Unforgivable Folly

Forty years ago, my wife and I and our kids spent two nights in a cabin outside of Jasper, Alberta, along the shores of the Athabasca River. Today, with a third of the town burned to the ground, I am profoundly sad. Susan Riley writes:

Our forests and communities burn at accelerating rates. One day downtown Toronto is awash in flood water; the next, iconic Jasper National Park is aflame. Winter is gradually retreating. Summers are becoming unbearable in some cities, especially for the elderly and those without air conditioning. Each new year brings once-in-a-lifetime climate emergencies. A recent Sunday was the hottest ever recorded globally—until the record was smashed the next day. 

Yet we allow our fossil-fuel industry to continue polluting—to actually increase production—to make promises it has shown it has no intention of keeping, while we wait for some imagined technology that will keep the oil (and profits) flowing and emissions magically shrinking.

Our politicians, with a few laudable exceptions, are divided into two camps: they are either stout defenders of the oil and gas industry no matter what damage the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions cause, or they are rhetorically committed to addressing climate change, but maybe next decade. Or maybe 2050. Maybe when there are no trees left, and smoke season lasts six months.

There is no need to re-litigate tired arguments about the carbon tax, or engage in hand-wringing over the costs of climate adaptation. There is, instead, an increasingly desperate need for a mass movement away from fossil dependency towards the clean, green future that—so far—is mostly glimpsed on billboards. 

Yet that mass movement has not materialized:

Just recently, for instance, in a blinding irony, a handful of major oilsands producers had to evacuate non-essential workers from mine sites in the Fort McMurray, Alta., area because of encroaching wildfires—fires, it hardly needs be said, made increasingly savage as emissions from these very sites multiply and accelerate the climate crisis. 

But if the immense fire that partly destroyed the city of Fort McMurray in 2016—a world-renowned event thanks to John Vaillant’s brilliant reporting in his award-winning book, Fire Weather—if that didn’t slow the pace of oil production, what will it take? Does the Alberta government care, for instance, that the scenic Rocky Mountain town of Jasper had to be evacuated last week as wildfires encroached? Does no other sector of that province’s economy—tourism, ranching, farming—count for anything in the face of the immense power of the oil industry?

Apparently not. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith declared herself “frightened and stressed” by the Jasper blaze, but she and many others are still living the dream: a booming oil and gas sector, big paycheques and bigger cars, and, well, if climate change is a problem, Canada is a tiny part of it. You would think it would be harder, every year, to ignore the inferno burning on the doorstep of the Edmonton provincial legislature, but denial is the easier and more lucrative course.

The federal government, meanwhile, looks on fretfully, tries to “work with the industry,” continues to offer loan guarantees—the latest worth $19-billion—to the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which, now that it is finally finished, will triple the amount of crude oil transported from Alberta to Vancouver harbour, and on to other places to be refined.

It bought the pipeline, of course, to win favour in Alberta, watched costs balloon to $34-billion, chipped in a $17-billion loan guarantee when construction got complicated, quietly tossed in that extra $19-billion a few weeks ago and—as NDP MP Charlie Angus says—is now “trying to cut some kind of backroom deal to create a front company” to take the embarrassing asset off its hands.

Even more cynically, it is primed to unload at least some of the pipeline on Indigenous groups, having set aside $5-billion in budget 2024 in loan guarantees for bands interested in investing in “natural resource” projects. Let them deal with the financial risk, the political heat, and—if the oil era ends expeditiously—a costly white elephant. 

This is unforgivable folly.

Image: Cpl. Marc-André Leclerc, DND Canada