If Alberta doesn’t put its hand up, Albertan consumers are going to be left at the bottom of an increasingly long waitlist for the latest electric vehicles.

The province will also find itself missing out on opportunities. Alberta had some 361 public charging stations in 2018. But add a phase-out to the mix, and building charging infrastructure is a significant business opportunity—BC has almost 2,000 such stations already. Factor in that most electric vehicle owners also want a charger installed where they live, and the opportunity for businesses and electricians that install and maintain this equipment is massive. A phase-out points to the destination and lets innovators take the wheel.

Consider the alternative: relying solely on increasing efficiency to reduce pollution. Despite improvements in technology, Canadians drive the least-efficient cars in the world, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2019, SUVs, vans and trucks made up 90 per cent of new vehicle sales in Alberta, up from 70 per cent a decade ago. What’s more, President Trump has plans to weaken North American emissions standards, itself an example of successful government intervention.

Even when charged on Alberta’s partially coal-powered grid, a Hyundai Kona EV will produce about one-third the pollution of a gas-powered Ford F-150, despite packing a lot more horsepower. Alberta is on track to halve coal powered-electricity in the next three years and fully phase it out by 2029, meaning your electric car will get cleaner the longer you drive it.

And, finally, don’t have it be said that electric cars aren’t very Albertan. Lithium, used in batteries, is a burgeoning industry in parts of this province. As for bitumen It can serve as a source of carbon fibre, enabling remarkably strong but lighter vehicles.

But let’s come back to the bottom line: climate change. Global warming is already threatening us. It’s estimated that the Fort McMurray fire was 1.5 to six times more likely because of climate change. It’s time for Albertans to accelerate toward a safer future and a diversified economy—in an electric car. Or, sure, that electric F-150, if you really need the truck.

Oumar Dicko responds to Dan Woynillowicz.

The automobile industry fully shares and values Canada’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate change. We understand the need to improve fuel efficiency and the environmental benefits of alternative fuel sources such as electricity and hydrogen. In fact, our industry has invested billions of dollars in greening vehicles and on improving fuel economy. Over the last decade, more innovation has taken place in the sector in terms of fuel efficiency than in the previous 90 years. Today’s new vehicles are far cleaner and more efficient than anything the industry has ever produced. This came as a result of ever-increasing consumer demand for greener vehicles and government climate regulation.

In addition, the industry is investing billions of dollars to make zero-emission vehicles more viable for the mass market and to increase the rate of consumer adoption. But current low gasoline prices, consumer preference for relatively larger automobiles such as sport-utility vehicles and crossovers, and a lack of electric vehicle infrastructure mean ZEVs still represent a small share of total vehicle sales, even in Quebec and BC, which have less than 10 per cent market penetration. In Alberta demand for ZEVs is less than 1 per cent of
the market.

This is not to say that demand isn’t increasing. It has increased significantly all over Canada, thanks to federal incentives. But it is still very much concentrated in provinces with local incentive programs.

The main technological impediments to ZEV adoption are also being addressed by the automobile industry. For example, “range anxiety”—the fear that a battery charge won’t be sufficient to get a driver where they need to be—is constantly diminishing, as today’s ZEV batteries are improving and battery charges on most new models are more than enough to cover the majority of daily trips by the average Canadian.

Costs are also coming down, though they’re not yet on par with traditional internal combustion vehicles, and consumer awareness is much greater. ZEV demand will likely continue to grow if governments and industry work collaboratively to address the fundamental challenges currently holding back the proliferation of ZEVs on our roads.

ZEV mandates such as BC’s, however, amount to effectively dictating what products manufacturers should bring to market and what vehicles the consumer should purchase. This kind of government interference in market dynamics without consideration for consumer preference and choice almost always leads to disappointing results at best and outright failure
at worst.

The reality is that consumer demand drives trends in the automotive market. The electric vehicle “boom” in Quebec and BC over the last couple of years is the result of consumer demand supported by the right set of government policies. The record sales numbers in these two provinces occurred before a ZEV mandate was in place. In Ontario ZEV demand tanked when the provincial government scrapped its incentive program, indicating that government policy should be focused on addressing demand-side barriers to adoption.

Phasing out gasoline vehicles and ordering manufacturers and dealers to sell a certain percentage of ZEVs in a jurisdiction absent any evidence that such demand exists is not sound policy. A ZEV mandate in Alberta will restrict families and businesses from purchasing the type of vehicles they need. Dealers, seeking to meet ZEV sales targets where no demand for such vehicles exists, will be coerced to sell fewer internal combustion vehicles, hurting their businesses and jobs, and generating fewer tax revenues for the provincial and federal governments.

Consumers, faced with this new reality, will move to purchase the vehicles they need in another jurisdiction or keep their older vehicles. The result will be a massive disruption to the market with no positive impact on the environment.

The automobile industry is committed to developing fuel-efficient, greener vehicles and has made impressive progress in improving internal combustion engines while also bringing ZEV technologies to market. Models and supply are increasing in every segment of the market and manufacturers are making the necessary adjustments to production patterns in order to meet increasing ZEV demand all across the globe. Governments should abandon the failed strategy of interfering in market dynamics, and instead keep working closely with the industry to promote consumer demand of ZEVs through incentive programs, investment in charging infrastructure and consumer awareness.

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Should Alberta Phase Out Gas Cars? appeared first on Alberta Views.

In March of last year Justin Trudeau stood in front of an audience of business leaders and politicians from Saudi Arabia to Texas, India to Russia, the US to China. His message was unequivocal—to leave a resource such as the oil sands undeveloped was both irresponsible and unrealistic. “We have the third largest oil reserves in the world… No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil and just leave it in the ground. The resource will be developed. Our job is to ensure this is done responsibly, safely and sustainably.” Trudeau reflected a pragmatism many in Alberta wouldn’t have expected—or believed possible—from a Liberal prime minister.

The oil sands are an important part of Alberta’s and Canada’s economy. The industry is one of the largest employers in the country, responsible for more than 400,000 direct and indirect jobs. According to studies by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the oil sands will pay an estimated $1.5-trillion in taxes and royalties—provincially and federally—over the next 20 years. That’s money to fund what governments are elected to do: healthcare, social services, education and infrastructure. In the absence of that economic stimulus, the futures of our province and country alike would be compromised. That’s why Trudeau said it would be irresponsible to leave the oil sands undeveloped.

But as Albertans and energy companies are only too aware, developing the oil sands is not so straightforward. It is expensive, the resource is far from market, and we have insufficient infrastructure (i.e., pipelines), not to mention the persistent concerns about the environmental impact of development. The recent war of rhetoric between Alberta and BC— who clearly don’t give Alberta enough credit for our robust Climate Leadership Plan—is evidence enough of that.

And that’s before getting into broader arguments over the future of oil as the adoption of electric vehicles continues to gather momentum, not to mention the automobile market’s disruption by ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles. These factors, which are contributing to an era of energy transition, will undoubtedly alter demand for oil and gas.

As emerging economies continue to grow, so too will demand for energy—and that includes oil.

But the key word is “alter.” Demand won’t be eliminated. As emerging economies continue to grow—and lift billions of people out of poverty—so too will the demand for energy, and that includes oil; it will continue to be the dominant fuel for transportation for decades to come.

What overrides all of this is that Alberta—and other oil and gas producing jurisdictions—must come to terms with the era of abundance of supply rather than one of scarcity (which is what drove up the price of oil to US$140 per barrel). High oil prices did what they were supposed to do—spur technological developments such as fracking that have contributed to the surfeit of oil and natural gas by enabling access to reserves that could not have been produced previously.

The fall in oil prices (also caused by geopolitics of the Middle East and within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has been felt in the oil sands in several ways: a push to increase competitiveness and decrease costs, investment in technologies to increase productivity and reduce the environmental footprint, and a decrease in the level of investment by major corporations. The fact that Royal Dutch Shell, Marathon Oil, Statoil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips all chose to sell their oil sands assets in 2017 was seen by some people as a signal to investors that the oil sands are about to go the way of the buggy whip. But that is anything but true. While investment has decreased and the era of the oil sands megaproject may be over, to borrow from Mark Twain, rumours of the demise of the oil sands are premature.

Oil sands producers have made a number of important advancements in the past several years. They came together in 2012 to establish the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance with the goal of sharing technologies and intellectual property. Research and development within the companies themselves has yielded promising results. The per barrel emissions intensity of oil sands crude has decreased 30 per cent. Measures put in place under the government’s Climate Leadership Plan, including the oil sands emissions cap, will ensure that number continues to fall. The Clean Resource Innovation Network connects the oilpatch to academia, research institutes, government and sources of capital, and is aimed at accelerating commercialization and increasing production while delivering energy with a smaller environmental footprint.

Water use continues to decline. The oil sands is allotted 3 per cent of the Athabasca River’s annual flow, but the amount withdrawn is less than 1 per cent and most of the water used is recycled: 80 per cent in mining operations and 94 per cent at in-situ sites. Significant progress has also been made in tailings technology, aimed at reducing the size and need for the ponds but also decreasing the time it takes to reclaim the land. Canadian Natural Resources alone is spending $1.6-billion in research to decrease wastewater created by its operations.

As to the issue of cost, recent improvements in technology, both at mining and in-situ operations, mean production can be sustained at prices below $40 per barrel.

The oil sands have become—and will remain—an important part of global supply. Not only is the resource important to Canada, but the barrels produced in Alberta are an important offset to supply volatility in other parts of the world. It’s time to dispense with the polarizing rhetoric and be proud of a resource that helps eliminate energy poverty around the world, not to mention keeps our cars running in –30°C winters.

Kevin Taft, former Edmonton-Rutherford MLA and Alberta Liberal Party leader, argues for phasing out the oil sands.

It’s time to stop expanding oil sands production and start planning for the long-term phaseout of this industry. The longer we delay, the bigger the Alberta government’s problems and liabilities become.

In 2015 Alberta’s Auditor General reported that the future cleanup costs for oil sands mines were almost $21-billion and warned that industry had set aside less than 8 per cent of this amount. Unless important changes are made, the province will be on the hook for the rest, some $20-billion. The Auditor General’s estimates almost certainly understate the risks. They don’t include the cleanup costs of immense SAGD operations, with their networks of wells and industrial sites, or oil sands pipelines and other facilities, nor do they include the cleanup liabilities of the conventional oil industry.

The government has allowed oil sands companies to defer cleanup costs decades into the future, when operations will be approaching the ends of their reserves. This allows companies to pad their bottom lines by avoiding costs—a classic case of powerful industries boosting profits by shifting liabilities onto taxpayers. This is part of a massive government subsidy scheme for oil sands operators that includes rock-bottom royalties, generous tax treatments and publicly funded research programs that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The oil sands industry keeps pace with Bombardier in the govern-ment subsidy business.

Alberta taxpayers face a jeopardy all too common: When a business is in decline, investors can strip its assets for themselves and walk away from its liabilities. That was the fate of Sears pensioners, and it happened at the Giant Mine in Yellowknife (cleanup cost to taxpayers: $1-billion) and the Sydney tar ponds in Nova Scotia (cleanup cost to taxpayers: $400-million). We’re on the way to repeating this pattern at a far more expensive scale in the oil sands.

The risks increase even more if there is a general decline in the oil sands industry. As the Auditor General’s report states, the province has designed the system so that the government itself is not protected “against a broad based and rapid structural decline in the oil sands sector.” In short, if the world loses its appetite for oil sands product (a distinct possibility), the industry will not be made to clean up any of its mess—the people of Alberta will be.

But aren’t these costs more than offset by oil sands royalties flowing into our treasury Hardly. The total royalties collected from oil sands production in the past six years are $21-billion, and in several of those years royalties were based on stellar oil prices that are unlikely to return. Worse, all of that money has been spent. Alberta stopped putting royalties into the Heritage Fund in 1987, choosing instead to use royalties to keep taxes lower than in other provinces. Thirty years later Alberta is in a financial mess: royalties are spent, the tax system is unsustainably low, debt is climbing fast, and environmental liabilities are massive. The Heritage Fund in its entirety is not big enough to cover the cleanup costs of the oil sands.

We’ve spent decades propping up the oil sands; the rest of the world has been shifting to renewables.

Many Albertans may be confused about the costs and benefits of the oil sands because the situation wasn’t always this way. Until the 1990s, royalties on oil sands bitumen were much higher, and every operation had to meet specific economic and environmental requirements. In 1997 the Klein government, an eager servant of the industry, launched a “generic” oil sands scheme that removed requirements for new operations to meet special economic or social requirements and slashed royalty rates to a fraction of previous levels, to as low as 1 per cent for new projects. Global investors raced to cash in and an oil sands frenzy began. Tens of thousands of jobs were created but the frenzy would not last, and neither would the jobs.

Today, if the oil sands were a country they would be the eighth largest oil producer in the world and climbing, yet the Alberta government—which owns the oil and sells about three million barrels of bitumen a day to companies—earns more money from alcohol sales and gaming. That’s right, royalties from the oil sands are so low that in recent years the government earned more from liquor and gambling than from bitumen sales.

It’s time to stop expanding the oil sands and to start discussing how we’ll manage when production declines. Make no mistake: the industry’s demise looms. While Alberta and Canada have spent two decades propping up oil sands production, the rest of the world has been shifting to renewable energy. Virtually every major carmaker is committed to rolling out full lines of electric cars between 2019 and 2025, with the intent of ending petroleum use by the 2030s. Renewables are now winning the race against fossil fuels for electricity: from Britain to Australia to Alberta, the cheapest new power is solar and wind. Google, a massive energy user, went from zero renewables in 2010 to 100 per cent in 2017, and Apple, Microsoft, Walmart and other businesses are on similar tracks. China will invest US$360-billion in renewables from 2017 to 2020. The writing is on the wall if we would only read it.

Demand for oil and other fossil fuels will likely peak within a few years and then decline. At that point production from the oil sands will be displaced by cheaper, better-located sources. So while Alberta has all its chips on the table backing bitumen, the Europeans, Chinese, Californians and others are going to win the bet with renewables.

We need to stop gambling on the oil sands, figure out how to cut our losses and move on to a different future. It’s time to relearn a hard lesson: The interests of the oil industry are not the same as the interests of Alberta.

Deborah Yedlin responds to Kevin Taft.

It’s very easy to get swept up in the off-oil rhetoric of individuals and non-governmental organizations that believe the transportation sector can function on something other than fossil fuels. Their arguments are unrealistic.

While it is absolutely true that a revolution is underway in the context of the world’s energy mix, which includes a shift towards renewables, ride-sharing and increased adoption of efficiency standards, it does not mean demand for oil will collapse. The recently released BP statistical outlook—often seen as the gold standard for analysis of trends in the energy sector—shows that the changes taking place will see the world reach a level of peak oil demand by 2030, but nothing resembling a collapse in consumption. Its analysis shows that a worldwide ban on combustion engines by 2040 would cause oil demand to drop by 10 million barrels a day, but not cease.

What is ignored in the utopian “off oil” scenario is that despite the rise in electric vehicles and ride-sharing, the demand for car travel is going to double from current levels, primarily due to continued industrialization of the developing world, especially China and India. And the majority of those trips will take place in cars run by combustion engines.

The continued industrialization also means growth in the use of fossil fuels for trucks, ships, aircraft—modes of transportation that are much harder, if not impossible, to electrify. And consider this: the International Energy Agency is still forecasting that by 2030, 675 million people on the planet will be without access to electricity.

Lost in the anti oil sands hyperbole is the importance of the barrels produced in Alberta to providing pricing stability and certainty to world oil markets. Research and development take time, just as it took almost 40 years for the oil sands to be profitable. But ongoing efforts will yield the results Albertans and Canadians are looking for: oil sands production that is sustainable from both an environmental and a cost perspective, not to mention provide a host of spinoff technologies that can be applied to other sectors.

For too long the oil sands has been seen as Alberta’s dirty secret. But it is has attracted more than $217-billion in investment, supports more than 400,000 direct and indirect jobs across the country, and is expected to generate $1.5-trillion in taxes and royalties over the next two decades, not to mention support Canadians’ retirement through investment portfolios. It’s time to change the dialogue and be proud of a tremendous resource whose development is underpinned by strong regulation and oversight not seen anywhere else, not to mention by innovations that continue to decrease its carbon footprint.

Kevin Taft responds to Deborah Yedlin.

In 1950 there were more than 100 coal mines in the Drumheller Valley, the economy was good and jobs were plentiful. But history was at an inflection point. Twelve years later almost every mine was closed and Drumheller’s economy was shattered. There was still plenty of coal in the ground but railways had converted from coal to diesel and home heating from coal to natural gas.

Justin Trudeau, Rachel Notley and the oil sands industry should remember this lesson, because history is at another inflection point. Governments and corporations around the world are intent on replacing petroleum with renewable energy as soon as possible. No matter what politicians and the oil industry proclaim, most oil sands reserves will remain in the ground.

The single biggest use for oil from Alberta is as fuel for internal combustion engines in cars and trucks, but the internal combustion engine is on the same track today as the steam engine was in 1950. In 2017 Norway became the first country where electrified cars outsold internal combustion cars, and by 2025 the sales of internal combustion cars there are expected to be zero. Zero! Norway’s not a fluke, it’s the thin edge of the wedge. Germany’s government voted to eliminate sales of gasoline and diesel cars by 2030 and other European countries are following suit, as is India. Internal combustion vehicle sales in China, the world’s largest car market, are expected to peak in about two years and then steadily decline as electric vehicles take over.

Governments around the world realize global warming must be addressed quickly and many have policies to phase out carbon emissions, while technology makes wind, solar and other renewable energies better than ever. Electricity is now cheaper from wind and solar than from coal and natural gas, and the operating costs of electric vehicles are less than half those of gasoline vehicles.

The glory days are over for the oil sands. In April 2017, Moody’s Investors Service published an in-depth analysis of the oil and gas sector that listed several significant risks, including lower demand and advances in alternative energy “that could occur at a faster pace than anticipated.” The Energy East pipeline was cancelled because it didn’t make financial sense, and the Keystone XL—if it is ever built—depends on guarantees from the Alberta government. The foundations of global oil markets are already shaky and the oil sands will not be spared.

We need to start planning now for an Alberta and a Canada after the oil sands.

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post The Future of the Oil Sands appeared first on Alberta Views.

Such future prosperity might be hard to imagine today. The global glut of oil has deeply cut prices and production. This year, ExxonMobil slashed 3.5 billion barrels of oil sands crude from its proven reserves because it estimated the cost to produce it would be higher than its potential sale price. Oil giants Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips both sold most of their Alberta assets; Norway’s Statoil ASA sold all.

Bloomberg predicts global oil demand could fall by two million barrels a day by 2028 or earlier, largely due to more people buying electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement—the first universal climate accord, which Canada signed in December 2015—commits us to lower greenhouse gas emissions. To meet this goal, Alberta’s NDP government has capped greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands at 100 megatonnes per year.

The low prices have hammered the province’s finances. Alberta’s non-renewable resource revenues in 2015/16 were $2.8-billion—down from an average of $9.3-billion over the previous five years. The provincial deficit for 2016 was $10.8-billion. Accounting firm Deloitte sees “no clear indication as to when the deficits will cease.”

It has become accepted wisdom that the province needs to diversify its economy. But how Enter the Energy Diversification Advisory Committee (EDAC), created by the government in October 2016. Its members see challenges ahead. “If things stay status quo, we’re going to lose people, the smartest ones first,” says Leo de Bever, the former CEO of the Alberta Investment Management Corporation and now a member of EDAC. “In the short term, we have to exploit oil and gas in the most responsible manner that we can. In the long term, we have to ask: What do we do with that stuff when we no longer burn it We’re not spending enough time thinking about where we’re going. Our central goal should be: What’s an alternative use of carbon?”

One solution is to shift from simple, low-value extraction to value-added processing. Adding value—essentially processing the raw product more, or a lot more—means turning raw oil and gas into fuels and petrochemicals, the latter used as building blocks for industrial and consumer products. Processing, in the words of one industry expert, could move Alberta further along the oil and gas value chain and transform us from fossil fuel “lumberjacks” to “furniture makers.” The multibillion-dollar question, though, is: Will industry do it if government isn’t involved?

Further processing could transform us from fossil fuel “lumberjacks” to “furniture makers.”

Processing oil and gas in Alberta has long been a matter of hot debate. The argument has ping-ponged between calls to “leave it to the market” and assertions that government “must encourage” value-added processing within the province. The latter view has often prevailed.

In the 1970s Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservative government wanted to bolster the petrochemical sector by using the province’s massive and easily accessed supplies of ethane. The substance can be isolated from natural gas to make ethylene—used to manufacture plastics and detergents. Industry, however, showed little enthusiasm for the idea.

So—the story goes—a civil servant under then Energy Minister Don Getty started to hide gas pipeline permit requests in a drawer rather than process them. Facing the threat of a freeze in development, the gas companies perked up. The PCs then sweetened things with royalty credits for companies that committed to build ethane plants. And it worked. Four of Canada’s six ethane cracker plants were built in Alberta, and ethylene is now the largest input into Alberta’s plastic resins and plastic products industry. In 2015 the industry’s revenues were $6.3-billion, nearly half the total petrochemical sector revenues of $14-billion.

Another Lougheed-era idea was the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), established in 1974 as a Crown corporation with a $100-million budget. AOSTRA supported basic and applied research—at universities and through sharing the costs of projects on private company leases—to turn Alberta’s vast bitumen deposits into a commercial oil sands industry. Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) technology, which allows for the extraction of underground, or “in situ,” bitumen resources, emerged from AOSTRA research.

Yet industry refused to put money into the development of SAGD. In a 2013 interview with Alberta Oil magazine, Clement Bowman, the agency’s first chairperson, recalled, “[SAGD] was funded 100 per cent by AOSTRA and this dramatically changed the industry. Developing in situ oil sands resources would have been much, much slower if not for AOSTRA.” Today 21 of Alberta’s 27 active oil sands projects use SAGD.

The province’s investment in value-added continued in 2007 with premier Ed Stelmach’s Bitumen Royalty-in-Kind (BRIK) program, where the province agreed to accept bitumen in lieu of cash royalties and send it to Alberta upgraders and refineries to—ideally—generate higher revenues. Eight new upgraders were proposed and hundreds of billions of dollars slated for investment. Alberta had a forecasted upgrading capacity of 3.4 million barrels per day at that time. Today Total upgrading capacity is just 1.3 million barrels.

Andrew Leach says the biggest “value add” is taking oil sands ore and turning it into bitumen.

Most of those projects were abandoned. Suncor and Total E&P Canada’s Voyageur upgrader, for example, was scrapped in 2012—because margins between the cost of bitumen and upgraded oil were shrinking. A partially built concrete ruin near Fort McMurray is the only reminder of the $3.5-billion invested in the project. Yet the BRIK program persists.

The Sturgeon Refinery was built, despite the weaker-than-expected numbers, and it serves as an interesting case study. Sturgeon is a three-phase joint project between Canadian Natural Resources and North West Refining that will receive 75 per cent of its bitumen feedstock from the BRIK program. The refinery in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, northeast of Edmonton by Fort Saskatchewan, will produce low-sulphur diesel, diluent and vacuum oil. Uniquely, the project will also capture nearly 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ a day to inject into depleted oil fields. It’s the first refinery constructed in Canada since 1984, and its first phase could cost $9.3-billion—more than double the initial planning estimate of $4-billion. Loan payments for capital costs are “effectively guaranteed” by a contract with Alberta’s government.

Sturgeon’s cost overruns are a “boondoggle” according to former PC finance minister Ted Morton. To ensure the refinery got built, the PC government retained ownership of the bitumen and committed to pay the company a fee, or “toll,” to process it—a cost that adds up to $26-billion over the 30-year life of the contract. It is “almost impossible for the investment to break even,” Morton said in a 2015 interview with the Calgary Herald. “I would be surprised if there is a way out.”

Some still see value in the project. A December 2016 Conference Board of Canada report, “Is There Value in Adding Value?”, estimated Sturgeon will generate $385-million per year in direct and indirect tax revenues for government in addition to royalties on the sale of the refined fuel and products. It is also expected to create about 500 permanent jobs. Ian MacGregor, president and CEO of North West Refining, says such benefits are why government should subsidize the next phases of the project. “The government committed the barrels that they collect through the royalty system and we need them to do that again,” he told an industry publication, JWN, in April 2017. “We have to keep progressing down that [value] chain. …It’s an emergency now.”

Andrew Leach, a professor of energy policy at the University of Alberta, challenges that assumption. He says we’re already adding the biggest value by extracting “oil sands ore” buried under boreal forest and turning it into bitumen. “You convert [the ore] to something that is worth $30 or $40 or $50 a barrel, depending on the time. The margins—the value add—at that stage are much higher than going from bitumen to synthetic crude, or from synthetic crude to refined product.”

Subsidizing big upgraders and refineries, Leach says, can amount to a transfer of wealth to refinery owners and some Alberta workers rather than a benefit to all Albertans. “How do you prioritize government spending?” he says. “I wouldn’t say you spend the money either on refining or on schools and hospitals. It’s just a question of: Does this make sense as a government investment Historically there hasn’t been a strong argument.”

Today, oil revenues in Alberta are still mostly linked to extraction. Five upgraders and four refineries are operating in the province, with the Sturgeon Refinery expected to be fully operational in early 2018. The refineries produce gasoline, diesel, oil lubricants and asphalt, but processed less than 20 per cent of Alberta’s total crude production in 2015. Most of the value-added crude production in the province comes from upgrading heavy oil and raw bitumen. The tar-like bitumen is mixed with diluent to flow through pipelines, or upgraded to synthetic crude oil, mostly for export to the US. In 2015 just 45 per cent of raw bitumen was upgraded in Alberta. That’s less than the 58 per cent in 2010—a move backward.

How has Alberta fared with revenues from processing, then Today we are “Canada’s leading producer of petrochemicals,” with abundant supplies of methane and ethane, according to Alberta Energy. But the petrochemical sector—which adds value by using natural gas to produce petrochemicals for goods such as plastics, antifreeze and fertilizer—is still a relatively small part of our hydrocarbon industry. Natural gas and byproducts contributed $493-million to provincial revenues in 2015/16, or less than one-fifth of Alberta’s annual non-renewable resource revenues.

So, back to the ping-pong match between market and government. In a final report Alberta’s 2015 Royalty Review Advisory Panel said: “Alberta has never purely ‘left it to the market’ to determine the destiny of our resources.” The public interest question for government—now as in the past—is how to influence that destiny. In a December 2016 interview with The Tyee, Premier Rachel Notley said industry will pull all the bitumen it can out of the ground under the emissions cap: “It’s just a question of whether we get the maximum value for it as the owners of the resource.”

The answer, unsurprisingly, is unclear. In October 2016 Alberta’s Minister of Energy, Margaret McCuaig-Boyd, convened the EDAC to advise the government on this specific question: “What additional steps can Alberta take to build a more diversified and resilient energy economy that works with industry and communities to create jobs, moves the energy industry up the value chain, and diversifies the energy industry into new end products?”

EDAC has two co-chairs, Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, and Jeanette Patell from GE Canada, along with five other members, including economist Leo de Bever. The government formed the group after the royalty review panel recommended it support value-added opportunities for bitumen—through partial upgrading—and for natural gas, particularly propane, which is so abundant in Alberta that companies have paid to get rid of it.

The NDP government’s initial step was the Petrochemicals Diversification Program. In December 2016 it awarded $300-million in royalty credits to Pembina Pipeline Corp. and $200-million in credits to Inter Pipeline Ltd., to help each company build petrochemical plants—using propane as a feedstock—in the Heartland industrial zone. “Alberta is a tougher place to build,” said McCuaig-Boyd. Subsidies, she said, help to “overcome construction challenges and level the playing field with places like Louisiana.”

The NDP hopes to kick-start a propane-into-plastic-pellets program similar to the PC government’s 1970s-era ethane-to-ethylene project. Petrochemical companies, which don’t pay royalties, are awarded credits once a plant is operating. These credits can be traded to natural gas suppliers, which subtract the credits from what they would have paid the government in royalties. Inter Pipeline expects to make a final investment decision on a $1.85-billion propylene plant—and a separate, $1.3-billion polypropylene plant—late this year. Pembina says it will decide on a $4.2-billion propane-to-propylene-to-polypropylene plant by “mid-2018.” Propylene is used in products such as resins and aircraft de-icing fluids; polypropylene is a plastic found in everything from bottle caps to Canada’s new polymer dollar bills.

According to the province, the publicly subsidized projects would create at least 3,700 construction jobs and 345 permanent jobs. But profit is not guaranteed; petrochemical clusters in the US, the Middle East and China are already turning a surplus of propane into plastic pellets, potentially driving prices down. Some fear the Alberta initiative will be late to the market.

Subsidies can transfer wealth to owners and some workers rather than benefit all Albertans.

The most transformative proposal for the future is “bitumen beyond combustion” (BBC). Engineer Ed Brost, one of those who came up with the BBC concept, says we need to re-envision the resource. “The world is heading toward electrification of transport,” he says. “If we stop burning oil, the resource is useless unless we come up with other uses.” BBC would create premium asphalt, carbon fibre and other high-value products from bitumen, with little or no greenhouse gas emissions. Alberta Innovates, a provincially funded research corporation, is collaborating with the Bowman Centre in Ontario to establish a pilot project near Sarnia using bitumen piped from Alberta. AOSTRA’s Clement Bowman is an adviser. The project is in the lab research phase as proponents seek to build a business case.

If commercially feasible, a larger plant could be built near Fort Saskatchewan, says Brost. While there have been partnership talks with oil companies, “nobody’s come up with a cheque yet,” he says. “We’re creating a massive environmental [liability] in northern Alberta. If we’re going to do that, let’s at least maximize the benefits; we want to create wealth and jobs in Canada.”

In the short term “the economics have not been kind” to value-added within Alberta, the 2015 royalty review panel noted in its final report. But “partial upgrading of bitumen,” the panel argued, “offers a potential opportunity to diversify our product range.” Partial upgrading refers to processing bitumen so it will flow through a pipeline with minimal diluent. Raw bitumen typically needs about 30 per cent diluent, usually natural gas condensate, to flow through a pipeline. Eliminate the diluent, and 30 per cent more crude can be transported, which could mean less push from industry to build new export pipelines.

For companies extracting “that lovely, gooey bitumen”—as Wildrose energy critic Leela Aheer called it in the Legislature on December 12, 2016—partial upgrading is the “technological Holy Grail for the oil sands industry.” Partial upgrading “does not upgrade bitumen to a light crude, but to something resembling more of a medium or heavy crude, and at a lower cost per barrel than full upgrading,” according to a 2017 report from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. Despite competition from an increasing abundance of US light crude, “gaps in several North American refineries could be filled by this partially upgraded Alberta oil.”

More than 10 different partial upgrading technologies are being developed for use in Alberta. None of them are commercialized. But several companies are close, including Calgary-based Nsolv, which has patented a technology in which a warm, purified solvent—usually butane or propane—is injected underground through horizontal wells, warming the bitumen until it flows into a production well. The process uses no water and lowers GHG emissions by up to 80 per cent compared to current SAGD processes.

Chemical engineer John Nenniger founded the company in 2003, building on his father Emil Nenniger’s research, which was started in the 1970s. In 2014 the company built a pilot plant on a Suncor lease near Fort McKay and produced 125,000 barrels of partially upgraded crude that needed no diluent to flow through a pipe. Now the company wants to build a commercial plant to prove the technology at industrial scale. It received technical endorsement and a $13-million grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) in 2016, but that isn’t enough—a commercial plant could cost more than $100-million, and no energy major has put up the money. Nsolv CEO Joe Kuhach says government funding or incentives are likely needed to get over the hump. “We’re stuck in the valley of death,” he says.

Leah Lawrence, president and CEO of SDTC, says Nsolv’s situation is typical. “Death valley” is where most new energy technologies falter, she says. It’s the funding gap where majors won’t pay to be the “first adopter” of a new technology, and government won’t cover the costs of scaling up to commercialization. As in Nsolv’s case, the gap is surprisingly wide. A 2015 study by McKinsey & Co. found that in the energy sector it typically takes 31 years to go “from idea to 75 per cent market penetration”—admittedly a high sales volume—compared to 12 years for medicine and eight years for a good consumer product idea.

As Alberta contemplates becoming the furniture builder of the fossil fuel world, the debate will only intensify. “There’s no shortage of good ideas, but there’s a shortage of capital to try out ideas,” says de Bever. “My personal advice is we need another AOSTRA, a fund to support innovation. It should be independent of government, with clear principles, and it should be able to fund at scale and cut losses quickly if a project doesn’t work out.”

But investing public money for a long-term payoff is difficult for government in a four-year election cycle. Alberta’s royalty review panel said that for partial upgrading alone, the amount of government money needed to “move the needle” is about “$300-million.” The costs are even greater for other new technologies. Still, the public appetite to transition to new sources of clean energy grows. And Alberta’s economy remains stagnant. So what’s a government to do The likely cost of doing nothing is decline.

“We must try new things,” says de Bever. “We’re in dire straits. A lack of imagination and a lack of openness to change is probably our biggest problem in Alberta.”

Tadzio Richards is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post Beyond Burning appeared first on Alberta Views.

To the 14th Premier of the Province of Alberta:

Dear Premier,

Welcome to your new office. Can’t say I envy the job you’ve worked so hard to get, but I’ll wish you well nonetheless. In any case, there’s an issue I’d like to take up with you.

I’m not sure if you can even see your desk for all the problems stacked all over it, but I’d like to talk to you about the biggest one, the bag of angry cats wrapped in a hornet’s nest that someone stuffed in that tar-smudged oil barrel sitting there in the middle of the room. Let’s talk about energy. Now, the contents of that barrel in your office are worth enough on the open market just now that it might seem less urgent than healthcare or wooing back Wildrose Alliance defectors. But make no mistake: the really big challenge facing you is energy.

It’s no accident the word itself is a synonym for power. Energy is your government’s biggest power source, its job creation engine and revenue pump, its claim to fame and its biggest headache. Alberta will define itself on the world map of the 21st century by how it handles its energy situation. So we need to talk about Alberta’s energy situation. The tarsands, in particular.

(Do you mind if I call it “tarsands,” by the way You’re surely worried about the branding—we’ll come to that—but when I was a kid in Cold Lake in the 1980s and guys from high school dropped out to go work the rigs and came back driving shiny new Camaros, the place where they’d struck it rich was called the tarsands. When I say oilsands, I feel like I’m doing someone’s PR work for them. And I don’t think it’s necessarily our responsibility, as Albertans, to make oil companies feel better about their business in every situation.)

Alright then: the tarsands. Now, Steady Eddie talked and talked in those last months before he announced his resignation. He zipped off to Ottawa to tell Nancy Pelosi about the tarsands, and then a few weeks later he zoomed back from an energy conference on a special charter flight to explain the tarsands in person to one of the most powerful moguls in Hollywood. He chatted up European Union delegates and yakked with Anna Maria Tremonti on The Current. For six weeks last fall, one of those big, glitzy electronic billboards in Times Square flashed out a happy message about the tarsands three times per hour. There was the Alberta government, making its pitch among the blinking Coca-Cola and Cup Noodles logos in the heart of New York, New York—and you know what they say about what happens if you can make it there. Here’s what your government told Manhattan’s huddled masses: “A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar. A great neighbour provides you with 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.” Cost the province $17,000, and Ed called it money well spent—so much so that he spent another thirty grand on another hurray-for-bitumen billboard in Piccadilly Circus in London. We needed, he said, to tell “our story” about the tarsands. Do you remember the tagline on those Big Apple billboards It went like this: Tell it like it is.

So let’s tell it like it is.

Your government thinks it has an image problem. That’s why Ed was doing all that talking; that’s why his response to strident and sometimes quite technical arguments about the nature of operations in the tarsands was to polish up the province’s brand and put it up in lights on Broadway. But this isn’t ultimately about the message. You don’t have an image problem; you have a paradigm problem. You’re stuck in the energy paradigm of the First Industrial Revolution: extract the resource, burn the fuel, make money and leave a mess behind. You need to join the Second Industrial Revolution: limitless fuel, emissions-free, zero-waste, renewable. Sustainable in the real sense of that word.

It’s a big shift. Epochal. They named a high school after Ernest Manning and a provincial park after Peter Lougheed, but if you can pull this one off, you’ll outshine both of them. You can do it inside a generation using existing technology, with substantial net benefit to the province. In fact, you can do most of the paradigm-shifting work inside one electoral cycle, with a single piece of policy called a “feed-in tariff.” It’s an easily copied thing that was invented in Germany and has spread to more than 60 jurisdictions at last count. Ontario’s even got one. It creates jobs, builds a new industry, diversifies the economy and clears the air. You get green power and a piece of the fastest-growing and most dynamic tech sector this side of the Internet. It won’t cost you; it pays. It’s a way to join the conversation about the world’s energy future instead of trying to score points in an unwinnable debate. And the best part is that it doesn’t mess with the tarsands. I’ll come back to just how it does this in a minute.

Tell it like it is? Your government got caught napping. The money was so fast and easy during the boom that you didn’t really notice what was happening beyond Alberta’s borders. The rapidly intensifying scrutiny around how energy is made, what it does to the places it comes from, what it does to the climate of the whole planet when you burn it at the rate of 86 million barrels per day. The whole carbon footprint thing. “Dirty oil.” All that. I guess that’s why there was a motion at your party’s convention last year urging you to address the “image deficit,” and it’s why everyone in the oilpatch is so charged up about “managing the message.” It’s also behind those slick ads the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers spent big bucks on, the ones showing nice folks doing good work in the tarsands. Because, after all, one in six Albertans is employed directly or indirectly in fossil fuels, and there were people starting to say some seriously terrible things about the kind of people who work in the tarsands.

Your government woke up with a whopper of a post-boom hangover in 2010. Found the place pretty much trashed. The mess the tarsands bacchanal left behind was suddenly everywhere. It was much, much messier—more complex, that is—than a couple hundred dead ducks. Even as BP’s blown well filled the Gulf of Mexico with spilled crude, billboards in the hippest neighbourhoods in London called the tarsands “the other oil disaster.” The European take on the tarsands was that it amounted to “the most destructive project on earth.” Municipalities in the US—Alberta bitumen’s biggest customers—and some very big companies with very long tentacles (FedEx, Avon, Levi Strauss) were threatening to boycott emissions-heavy oil. David Schindler was brandishing photos of deformed fish pulled out of the Athabasca River. And, yes, there were more dead ducks. James Cameron called the tarsands a “black eye” and announced he was coming to see it for himself, conjuring up fears of a Titanic wave of bad press and a global protest campaign. The day he arrived, the EU parliament was debating a motion to classify tarsands oil a “high-emissions fuel.”

You’re stuck in extract-the-resource, burn-the-fuel, make-money, leave-a-mess. You need to join sustainable.

It was, on the surface, a PR mess, and your government met it as such. The Ministry of Environment upped its spending on public relations by 54 per cent—while cutting back spending on actual monitoring and compliance by 26 per cent—since 2003. The billboards blinked over Times Square and Piccadilly. Ed met James and brought some EU big shots out to see the situation for themselves. Your government did a pretty good job, actually, of toning down the rhetoric: both Cameron and the EU folks had to admit the tarsands wasn’t actually “the most destructive project on earth.” But think about that: as far as the image battle goes, making the case that Alberta’s bread-and-butter industry isn’t quite the worst industrial disaster on the planet is what passes for “winning.”

This is how it is. James Cameron had a point, and it’s worth your time. This is a guy who manages billion-dollar production budgets and casts of thousands and next-generation technology and turns them into billions more in profit; he innovates as surely as Steve Jobs or Syncrude does. He actually said something pretty smart about the middle ground in this conversation. Bet you missed it, what with the Edmonton Sun’s front page screaming “DIPSTICK!” in hundred-point type and all. So find yourself a back issue of Time magazine. September 29, 2010. Cameron was asked if tarsands exploitation can be squared with serious action on climate change. Quoth the Dipstick: “That depends on the pace of that extraction and burning versus the pace of the conversion to a renewable energy economy.” The way he put it right after his meeting with Steady Eddie was like this: “It will be a curse if it’s not managed properly. It can also be a great gift to Canada and to Alberta.”

As you know, you’re sitting on the bounty of one of the planet’s largest proven oil reserves. An enormously important strategic resource, a cheque with a lot of zeroes on it that you can cash only once. You could use it to fuel the last best boom. Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, there’s a billion Chinese waiting to get their tanks filled. What do Europeans and Hollywood types know, after all, about what it takes to be what your colleague Ron Liepert called, in his inimitable style, “a proud super energy power” Yup. You could do that. Or you could use that one-last-time bounty to buy enough rocket fuel to blast us into the front ranks of the Second Industrial Age.

I know, I know. You think you’ve got another way. A mavericky Alberta-advantaged sort of way. A billion Alberta taxpayer bucks in highfalutin’ research on carbon capture and storage. Green(-ish) bitumen upgrading. Better and better wastewater management. Tailings pond reclamation. The Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development. A great big fat transmission line for Alberta-born electricity, tethered to the inexhaustibly power-hungry grid of the USA. A couple more coal plants—“clean” coal plants—and maybe some (emissions-free!) nukes in the Peace Country. All that. Sure. Ever seen a pig wearing lipstick You might be able to sell that dolled-up ham to your political base, but you can’t fool the world. Energy’s a global game, and you won’t win with spin alone.

This is how it is: the tarsands is a ravenous consumer of power, and it mates up with Alberta’s mostly coal-fired electricity grid to make the province as a whole a colossal greenhouse gas-spewing smokestack. The oilpatch alone generates 5 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide nationally. Tarsands extraction uses enough natural gas annually to heat more than three million homes. (You could heat one in four Canadian households for what it takes to stoke the engines in the tarsands.) The industry is making great strides in water conservation, but it still swallows up a full 2 per cent of the Athabasca River’s flow. At the other end of the extraction cycle, 1.8 billion litres of toxic wastewater pour into tailings ponds per day, creating, collectively, a lake 130 square kilometres and growing. (If it were one big pond, it’d be the twelfth-largest body of water in the province.) The dam holding back Syncrude’s tailings is one of the largest on the planet.

The industry claims big gains in reclamation, and some of those claims do hold water, but the poster boy—the only certified reclaimed land in the whole tarsands to date—is a 104-hectare speck covering roughly 0.2 per cent of the total disturbed land in the Athabasca region. Also, it was never actually a mining site, just a holding area for moved earth. The shrillest of your critics say tarsands oil creates three times as much greenhouse gas per barrel as conventional crude; your government and the industry itself were correct to point out that over the entire life cycle of the barrel—the only measure that actually matters on the scale of the earth’s climate—that figure is much lower. It might even be as low as 5 to 15 per cent more greenhouse gas per barrel, as the industry analysts claim, though it’s more likely closer to the top end of the 8 to 37 per cent range reported by the Natural Resources Defense Council (or even the 82 per cent figure the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency has quoted).

Regardless, take any of those figures and triple them, because your government’s own stated production target is 3.5 million barrels per day by 2020. And even if it all isn’t particularly dirty as oil goes, and certainly not the most destructive thing on earth all by itself, it’s far from sustainable. This is how it is: the tarsands is the final chapter in the story of the First Industrial Age. It’s vital to the energy picture (and the provincial economy) of the next decade or two at a minimum. And the industry extracting it is attempting, in fits and starts, to become a more responsible environmental steward and all that. Sure. But the tarsands is intrinsically, irredeemably problematic. A necessary evil.

Illustration by Carolyn Fisher

The industry knows this, by the way. There was, for example, an article in The Economist not long ago about the tarsands controversy noting that “in private,” anonymous oil executives were quick to point out that the industry is being hampered and weakened by “lax regulations,” whose passage is your job, not theirs. (This is consistent with my own private conversations with industry people, for what that’s worth.) When the oil industry’s asking for tighter regulations, “lax” is a pretty gentle way of describing the ones you’ve got. (Please don’t mention your carbon tax. Please don’t mention your toothless intensity-based carbon tax, which not even the industry itself will gussy up with enough gloss to suggest it could possibly result in an actual reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions.) In the absence of government leadership, a handful of oilpatch players—Suncor, Statoil, Total E&P and ConocoPhillips—went and formed their own Oilsands Leadership Initiative for the express purpose of trying to change the actual environmental costs of their operations, as opposed to the perceptions of them in the eyes of random Times Square passersby.

There’s even evidence there’s awareness of this stuff in the back corridors of the federal government. You find any time on the campaign trail to read WikiLeaks Well, a particularly telling cable in that great digital pile was one from the US ambassador to Canada, advising President Obama to be aware that Jim Prentice, then the environment minister and honourable member for a riding containing many thousands of oilpatch employees, was deeply concerned about the repercussions the tarsands mess might have for Canada’s standing in the world. Prentice was, the US ambassador reported, ready to press for stronger federal oversight. (He, of course, quit the government not long after this was reported.)

Now, what about your guys Well, your Energy Resources Control Board has said it won’t regulate the industry’s growth, because controlling energy resources in such a manner is not its job—which made everyone not on the ERCB wonder just whose job it is, then. Your predecessor’s cabinet, meanwhile, mostly mouthed platitudes about being proud to be a “super energy power” and delighted to report the oilpatch’s long record of sound environmental stewardship. It did nothing else to suggest it’d heard the widespread criticism inside the oilpatch and beyond that your government’s approach to tarsands regulation is best characterized as asleep at the switch. (Actually, I prefer the term “abdication,” as in “the ERCB has abdicated its authority to regulate the industry.”)

Your government’s plan for the province’s own energy needs shows evidence of even less foresight than your plans for the oilpatch. Your predecessor’s hydrocarbon-centred plan is to run fat transmission backbones from Calgary to Edmonton and from Edmonton to the oilpatch, with some unspecified mix of giant power plants fired by coal and/or natural gas and/or radioactive fuel rods to feed the province’s growing electricity needs (and perhaps create a bunch of excess juice for profitable export south of 49). The supposed need for this stuff is based on two specious assumptions: that the energy grid and the demand curve of the next 50 years will look pretty much like that of the last 50, with huge, centralized, fossil-fuelled plants sending juice across vast empty spaces to urban and industrial centres; and that fuel costs will remain ultra-low and efficiency efforts and decentralized renewable power will stick to the do-gooder fringe.

The tarsands will be a curse if not managed properly. It can also be a great gift to Canada and Alberta.

This is a 1950s approach to the 21st century’s energy needs, a Fonzie scheme, a whack on the energy jukebox in a roomful of iPods. The transmission lines themselves are stirring up legitimate anger among landowners up and down their lengths, because whatever logic is driving the urgent need to erect high-voltage towers on their land was never really explained to them. The kindest estimate of the hit every single Alberta energy consumer will take on her power bill is something like $100 per year. Enmax, which sends bills to hundreds of thousands of Albertan households, says it’ll be more like $300. Even if coal and gas plants spewed fairy dust and nuclear rods were made of cotton candy, this would be a pretty big surcharge on more of the same. As it is, it promises to tether the province to at least $10-billion worth of a business as usual that fewer and fewer experts outside Alberta believe has a future long enough to justify the 20-year-minimum lifespan of the power lines and the fossil-powered plants proposed to feed them.

Understand: Business as usual in the energy game has ceased to be, and none of the problems it has created can be solved with PR alone. Like I said, you don’t have an image problem. You have a paradigm problem.

Do you read the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook If you don’t, you really should, as the political leader of a super energy power and all. Anyway, here’s what the 2008 report said: “Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable—environmentally, economically, socially.” That is how it is: patently unsustainable. Look as closely as you want and you still won’t find any asterisk or fine print declaring the statement void for super energy powers with quite a lot of bitumen buried in their boreal forests. And in case this was at all ambiguous, the 2009 IEA World Energy Outlook simply declared this: “The days of cheap energy are over.” Again, no caveat exempting bitumen boomtowns.

Did you hear old Dmitry Medvedev—the President of Russia, overseer of Europe’s biggest petrostate, a man about as far from an environmentalist as you can get without actually being Dick Cheney—did you hear Dmitry after the worst wildfires in recorded history forced his country to suspend grain exports No Here’s what he said: “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.” That’s the President of Russia, a nation with an economy built on wheat and fossil fuel. Think that has any relevance to your oilpatch on the prairie?

Or how about that report from Canada’s own Environmental Law Centre, the one specifically looking at coal-fired power in Alberta It noted that your government was “virtually powerless under current legislation to prioritize lower impact energy.”

Let me tell you my own most telling moment living under this asleep-at-the-switch energy regime. I was invited to the grand opening of Walmart’s new regional distribution centre in Balzac. It’s basically a giant refrigerator-freezer out there by CrossIron Mills, and it’s the food warehouse for Walmarts across western Canada. It’s also a global model of clean-powered, hyperefficient industrial design, intended to be the template for new facilities everywhere there are Walmarts, which is damn near everywhere on earth. They put up a bunch of explanatory posters in the lobby so visiting dignitaries and executives would be clear about how it uses solar energy and recycles the waste heat from its cooling system and powers its forklifts using emissions-free hydrogen.

The notice about the hydrogen fuel is quite something. Turns out they’re trucking it in from Quebec, because even hydrogen made from emissions-free electricity in Quebec and trucked across the country creates less greenhouse gas than using Alberta’s outmoded grid would. Here’s what it says on the poster: “As Alberta increases its renewable energy production and decreases its coal energy generation, manufacturing hydrogen in Alberta may become a more viable option.” I like the friendly neighbour optimism there, the expectation of change. You know what that really is, though That’s the world’s largest retailer telling you your energy policy is, as the IEA said, patently unsustainable.

There’s a conversation here, and it isn’t about good oil-exporting neighbours telling it like it is, and it isn’t being conducted exclusively or even primarily between the Alberta government and some ill-informed European environmentalists. Line up just the participants I’ve had room to mention: Walmart, the President of Russia, the European Union, the IEA, the Oilsands Leadership Initiative, and of course James “DIPSTICK!” Cameron. A more exhaustive list would have Arnold Schwarzenegger on it, the California and Ontario governments, the Chinese in general (who lead the world in the burning of coal, but also in the production of solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars) and India’s National Solar Mission. Britain’s Conservatives and Germany’s right-wing government and, well, basically all of Europe. Australia, which just passed a carbon tax. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few, or a few hundred million.

This is a conversation about change, not about image. It’s about the energy paradigm of the 21st century, which by necessity will be about oil only insofar as it can hasten the shift to emissions-free sources of power. This conversation is not going away, and it will define Alberta’s future regardless of how we tell our tarsands story. And Alberta, super energy power though it may be, is entirely absent from this conversation at present.

Illustration by Carolyn Fisher

The quickest way into the global energy conversation is a “feed-in tariff.”—a transformation engine.

The quickest way in, with the best side effects, is a feed-in tariff. It is a transformation engine. It creates a huge price incentive to substantially expand the amount of renewable energy on the electricity grid, and it guarantees the green-power market for long enough that renewable energy companies can set up shop and start manufacturing at industrial scale. It’s been applied at municipal scale (in Gainesville, Florida, among other places), at provincial scale (in Ontario in particular) and at national scale across Europe and around the world. It was born in Germany, where it has created 300,000 jobs and a $40-billion-plus industry in just a decade—this in a country with nowhere near as much windy plain as Alberta has, and no corner as sunkissed as southeastern Alberta is.

What’s more, Germany did all this without direct taxation, instead bumping up the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity nationwide to the point where it amounts to a surcharge of about $50 per year for the average German homeowner. That’s half the estimated best-case per-consumer cost of your proposed transmission lines. Plus it decentralizes and distributes power generation to the point where outsized transmission superhighways become a thing of the past, while introducing an enormously promising new revenue stream to rural and urban Albertans alike.

Everyone likes to say renewables can’t scale up to industrial size—as opposed, for example, to nukes (which your government has been seriously investigating). But Germany added a nuclear power plant’s worth of solar energy to its grid in just the first eight months of 2010, whereas if you commissioned that dodgy Peace Country nuclear plant tomorrow, I guarantee it won’t be grid-connected before 2020 (and if I were a gambling man, I’d factor in the recent Japanese disaster and say not before 2030 as a safe bet). Bottom line: the feed-in tariff is a real road to “becoming all things energy,” as your predecessor’s cabinet liked to bray. It’s a proven route to diversifying the economy. And it would provide an incomparable story to tell to visiting Hollywood moguls.

Here’s the tale that would be yours alone to tell.

Hey, Jim, you could tell that Cameron fellow, I want to tell it like it is.

Look, Jim, we get it. We know the tarsands aren’t all that good for the hometrees of the boreal forest. We know that another boom governed by an order of “Full speed ahead!” would guarantee us a catastrophic meeting with that climate iceberg out there. We get it. We’re sitting on a vital strategic resource, and we just upped our royalties to somewhere closer to the global petrostate average, and we’ve got a sustainable technology fund earmarked exclusively for cleantech. Some carbon capture, yes, but also some amazing waste-to-energy stuff on our farms, an ambitious geothermal scheme that takes advantage of our world-class expertise at drilling holes, and some amazing new developments in solar and wind that take advantage of Saskatchewan’s abundance of rare-earth metals. (Come on, Jim, I thought you were a sci-fi guy. You didn’t know Saskatchewan sits on some of the world’s richest deposits of the raw materials they need to make wind-turbine magnets and electric-car batteries?)

But listen, Jim, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The big thing is we’re global leaders in renewable power. We’re committed to the new paradigm. We’ve got this feed-in tariff, and we are filling the province with wind turbines and solar arrays. We’ve even got an extra incentive for homeowners, so solar panels on the roof are hotter than hot tubs and hipper than granite countertops in Calgary and Edmonton. These people work in the oilpatch, too, but they live by green power’s light. We’re building houses that make more power than they use, Jim. Some of those folks have electric cars now, too, and we brought in time-of-use pricing on their power so they fill up on the cheap when demand’s low at night, and then they drive to work and sell off their spare juice at a profit when everyone needs it at midday. Best smart grid in North America.

We want to lead this transition, Jim. A grandkid born to a tarsands titan today can’t possibly expect a lifelong career in the oilpatch. We get it, Jim. We’ve partnered with big utilities across the prairies to maximize the benefits of both small-scale renewables and large-scale hydro, and our collective western Canadian grid will be verging on emissions-free by the time Avatar 3 hits the theatres. Some of our oilpatch partners—Statoil and Shell and Total, in particular—have been crazy-keen to play with this cleantech stuff for years, so we’ve set ourselves up as their best test bed. Now, when they go home and hear jeers from their shareholders about dirty oil, they point to pictures of solar farms and state-of-the-art geothermal heat pumps. Some of them even buy carbon offsets from our clean energy companies. We’ve got net-zero bitumen mining and upgrading. How about that?

Heck, Jim, we’re talking about frugality, stewardship, thrift, innovation. Entrepreneurial zeal and community spirit. Prairie self-reliance and a maverick’s self-confidence. These are conservative values, Jim. Our values. Not just Norway’s, and certainly not Hollywood’s. We own the future. Our citizens live in houses that make their own power and go to work making power plants for the world. Bring a camera crew next time you come, Jim—we’ve got a movie we’d love you to make.

Anyway—to come back to you, Premier, and the energy challenge you face—I hope you can understand how if you solve the paradigm problem, you won’t need to worry near as much about your image. The paradigm’s shifted, and your economy’s hitched to a twilight industry. Don’t just tell the story, change the story. Make history. Own it.

Calgary-based Chris Turner is the author of The Great Leap Sideways and The Geography of Hope (2007).

The post Paradigm Shift appeared first on Alberta Views.

Enmax (an energy utility wholly owned by the City of Calgary) has long been one of the province’s most vocal proponents of “microgeneration,” the production of electricity by homeowners. Homes with solar panels on their roofs or wind turbines in their backyards can generate their own electricity instead of relying solely on companies operating big centralized plants powered by coal or gas. As part of an ambitious plan which will see the homes of 250 Enmax employees retrofitted with small-scale green-power generators over the next year (this as a test run of a broader rollout to all its customers in 2010 or 2011), Enmax has gathered the leading microgeneration candidates at the back corner of this nondescript warehouse.

A solar thermal panel (which harnesses the sun as a water heater) has been mounted on a large plank and rests propped against the wall like a half-completed home improvement project in some do-it-yourselfer’s garage. Along one stretch of wall, household-scale wind turbines have been stacked neatly in their shipping boxes. Elsewhere a couple of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, await the chance to generate electricity in southern Alberta’s annual 300-plus days of sunshine.

It all looks no more substantial than a specialty aisle at the rear of a Home Depot, and some of this stuff—the solar water heaters and PV panels in particular—has been on the market for years. In other jurisdictions around the world, from sunny California to oft-dreary northern Germany, forward-thinking legislation has turned rooftop solar into a household feature as common as a skylight. By one report, though, there are only about 100 microgeneration installations in all of Alberta right now. At a guess, I’d say the assortment of demo-project materials in Enmax’s warehouse could nearly double that.

Still, none of this—the panels and turbines, the workaday warehouse and Enmax’s bold plan to expand far beyond it—would be of much significance without the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure. This was created only recently: Alberta’s “Micro-generation Regulation,” officially AR 27/2008T, was passed on the first of February 2008 and came into effect on New Year’s Day, 2009. It’s a simple and fairly common piece of policy, a document similar to ones enacted in several other provinces, all but a handful of American states and just about every country in Europe. AR 27/2008T obliges owners of electricity utilities to install a new kind of electricity meter on the houses of any and all customers who would like to generate their own renewable energy and feed it back to the grid in exchange for a credit on their power bills. You’ll generally hear this process referred to as “net metering” or “two-way metering.” AR 27/2008T, in short, enables Albertans to reduce their power bills by generating green power in or on their homes and selling it back to their utility at the same rate for which they might otherwise purchase it.

What fanfare there was to greet AR 27/2008T was mostly muted. A Pembina Institute spokesperson characterized it as “a positive baby step,” while Enmax CEO Gary Holden called it a “critical first step.” Only the Edmonton Journal mustered any real enthusiasm. With AR 27/2008T, the Journal reported, “Alberta entered a new energy age.”

How, you might wonder, could a whole new age be ushered in by a single baby step Well, consider the difference between a spark and a raging bonfire—and moreover consider the essential continuity between them, which of course can only be seen in retrospect. AR 27/2008T is, for now, just a spark, and it could easily fade to a cinder. With the right kind of fuel, however, it could be the start of a mighty conflagration indeed. Or, actually, the end of the greatest conflagration in human history—our 200-year bonfire of the fossil fuels—and the beginning of the sustainable new age of renewable power.

Holden: “My home effectively has no power bill to speak of—and I sell excess power into the grid.”

Some simple legislation could accelerate that shift—complementary policy initiatives to make AR 27/2008T into something downright epochal. The Alberta government could provide strong incentives for the installation and perhaps even the manufacture of microgeneration systems, whether by tax rebates, direct government investment or some kind of favourable-interest-rate loan scheme. Or it could decide it truly wanted to lead the transition to a 21st century economy, in which case it could pass the much more ambitious legislation known as a “feed-in tariff,” a powerful policy measure that sets prices above market rates for electricity generated by renewable sources. The feed-in tariff has transformed several European countries (most notably Germany) into titans of the renewable-energy industry in less than a decade, and the Ontario government seems intent on importing the policy wholesale later this summer. Alberta could take a lead role in the manufacture and implementation of the technologies that will drive this new economy—if it’s ready to fully embrace the future.

Back at the Enmax warehouse, on a pallet in front of the shelfload of tiny wind turbines, there stands a sleek metal appliance with a digital display mounted along its top rim. It’s a miraculous little machine, one that might prove to be the most revolutionary in Enmax’s microgeneration arsenal. You could easily mistake it for a dishwasher, but it is in fact a demonstration model of the first fundamental reinvention of the household furnace in a century. And it so excites the company’s CEO, Gary Holden, that he installed seven of them in his basement in spring 2008 to test their mettle against the ferocious Alberta winter.

The device is called a WhisperGen, and it’s a household-scale version of a combined heat and power (CHP) plant. CHP (wherein the waste heat from a natural gas or coal power plant is used to warm nearby buildings) is a common efficiency strategy, particularly in northern Europe. The WhisperGen, though, is one of the first home appliances to employ the technique, and Holden’s Calgary home is likely the first in North America to be outfitted with a self-contained CHP system.

The results, Holden explains, have been nothing but encouraging. “It’s really quite fantastic to come and see how we effectively have no power bill to speak of, because of the ability to sell the excess power into the grid when we don’t need it. And that creates a credit that is used for times when we do.”

The core of the WhisperGen is a device called a Stirling engine, a legendarily hyperefficient mechanical device invented in the early 1800s. The Stirling filled the heads of engineers with visions of near-perpetual motion, but there were no widespread commercial applications of the technology. However, the world has been awakened anew to the Stirling’s potential in the face of the converging energy and climate crises. The seemingly limitless abundance of energy-dense fossil fuels relegated the frugal Stirling to the dusty back corner of the lab for the past hundred-plus years. This is pretty much where the Stirling-powered WhisperGen was when Gary Holden—at the time the chief executive of TransAlta’s New Zealand subsidiary—discovered it on the campus of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch in the mid-1990s.

Inside this nondescript appliance—a WhisperGen—is technology that could revolutionize our future. (Ashley Bristowe)

Holden: “What I found was a university laboratory with wires and gauges and pipes everywhere, and some sheet-metal contraptions to capture the heat. It was a relatively crude example of the technology. But I understood its potential back then, and when I asked the inventor—he was a 28-year-old grad student at the time—he said, ‘Well, my vision for this is to see one of these in every home in Europe.’”

Skip ahead 15 years, and witness a dream nearly realized. The lab project gave rise to a technology start-up that sold the little devices to yacht owners, and that start-up was eventually bought by New Zealand’s state-owned power company, Meridian Energy. Meridian recently entered into an agreement with Mondragon of Spain to start churning out 30,000 WhisperGens per year, with the intent of bringing them to a great many homes throughout the efficiency-obsessed European market.

All well and good if you happen to be Spanish or Danish, but what relevance does any of this have to an average Alberta homeowner Well, consider the value proposition for the WhisperGen, the thing that convinced Holden to bring it all the way from New Zealand: the WhisperGen can be installed in any basement in Alberta, about as quickly and easily as any old boiler, where it can be connected to the existing natural gas line and used to heat the entire house much more efficiently than a conventional gas furnace. In addition, the WhisperGen’s chief by-product is a steady stream of electricity, which could be connected to a two-way meter to offset a significant portion of the home’s power bill. It does more heating with less fuel, and it discounts your electricity bill as a side effect.

Get Holden going about it and he’ll paint a rosy Jetsonian future just a few years off where the benefits of that softly whirring Stirling engine begin to multiply all but exponentially. “You have a plug-in hybrid car in your garage, and in the middle of the night when your lights are off and your TV’s off and everything, your demand is low, you take the power from your Stirling engine [to] your car and you drive to work each day,” he says. “It’s actually a benefit that even solar power doesn’t create, because you’re generating electricity in the off-peak hours, and the synergy that has with plug-in hybrid vehicles is amazing. And so then you get into payback periods that are just unbelievable. You’ll be paying the equipment off in months, because you’re offsetting some of your power bill during the day when it’s running, and you’re offsetting a huge fuel bill in your vehicle during the night.”

Holden was not the first executive I’d found starry-eyed by the revolutionary potential of this “energy Internet” idea. Last October—the same week that the global economy began its plummet, I sat in on a conference call at the end of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s three-day “Smart Garage” charette. The RMI (a Colorado-based energy efficiency think tank) had gathered together senior executives from a cross-section of Fortune 500 companies—Ford and Nissan, Duke Energy and PG&E, Cisco, Google and IBM—to explore the feasibility of building a next generation of infrastructure, an energy Internet it christened the “smart garage.” The assembled industrial heavyweights envisioned the harnessing of green power (produced at household or regional scale) to feed plug-in hybrid cars, which then used Internet technology to automatically coordinate recharging and the sale of excess power back to the grid, based on the energy demands of a given home or workplace and the current price of electricity. The consensus was that the technology already existed; it simply needed a few big players—automakers and utilities in particular—to begin manufacturing the right kinds of cars and installing the right kinds of infrastructure. “It’s hard to see another infrastructure play,” RMI’s Michael Brylawski concluded, “that has so many simultaneous benefits—oil security, climate, jobs.”

In the months since RMI’s “smart garage” confab, Barack Obama’s new administration has announced generous incentives for electric-vehicle buyers, and Hyundai has promised to bring a plug-in hybrid to North American roads by 2012, where it’s expected to join the new plug-in Toyota Prius, the Chevy Volt and the debut plug-in vehicles from Chinese upstarts like Build Your Dream (this as part of the Chinese government’s recently declared goal of manufacturing half a million electric vehicles per year by 2012). And, of course, Calgary’s own Enmax has unveiled a suite of funky new microgeneration technologies particularly well suited to feeding juice to such vehicles.

So there’s a future, already technologically feasible, the bulk of it indeed already sitting in a warehouse overlooking the Deerfoot Trail, in which you plug your car in at night and drive off the next morning using the excess electricity generated by your furnace while you slept. Maybe you’ve decided to go even further and put some solar panels on the roof, in which case you can whistle happily through the day’s work at your office while your house is feeding the provincial grid with peak-load power, busily chewing away at its own utility bill. Your car, meanwhile, figures out the price of electricity that day and if it’s looking profitable, it sells the extra power in its battery pack to the building you work in.

Microgeneration is already technologically feasible—unlike carbon capture and storage.

You are less reliant on the vertiginous fluctuations in oil and natural gas prices, your provincial government has come to realize it will never need to build another coal-fired power plant and will soon shutter those that remain, and these basement-scale Stirling engines proved so popular that they built a big factory down next to the Deerfoot to manufacture the things for the whole North American market, so you even know people that have stable jobs building them. Your economy’s joined the front ranks of the green-collar boom that dug the industrial world out of its recessionary rut, and though you still hear the occasional grumble from afar about the emissions-belching tar sands, you just as often hear about another refugee of the Okanagan drought arriving in Calgary to work in WhisperGen sales. When the Edmonton Journal talked about a new energy age dawning, this is what it was driving at.

Let me reiterate: this is all already technologically feasible. Indeed, it’s much closer at hand than a scenario in which some indeterminate portion of the emissions from the province’s fossil-fuelled power plants is carried away via pipeline for injection into a permanent reservoir deep beneath the boreal forest—by which I mean carbon capture and storage (CCS). The Alberta government, however, has sunk $2-billion into CCS this year alone, and it has made no direct investment whatsoever into microgeneration. The province’s preference, it would appear, is to help big corporate polluters instead of putting clean, money-saving tools in the hands of regular taxpayers.

Gary Holden of Enmax, for his part, is optimistic that the technology fund created by the provincial carbon tax could be a sufficient source of funding to create the proverbial “level playing field” for energy production in the province. (At present, as Holden notes, existing fossil-fuelled power plants have an unfair advantage owing to the vagaries of energy pricing—“historical averaging,” for example, whereby current prices are determined not by what it costs to generate power today, known as the “marginal cost,” but rather by the total cost of electricity production over the life of the plant.

One of a growing number of local solar arrays. (Tim Schulhauser. Courtesy of Skyfire Energy)

I’d argue, though, that a far more ambitious plan is warranted. Perhaps something like Germany’s feed-in tariff model, which involves setting prices higher than market rates for green sources, thus going far beyond encouraging the odd “alternative” installation, instead putting renewable power at the very centre of the energy market. In the German case, the feed-in tariff in less than a decade created an industry that employs 250,000 and turns over $40-billion in annual revenues. And it did so by increasing the average German’s power bill by about $50 per year. Of course, hundreds of thousands of Germans opted instead to stick solar panels on their roofs, sell green power back to the grid and offset the price hike—and then some.

Here’s the crux of it, the real promise of AR 27/2008T: I firmly believe, after four years and counting spent circling the globe on the sustainability beat, that this new age has already begun. Microgeneration is as disruptive to our relationship with energy as digital technology has been to human communication. And its full potential is much greater, because electricity enables so many more of life’s necessities than telephones and mail services ever did.

The first places to understand this potential, to leap for it and grab on tight, will become the industrial leaders of the 21st century and beyond. Significant swaths of Europe are already a generation ahead of us, California is coming on strong, and Ontario appears intent on passing the continent’s most ambitious renewable energy legislation this summer. Distributed, scaled-down power generation has already turned a Danish former farm-machinery manufacturer (Vestas) into the world’s largest wind turbine maker and transformed the collapsed industrial heartland of the former East Germany into the epicentre of the world’s solar industry. The first mass-market electric car will likely be made in China, and the furnace of Canada’s brightest future will almost certainly be built for the first time on an industrial scale in Spain, using a design developed in New Zealand.

The map of this new industrial order is already being sketched in. AR 27/2008T isn’t enough to mark Alberta’s place on it—but it is a start. And so the question for the province, ultimately, is whether it intends to lead or merely follow reluctantly along.

We can only wonder, for now, what a courageous commitment to a sustainable future might mean for Alberta. It could start, though, with Enmax’s nifty new turbines and panels—and, most enticingly, its WhisperGens. “I think it’s such a good technology,” Holden told me, “that it’s easy for me to picture, 20 years from now, every single-house dwelling or apartment block would be inherently built around Stirling engines.”

Holden likens this to the state of electric refrigeration in the 1920s: an unknown, bewildering technology, a bizarre contraption that squatted right there in your kitchen, stuffed full of exotic gases with sci-fi names, doing a job the good ol’ icebox already accomplished just fine, thanks. When it came to keeping things cold, who’d even think of competing with ice Holden: “It was the electric utilities that sold those units first; your local utility would come and service it. It was that extra level of comfort provided by the utility that led to the widespread use of refrigerators. I see this technology being exactly the same. Utilities need to give the comfort, utilities need to show how the economics can be positive.”

Well, I was fully sold. Alas, Holden explained that it’d still be a couple years at least before I’d be able to install a WhisperGen in my own home. I can only hope my 25-year-old gas furnace holds out until then. I have no intention, in any case, of installing another “conventional” appliance of any sort in my basement. There’s no future in that.

Chris Turner is author of The Geography of Hope. His “The Big Decision” (AV, Oct 2008) won a National Magazine Award.

The post Kill (Your) Bill appeared first on Alberta Views.