‘Shut down the oil sands’ is not an extreme position

Rather, it is the endpoint of joined-up thinking about climate science and energy policy.

On Twitter the other day, Suzy Waldman said: “Trying to envision middle ground between idea coalsands ought 2b shuttered and idea Canada’s economic fate depends on them”.

I think this perspective risks perpetuating one of the big problems in Canadian climate and energy politics – namely, the assumption that the oil sands have a legitimate future part to play in Canada’s economy and that any position that questions that is ‘extreme’ and outside the political middle ground. This may be true in terms of opinion polls and the positions of politicians, but this is because people haven’t really accepted that our current trajectory ends with planetary catastrophe.

We now have very clear and credible evidence that warming the planet by more than 2°C virtually guarantees big trouble for humanity. Crossing that threshold can be achieved by burning a fraction of the conventional oil, gas, and coal available on the planet. In short, then, we have a dangerous amount of fossil fuel available without even tapping unconventional sources like the oil sands.

Stabilizing the climate at any level of temperature increase means cutting greenhouse gas pollution to the point where the amount produced each year is absorbed by natural systems and so there is no net change in the concentration. Achieving that requires very deep cuts – essentially, the global phaseout of fossil fuel use. Stabilizing below the 2°C limit requires that all this happen extremely quickly. In such a world, it simply makes no sense to be building bitumen mining and in situ extraction facilities intended to operate for decades. Nor does it make sense to keep building pipelines to export fuels that we cannot afford to burn, if we wish to maintain a livable planet capable of sustaining human prosperity indefinitely.

This connects to the biggest problem with the oil sands: the way in which they contribute to a vicious cycle. We build more fossil fuel production capacity, so naturally we need to have transport and export capacity to serve it. The availability of fossil fuels then encourages people to keep investing in vehicles, power plants, and other facilities and equipment that require them. And so fossil fuel dependence is perpetuated.

If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to rapidly reverse that cycle. We need to be shutting down production capacity, and transport capacity, and facilities and equipment that depend on fossil fuels. That will probably make some things a lot more expensive and change the ways in which people live, but the alternative of a planet with a permanently hostile climate is clearly much worse.

Shutting down the oil sands is an extreme idea politically in Canada, but that is simply evidence of how poor the scientific basis for Canada’s energy politics is.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

14 thoughts on “‘Shut down the oil sands’ is not an extreme position”

  1. There’s also a political side to the vicious circle. The bigger the tarsands industry gets, the more taxes it contributes and the more influential it becomes with politicians. That means the more it grows the harder it becomes to shut down.

  2. I believe that even the oil companies are cognizant of the futility of tarsands exploration. That is not going to stop them from doing so as the addiction to oil and demand for it is so high. Jobs and wealth are also a powerful lure. As you said earlier,tobacco companies knew for a long time that smoking was harmful, but that did not stop them from pushing their product on an addicted population. In the end, the industry collapsed as will the fossil fuel industry. Hopefully, some form of clean energy will be discovered/invented by young minds today.

  3. In some ways tobacco companies are an encouraging precedent.

    At the same time, they are still worth billions of dollars, many millions of people around the world smoke, the rate of smoking is rising in many countries, and tobacco remains one of the most common killers of human beings.

    If we are to be successful in addressing climate change, fossil fuel companies will need to be shrunk down a lot more than tobacco companies have been so far.

  4. Hi Milan,

    Thanks for the blog post. I agree with you in principle. However, Canada’s West as well as Canada’s coffers in general are highly dependent on oil revenue, and the oilsands is our greatest untapped oil source. We should not underestimate how contentious the process is going to be of shifting off of this dependence. You can’t shut off the economic tap of almost half the country without a bitter struggle. Still, we have to start somewhere. I think the right place to begin is with a carbon tax that will shift some revenue towards economic diversification as well as decarbonization innovations to mitigate the oilsands` negative impacts. A carbon tax would also give notice to the oilsands and to the rest of the world that Canada is aligning with the rest of the world in terms of taking action against carbon.

  5. I agree that it will be contentious, but it is nonetheless urgent and necessary.

    We are on track to commit ourselves to more than 2˚C of warming within 15 years. If we are to avoid that, mitigation will need to be very aggressive, especially in countries like Canada with excessively high per-capita emissions.

    Given that, we should be at the stage of shutting down oil sands projects and pipelines, not building brand new ones.

    A carbon tax is a good idea, but it needs to be set at a level where we will see the sort of aggressive transition that is necessary.

  6. We should not be building new coal mines, oilsands plants, oil pipelines and coal ports unless the users of these fuels capture and store the carbon pollution (which is technically feasible).

    The obvious necessity is to stop expanding carbon polluting infrastructure while using trade pressure and diplomacy to work with like-minded jurisdictions in preventing this expansion in all countries. We won’t convince the Chinese to burn less oil and coal if we’re trying to sell them more and burning more ourselves. Difficult as this global task is, there is no other way to prevent the harm scientists predict, some of which is already happening.

    He would also not be surprised by the litany of false rationalizations used by the promoters of carbon pollution. They tell us “we’re not going to stop using gasoline tomorrow.” In fact, we need to start phasing out the burning of gasoline today so that we won’t be using it in 30 years. Expanding oil infrastructure goes in the wrong direction. Instead, we should be regulating or pricing carbon pollution and using other vehicle and fuel policies to gradually convert our transportation system to some combination of zero-emission electricity and biofuels. And corporations like Enbridge, if they truly had our children’s interests in mind, would be leading the charge in calling for these policies and promoting non-polluting options.

    Another false argument is that we need the jobs and tax revenue from oil pipelines and other carbon polluting projects. But should we accept the idea that we can only create a wealth-producing economy in the short-term by destroying our environment and economy in the long-term? Humans have an enormous capacity to generate economic well-being, some of it based on extraction of natural resources in ways that don’t lead to carbon pollution, much of it based on the non-extractive ingenuity unleashed by market economies.

    http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/story.html?id=8780477

  7. Oilsands emissions, the fastest growing source of carbon pollution in Canada, are projected to rise from an estimated 34 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2005 to 101 million tonnes in 2020. Apart from Alberta (295 megatonnes) and Ontario (177 megatonnes), no province or territory is projected to have a higher level of emissions than the oilsands sector in 2020, with Quebec coming the closest at 81 megatonnes for that year, followed by Saskatchewan at 74 megatonnes and British Columbia at 64 megatonnes.

  8. The question now is around the future of the resource. Despite prognostications of doom, there are many factors that keep the oilsands in the game. Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been spent to bring online what’s expected to be nearly three million barrels a day of production in 2018.

    As well, oilsands production, once started, remains relatively stable for decades. It would take an even sharper drop in oil prices than we have seen in recent years for producers to shut in their production.

    “I do think that many of these assets have been built for 20- or a 40-year life, and I think they will produce to the end of their useful lives, said Jackie Forrest, director of research at the Arc Energy Research Institute. “The oilsands represents about three per cent of global supply. It’s a major component of the oil market today and will continue to be so for a long time.”

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/great-canadian-oil-sands-50th-birthday-1.4309424

  9. How the oil sands make our GHG targets unachievable

    Winding down oil sands production to achieve our GHG targets and as a defensive measure against a collapse in oil prices must be seen as a national project.

    At the Paris climate conference in December 2015, Canada reaffirmed its target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30 percent from the 2005 level by 2030. The Liberal government was roundly criticized by environmental groups and some opposition politicians for not going beyond the “weak” target of the previous Conservative government, but even today — two years later — there is still no plan in sight for how Canada could achieve its target by 2030, given that current total emissions are about the same as they were in 2005. At the same time, the oil industry is planning an expansion of oil production from the oil sands — one of the highest CO2-emitting sources of oil in the world on a per-barrel basis — and the federal government has approved contentious new pipelines to facilitate that expansion.

    As our calculations show, only with a complete phase-out of oil production from the oil sands, elimination of coal for electricity generation, significant replacement of natural-gas-fuelled electricity generation with electricity from carbon-free sources, and stringent efficiency measures in all other sectors of the economy could Canada plausibly meet its 30 percent target.

    However, expected improvements in the performance and reductions in the cost of electric vehicles, combined with across-the-board improvement in the efficiency of cars and trucks, could see a permanent collapse in the price of oil by 2030, if not sooner, rendering oil sands oil a permanent money loser. Thus, the most urgent task related to the oil and gas industry in Canada is to plan an orderly phase-out of oil sands oil production — before such a phase-out is imposed by external economic forces. Doing so would align Canada’s international climate promises with its economic well-being.

  10. Climate fears are real, so oilsands must close
    By THOMAS WALKOMNational Affairs Columnist

    While the oilsands are responsible for only 10 per cent of Canada’s carbon emissions, they remain one of the country’s biggest single-point sources of greenhouse gases and a potent symbol of what humankind is doing wrong.

    Economically, the oilsands are doomed. In a world awash with cheap shale oil, new tarsands projects are ultimately too expensive to develop — even if the $4.5-billion Trans Mountain pipeline that Ottawa bought to deliver Alberta bitumen to the Pacific coast goes ahead.

    Environmentally, they are a disaster — in terms of both the tailing ponds created to store their waste and the carbon emissions they spew into the air.

    Government-mandated production cuts and government-purchased rail tanker cars can keep the oilsands limping along. But in a world whose very existence is threatened by the greenhouse gases this industry creates, the more sensible option is to shut it down.

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