Bad ideas and Tory premiers: the prairies

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/08/2023 (876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the final day of its spending and policy announcements before the election blackout period, the Stefanson government announced it was exploring, along with Saskatchewan and Alberta, the construction of a new deepwater port on Hudson Bay with either a rail line or a pipeline to feed it Alberta fossil fuels and Saskatchewan potash.

Premier Heather Stefanson, along with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, three stooges to the fossil fuel industry, support this absurd idea. Building another pipeline (or the rail equivalent) to tidewater to export oil and gas makes as much sense as building another Blockbuster franchise.

The world is rapidly abandoning fossil fuels as the energy transition steps on the accelerator. Already, 17 American states will abandon gas cars by 2035. That includes the biggest state, California, with a population equal to all of Canada. By 2030, the U.S. will be 50 per cent zero emissions vehicles. All 27 EU nations have banned internal combustion engines (ICEs) by 2035. Norway will get there by 2025. Israel, Japan, and Chile have announced similar plans to eliminate gas cars, and India and China are also phasing out ICEs.

So just who exactly are you going to be selling your oil to?

One has to seriously question the business acumen of this clump of Conservative premiers who ignore the world around them and cling tenaciously to a sunset industry. Fossil fuels are on their way out. So too should any politician who continues to promote an industry that is burning our planet.

Just the day before the harebrained deepwater port announcement, our PC government rolled out ‘Manitoba’s Energy Roadmap’ that argues — just like Scott Moe in Saskatchewan — that it is too expensive to get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, we’ll add some wind and solar but continue to rely upon natural gas for a big part of our home heating and industrial use, even though better, cleaner alternatives (especially geothermal and air-source and ground-source heat pumps) are available right now.

To quote from Manitoba’s Energy Roadmap: “Pursuing net zero must be done assiduously to avoid significantly impacting affordability and Manitoba’s competitiveness.” At least Scott Moe in Saskatchewan said it more simply: (paraphrasing) it’s too expensive for us to transition away from fossil fuels, so we won’t bother, at least not any time soon.

A month earlier, on July 7, the Manitoba government announced that it will adopt the lowest tier of building codes for new construction in the province, when higher building standards would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Out west, Vancouver and Victoria have already banned the use of natural gas in new home construction, part of B.C.’s aggressive transition plan to move away from fossil fuels. Manitoba? Instead of picking the low-hanging fruit of promoting energy efficiency, we’ll just continue to burn fossil fuels. It’s easy and (for now) cheap.

That’s another bone-headed decision from a government that doesn’t take climate change seriously.

It joins similar bone-headed decisions from our Prairie Conservative premiers: Danielle Smith just declared a moratorium on renewable energy projects while she squanders taxpayer funds on abandoned oil and gas wells, with an ultimate tab of more than a quarter trillion dollars. Here’s a thought: maybe the fossil fuel companies, currently making record profits, can clean up their own mess before they leave. And Scott Moe decided that instead of promoting the use of electric vehicles, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, he would tax them instead.

And the latest from this Conservative brain trust is the proposal for a pipeline/railway to Nelson to transport fossil fuels to Arctic tidewater. It is one of the dumbest ideas from our political class, and that takes some doing, in quite some time.

They propose to build what will become, by the time environmental approvals are finished (if ever) and construction is completed in the early to mid-2030s, an instantly stranded asset. By then there will be no need for new pipelines (or a rail equivalent).

None.

As demand for oil and gas falls, the current rail capacity devoted to carrying oil, propane and butane can be redeployed to move the other products such as Saskatchewan potash and grain through existing ports east and west.

We’ve had enough pipeline boondoggles with the Trans Mountain Pipeline (where the federal Liberals decided they too needed to join in the madness) that jumped from its original approximately $12-billion budget to more than $30 billion; and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline to Kitimat where the original budget of $6.6 billion has soared to over $14 billion. Both Coastal Gaslink and Trans Mountain will soon be operational.

And let them be the last fossil fuel pipelines we ever build in this country.

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg.