Carney capitulates to Big Oil

But Carney’s energy superpower ambitions have a twist, differentiating him from Harper who was, although not an actual climate change denier, at least a close facsimile.

Carney, on the other hand, strives to assure Canadians he takes climate change seriously and that his ultimate goal is transitioning Canada to clean energy.

That may be true, but it ultimately counts for nothing.

Clearly, Carney understands the scope of the climate threat, and he realizes that transitioning to clean energy is necessary and that it would actually benefit Canada’s economy.

However, lined up against Carney is the enormously powerful set of interests that make up the fossil fuel industry, and they have very different plans for Canada.

Their plans demand that Ottawa assist them (including with huge financial subsidies) as they squeeze every dollop of bitumen from the ground — no matter how wildly fires rage across the country and how Trumpishly orange the skies become.

Alas, Carney has capitulated to these demands.

Not only has he scrapped the climate policies of his predecessor Justin Trudeau, he’s given in to Big Oil’s demand for another pipeline, even agreeing that Ottawa will pay for it, along with Alberta, thereby abandoning earlier promises that it would be funded by the private sector, not Canadian taxpayers.

But let’s be clear: Carney is going along with Big Oil’s plans, not because he fails to grasp the severity of the climate threat, but because he’s been outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by Big Oil, which makes its demands through the Alberta government, which it effectively controls.

Carney obviously wants to present himself to Canadians as champion of Canadian unity. And he apparently believes that, to keep Canada together and defeat Alberta separatism, he must submit to Big Oil’s demands — even though his submission has so far won him nothing; it didn’t even stop Alberta from launching its referendum on a possible path to separation.

So much for surrendering. It only leads to more demands.

Yet, undeterred, Carney keeps on surrendering.

The extent of his willingness to surrender to Big Oil became even clearer last week with the release of another Ottawa-Alberta agreement — this one about building a massive Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) network that would trap carbon emissions from oil production and store them underground.

But CCS is ultimately a scam, which Big Oil falsely presents as a climate solution.

Despite large investments in CCS projects around the world for decades, the technology has succeeded in eliminating only a minuscule .001 per cent share of global emissions, according to the David Suzuki Foundation.

That’s because about 80 per cent of the carbon emissions from a barrel of oil happen when the oil is burned in cars or furnaces. And CCS does nothing to reduce those emissions.

“There’s no such thing as decarbonized oil,” said climate scientist Simon Donner, rebuking Carney’s suggestion that the new Alberta pipeline would carry “decarbonized oil.” Donner later resigned as co-chair of Ottawa’s climate advisory group.

But Alberta’s major oilsands producers (which are mostly foreign-owned, as political economist Gordon Laxer has documented) have keenly promoted CCS as a climate solution — and one that Canadian taxpayers should heavily subsidize. Carney agrees.

So, under the gullible guise of fighting Alberta separatism, Carney is putting Canadian taxpayers on the hook for tens of billions of dollars to build a new pipeline and a carbon capture system which amounts to a giant fig leaf — even as raging wildfires signal an increasingly catastrophic climate future.

Clearly, Big Oil has us just where they want us.

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star.