[Website editor: Alberta could 'potentially reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of oilsands operations by 13 to 16 per cent' by using hydroelectric power. Why trash just one region when we can trash two in order to trash the world's climate even more?]
VICTORIA — The B.C. Liberals have lately promoted building a new electrical transmission link to Alberta as a way to sell green power to a neighbour while attracting federal infrastructure dollars for job creation.
April 13, 2016 - When Rachel Notley's NDP came to power last spring in Alberta, Gordon Laxer's book, After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians, on ecological renewal and Canadian petro-politics was already at the publisher. And so, he was given a week to do some major rewriting because he had not foreseen this political earthquake in the making.
That silly Leap Manifesto -- giving itself away right in the subtitle, which calls for "a Canada based on caring for the Earth and one another." No wonder it provoked fury and outrage.
Canada's big banks are cutting credit lines of struggling energy companies, heaping more financial strain on an industry battered by the collapse in oil prices.
Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Bank of Canada and National Bank of Canada are among those reducing credit lines as the lenders complete their semi-annual review of borrowing limits in the hard-hit energy sector.
“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.
[Webpage: Note that this artticle refers to new investment.]
Wind and solar have grown seemingly unstoppable.
While two years of crashing prices for oil, natural gas, and coal triggered dramatic downsizing in those industries, renewables have been thriving. Clean energy investment broke new records in 2015 and is now seeing twice as much global funding as fossil fuels.
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.
