A recent meeting in Saskatoon brought the Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister together with all the Premiers. They sat down just after Saskatchewan declared a State of Emergency as wildfires ravaged the northern part of the province.
The Premiers and Prime Minister issued a joint declaration, promising to “work urgently to get Canadian natural resources and commodities to domestic and international markets, such as critical minerals and decarbonized Canadian oil and gas by pipelines…”
That’s Orwellian doublespeak, decarbonized oil. It echoes marketing spin borrowed from greenwashing specialists employed by the fossil fuel industry. I find myself so flabbergasted that I felt compelled to write four words: Oil is a hydrocarbon.
Along with methane gas and coal, burning these fossil fuels is the primary driver of the climate breakdown that is just now ushering in yet another summer of fire weather in Canada. Let’s remember the firestorms that devastated in Lytton, Fort MacMurray, and Jasper.
During the recent election, Canadians rejected Pierre Poilievre, a market fundamentalist politician and sock puppet for the fossil fuel industry. Mark Carney was able to come off as a moderate, concerned about future generations. Or so it seemed from his book Values. He supported carbon pricing, although expediency put this aside. He seemed to grasp the corrosive power of markets: “Unchecked market fundamentalism devours the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.“
Let’s think about how our future will be determined by what we do today. Will we continue to be prey to the numbing propaganda of the fossil fuel industry whose worldwide profits amount to three billion dollars daily? Climate breakdown is a disaster on a scale like nothing else our species has ever faced.
The Carney government must stick to the promise of the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. We desperately need a hard cap on emissions.
Let’s remember that it was another Prime Minister who, just like Mark Carney, started talking about Canada as an energy superpower just after being elected: “An ocean of oil-soaked sand lies under the muskeg of Northern Alberta – my home province,” Stephen Harper proudly boasted to a meeting of the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in 2006.
Ten years before the Fort McMurray wildfire incinerated the tar sands town, Harper was referring to some of the dirtiest fuel on earth. No one gazing at Fort Mac’s toxic tailings ponds a hundred years from now will have benefitted from the bitumen piped out to Asian markets.
But we will be struggling with a ravaged planet for generations to come, both here and everywhere else on the planet. This is the legacy of short-term thinking.
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