“I won’t let up,” Alberta Premier Rachel Notley told delegates to the NDP’s national convention last week. “We must get to ‘yes’ on a pipeline.” She repeated that message Saturday, asking the convention to support “pipelines to tidewater that allow us to diversify our markets.”
In doing so, Premier Notley just became the latest Canadian politician to play games with pipelines. She’s telling Albertans a pipeline to tidewater can cure what ails the industry. It won’t — it can’t — because the problem a pipeline to tidewater was intended to address doesn’t exist anymore.
The idea that greater pipeline capacity and access to tidewater would maximize the value Alberta receives for its tar sands crude is a standard talking point for industry, politicians, and other commentators in the ongoing oil price-induced recession in Alberta.
This briefing note counters this argument with analysis that shows that even if Alberta had expanded access to tidewater today, in the form of pipelines to east or west coasts, it would not be any better off.
People need to get their heads around the idea that fossil fuels are "probably dead," the CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway said Wednesday.
"I’m not maybe as green as I should be but I happen to think the climate is changing (and) they’re not going to fool me anymore," Hunter Harrison told a J.P. Morgan transportation conference in New York.
The veteran rail executive said the transition to alternative fuels will be long, but new investments in traditional energy sources will dry up because of environmental hurdles.
Canada’s first ministers are meeting today to discuss climate change. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his top cabinet ministers are sitting down in Vancouver with the premiers of all provinces and territories.
On the eve of his meetings with the premiers, Trudeau on Wednesday delivered a keynote address to the Globe 2016 summit in Vancouver on clean energy and sustainability.
The Daily Planet's Ziya Tong grills Justin Trudeau on sustainable energy development in Canada at the 2016 Globe Series launch in Vancouver, B.C. on Wed. March 2, 2016. Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey
Steadfast in his commitment to getting Canadian oil to market, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said putting pipelines in the ground will pay for the country's transition to a greener future.
But the prime minister said that can’t mean abandoning the oil and gas sector — including plans to build more pipelines.
VANCOUVER—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants Canada to play a lead role in the global fight against climate change, but said that cannot mean abandoning the oil and gas sector — including plans to build more pipelines.
[Webpage editor's note: The proposed Energy East pipeline would terminate at the Irving refinery and export terminal in St John, New Brunswick. Just one telling tidbit from this article: Property taxes on the Irving's oil-by-rail terminal are half those of the Tim Horton's across the street.]
The Irvings run New Brunswick like a hermit kingdom. But as the Energy East pipeline catapults the family onto the national stage, the timing is awkward. Now even the Irvings aren’t talking to the Irvings,
Canada’s oil sands sector represents a crucial global supply to meet future crude demand, but only if producers can simultaneously drive down costs and slash greenhouse-gas emissions, the head of the influential International Energy Agency said Thursday.
