Folly of Canada’s oil, gas addiction clear

In the 1976 film classic, Network, news anchor Howard Beale during his evening broadcast shouts into the camera: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It was his protest against inflation, corporate greed and crime.

It so resonated with viewers that people around the country, as prompted, opened their windows and shouted the same. His ratings soared (Donald Trump would be proud). A half-century later, there is an eerie sense of deja vu.

The folly of Canada’s addiction to oil and gas has never been more clear. With the price of crude rising at record speed, the fossil fuel industry is profiteering from war in the Middle East. Prices at the pump are soaring, to be soon followed by supercharged inflation across the economy.

And Scotiabank now predicts that the Bank of Canada will raise rates three times in 2026, so the cost of your mortgage is going up. And for what?

So we can continue to coddle the oil and gas cartel? Most of our political class, with one exception — new NDP Leader Avi Lewis — are in the pockets of Big Oil: the three Prairie premiers, and the leaders of the two largest federal parties.

They all want to double down on expanded fossil fuel production in our country, spurred on by powerful, well-funded fossil fuel lobby groups. They desire to loot the public purse for tens of billions more in subsidies for new pipelines in every direction, a fleet of Arctic icebreakers and associated infrastructure and for absurdly expensive carbon capture to pretend to care about the carnage from climate change.

I won’t even mention the immorality of promoting planet-killing emissions: it’s the economics that make zero sense. Building out expensive infrastructure doomed to become stranded assets.

Are all these people promoting a fossil-fuel future really that obtuse?

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the big four in the tar sands, Cenovus, Exxon (Imperial Oil), Canadian Natural Resources, and Suncor, are three-quarters foreign owned, mostly by Americans. The pipelines that carry our gas and oil to export markets also carry most of the profits from our natural resources out of country.

And what do we get for it? Life getting less and less affordable by the day.

It’s time to declare we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. It’s time to end the oil-fuelled boom-and-bust cycles.

It’s time to wean ourselves from our fossil fuel addiction.It’s time for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil & Gas.

The revenues should go straight toward the renewable energy transition: building out wind, solar and geothermal, with grid-scale battery storage.Building out a national electricity grid and a robust national EV charging network. Installing high-speed rail between large population centres.

It’s time to electrify the economy, and replace oil and gas in homes and industry with heat pumps. Retrain oil and gas workers for the green economy — for example, redeploy drill rigs for geothermal energy.

It’s time to invest in clean tech and green energy as the rest of the world outside of North America is doing.

It’s also time to impose a national ban on fossil fuel generating stations for data centres.

Amazon, Meta and Microsoft can build their own clean energy plants and not parasitize existing electricity grids that you and I as taxpayers and ratepayers have already paid for. If they want to build small modular nuclear reactors to power them, they can knock themselves out.

Just don’t ask for public subsidies — they’re profitable enough to pay their own way.

New national NDP Leader Lewis has long articulated a vision that features many of these proposals. It’s a vision of a future electrostate, not a petrostate, which is the rear-facing vision of Smith, Moe, Kinew, Poilievre and Carney.

The Leap Manifesto, of which Lewis and spouse Naomi Klein were two of the lead authors (along with journalist Martin Lukacs), when presented roughly a decade ago was ahead of its time. Some, including me, were skeptical.

And there are still parts of it about which I have doubts: capitalism will not disappear overnight for example.

But much of it was prescient, and Lewis in his NDP leadership campaign presented a rough draft of a roadmap into the future. One that is cleaner, greener, cheaper and more resilient than what we have now.

So what are we waiting for?

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg.