Reining in oil and gas is good for the economy

National Observer

a day ago

In biophysical terms, the oil and gas sector has expanded to the point of dominating the Canadian economy. The raw material extracted from nature by the oil and gas industry now outweighs all other domestic extraction of natural resources. This includes trees felled, ores mined, fish caught, gravel quarried, livestock slaughtered, coal mined and crops harvested. When burned, Canadian oil and gas emit well over a billion tonnes per year of climate-wrecking carbon dioxide.
In sharp contrast to its biophysical dominance, oil and gas extraction provides only 0.4 per cent of Canadian jobs, and indeed only 16 per cent of jobs among extractive sectors. Moreover, most Canadian fossil fuel energy gets exported rather than consumed domestically. Even if domestic production of oil fell by nearly two thirds, and gas by more than a third, it would still be enough for current levels of domestic consumption. When Canada finally starts keeping, rather than breaking, its commitments to reduce fossil fuel use and thus greenhouse gas emissions, still less oil and gas will suffice for domestic consumption.
Over the past 10 years, the governing Liberals promoted the biophysical takeover of the economy by oil and gas, largely through aggressive support of pipelines. They spent $50 billion buying, enlarging, and otherwise bolstering, the unmarketable Trans Mountain Pipeline. They sicced the RCMP on people defending Indigenous land against the Coastal Gas Link. And they launched a treaty dispute with the US to stifle tribal and state governments acting to shut down Enbridge Line 5. These actions have done tremendous harm to Canadian ecosystems and the global atmosphere.
Liberal support for oil and gas has also hurt the Canadian economy. On average, other economic sectors sustain more than eight times more jobs per million dollars of GDP than oil and gas extraction does. Public and private investment in oil and gas crowds out investment in these other sectors, thus killing off jobs. By locking in fossil fuel, oil and gas investments lock out what we need more of, for both ecological and economic reasons. This includes solar energy, green buildings, mass transit and ecosystem restoration, all of which would create more jobs.
At this week's meeting with premiers, Prime Minister Carney showed disturbing signs of caving in further to oil and gas. Instead, he must stop the industry's all-out assault on the biosphere. This means ending fossil fuel subsidies, rather than augmenting them, as the Liberals have in the past. And it means rejecting new pipelines and phasing out old ones, rather than proliferating them, as the Liberals have in the past. Humanity and nature urgently need our new government to finally set the Canadian economy on a more ethical and prosperous course away from oil and gas.
Gregory M. Mikkelson, co-founder, Cross Border Organizing Working Group, As a tenured professor of environmental studies, Greg Mikkelson lectured and published in ecology, philosophy, and economics, with a focus on the nature, causes, and value of biological diversity. He also helped divest McGill University from fossil fuels. Having left academia, he now volunteers as a researcher and organizer for a growing international movement to shut down tar sands pipelines in the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence watershed.