The Oil Barons Are In Charge

The conventional wisdom, Linda McQuaig writes, is that ordinary people don't understand the science of climate change:

It’s we ordinary people, with our self-absorption or resistance to change, who are the prime culprits in the world’s failure to act against climate disaster.

But that's backwards:

By focusing on the alleged failure of ordinary people to tackle climate change, we take our eyes off the real culprits behind the drapes — the fossil fuel industry and lickspittle governments, the best example being the one in Ottawa.

Big Fossil is the wealthiest and most powerful lobby in world history. Any serious attempt to tackle climate change would involve it giving up future profits that are truly staggering.

That’s because, according to the International Energy Agency and other authoritative sources, at least two-thirds of the world’s fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground if there’s to be any hope of meeting the widely-agreed target of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. (So far we’ve warmed the planet by just 0.8 degrees and that seems to be working out just fine, right?)

Since Big Fossil owns the rights to those reserves, leaving them in the ground would mean it would have to walk away from trillions of dollars — about $20 trillion, according to U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben.

Governments around the world are going to war to protect those oil reserves. Or, if they're not at war, they're bending over backwards to do the oil bobby's bidding:

Stephen Harper’s government has undermined international climate negotiations, gutted Canada’s environmental review process, targeted environmental groups with harassing audits and championed unbridled oilsands development.
 
Its craven devotion to Big Fossil has made it a perennial recipient of the Fossil of the Year Award, disdainfully issued each year by the Climate Action Network, a global association of more than 850 environmental groups.

Stephen Harper is his father's son. He works for the oil companies -- not thirty-three million Canadians. The oil barons are in charge.


We'll be in Ottawa for the next couple of days. I should be back on Monday.

It's The Oil, Stupid

The Harper government's budget is all about oil. The changes in environmental assessment and employment insurance are all about goosing Canada's petroleum exports. As an economist, Stephen Harper supposedly learned something about the wisdom of diversification. "But," Lawrence Martin writes,

in the past decade, the clock has been turned back. Because of a boom in the oil and gas sector and a range of other factors, the economy has reverted toward being a staples-driven enterprise. “In July, 2011, unprocessed and semi-processed resource exports accounted for two-thirds of Canada’s total exports, the highest in decades,” [economist Jim] Stanford wrote. “Compare that to 1999, when finished goods made up almost 60 per cent of our exports.” 

As is the case in so many areas, the Harper government is hell bent on marching backwards -- and they will smear anyone who questions the wisdom of returning the Canadian economy to the nineteen century. Stanford writes that oil has become the driving force behind a new McCarthyism:

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side-effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture.  Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive.  And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious.  I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s deindustrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

Peter Lougheed knew that Alberta's oil should be used to build a diversified economy. When Stephen Harper looks at the Canadian economy, all he sees is oil. He assumes that anyone who does not share his vision is stupid. He's got it backwards.