Adam Riggio: Oil! The Industry With No Future

Credit: (Aidan Jonah/The Canada Files)

Written by: Adam Riggio

Right now, The Canada Files is one of many places where you can follow the ongoing resistance to the continued expansion of the oil industry, as they raze necessary ecosystems around Canada to rip petroleum from the Earth.

For the last week, the RCMP has been raiding and attacking Wet’suwet’en people defending their lands from the expansion of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. Camps are attacked, leaders are being arrested, and even the journalists covering this brutal police crackdown have been attacked and threatened.

Those doing the threatening are patriotic servants of the Canadian state itself, the officers of the RCMP. Those officers are armed with weapons more appropriate to the battlefields of Libya than the supposedly peaceful Canada.

Protests continue at the site of the Wet’suwet’en blockades, in solidarity across British Columbia and throughout Canada, including those covered directly by The Canada Files. Some solidarity protests even able to shut down major rail lines. This is despite fierce opposition, with some local people driving cars into protestors.

Canadian Leaders Remain Delusional About Oil

All of this is so that the Canadian government and state institutions can defend an oil industry that is already at the beginning of its natural death throes. If you listen to the demagogues of mob-rule extremism like Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, then even the smallest criticism of oil industry practice is a direct and violent attack on the economy of Canada.

But in the modern era, a country that places its economy entirely in the oil industry is setting itself up for long-term economic disaster. For one very relevant example, the light natural gas market for which Coastal GasLink exists to serve just had the bottom fall out of it. With demand for light natural gas plummeting in Asia, Trudeau’s commitment to attack Indigenous Canadians with the force necessary to take down ISIS look like the obsessions of an idiot.

Political parties happier to align themselves explicitly with extremists and greedy mega-corporations are, naturally, no better. But their stupidity is cartoonish enough to call attention to how pathetic our leaders truly are.

Federal Conservative Party leadership candidate and perennial embarrassment to the dignity of his own office, Peter MacKay, even hopes to resurrect the Energy East pipeline project. Energy East, like TransMountain, was abandoned by its corporate owners as a money-losing project.

That pipeline would have been nearly the breadth of North America itself, so large that it would never have become profitable without skimping on construction and maintenance until it was spilling oil all over our country like a garden hose run over by a lawnmower. Yet our politicians support such destructive infrastructure because they and the public convinced themselves that oil is the only possible energy source.

Divestment Is Already Happening

Economic instability around the world is growing as the direct, indirect, and systematic effects of climate change worsen. That economic instability drives the global price of oil down, and makes its relative highs volatile and vulnerable. As all those destructive climate effects become increasingly ridiculous to ignore, the push to renewable energy receives more and more impetus.

Not only that, but renewable energy is simply cheaper to produce than it is to tear fossil fuel deposits from the Earth. Analysts throughout the energy sector have been saying this for years, yet Canada’s governments never seem to listen. The share value of fossil fuel companies has tumbled consistently for several years.

Yes, the melting ice caps will expose the far north to oil exploration, but those wells will still be massive, dangerous, and complex. It will take enormous infrastructure to extract oil from the Arctic and ship it safely around the world. Mere pipelines from northern Alberta are already so expensive that companies themselves are pawning them off on gullible Prime Ministers rather than risk investing the development money themselves.

Those oil companies, meanwhile, are silently investing in more profitable renewable energy projects themselves. Taxpayers of countries like Canada, whose leaders bend over backwards for the petroleum sector, will be stuck with the bill while they continue to profit cleaning up the messes that they themselves made.

Futile Even for Buying Votes

Prime Minister Trudeau and the top minds in the Liberal Party made him the proud face of reconciliation, but that campaign has consisted entirely of empty symbolism. On matters of material importance, like whether Indigenous people and governments should consent to ecologically dangerous development on their lands, Trudeau happily treats them like obstacles.

He is more than happy to accept court decisions that strip the rights of Indigenous people and leaders to have a say in what happens on their land. Trudeau, the courts of Canada, and most definitely right-wing leaders, all describe such basic rights as some illegitimate “veto” that these bothersome Indigenous most certainly do not deserve.

The Liberal Party is more than ready to bail out multi-billion-dollar companies like TransCanada. Trudeau’s team has admitted that their decision to buy, refurbish, and expand the TransMountain Pipeline was a moment of unprofessional panic. Since then, the Liberal government has dedicated itself to waste more than $12-billion on that worthless pipeline, and will likely blow billions more.

Yet Trudeau will earn no votes from Alberta or Saskatchewan, no matter if he martyred himself for Liberal ballots by drowning himself in a tar pit. Conservatives today are radicalized by extremist online media. Trudeau wastes billions bailing out oil companies to build pipelines that will never generate profit, and conservatives still consider him a tree-hugging communist.

No, Trudeau and the Liberal Party continue to buy into the lies that define their head-in-the-sand approaches to politics. That the Liberals are the Natural Governing Party of Canada™. That “Sunny Ways” are more important than the real hard work of building a society on ideals of justice.

That Canada will always profit from producing the world’s oil.

Lies. All lies. Don’t believe them.