A new poll released Friday shows the majority of Canadians assume development in the Alberta oilsands has a much larger impact on nation’s economy than it actually does.

According to the poll, conducted by Environics and commissioned by Environmental Defence, 41 per cent of Canadians believe the importance of the oilsands to the economy is six to 24 times higher than it actually is. And a full 57 per cent of Canadians overestimate the value of oilsands to the country’s economy.

The oilsands, according to Statistics Canada, account for only 2 per cent of the national GDP.

Despite the misconception, however, 66 per cent of Canadians still support a transition to a cleaner economy that would limit dependence on the oilsands.

In addition, 76 per cent of Canadians believe that, in light of climate change, the country should shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy.

A recent report from Natural Resources Canada, released quietly at the end of June, said Canadians can expect more floods, storms and other extreme weather to affect the country as climate change increases. The report also claimed governments aren’t doing enough to adapt to a destabilized climate.

The report noted in Canada there have been “relatively few examples of implementation of specific changes to reduce vulnerability to future climate change, or take advantage of potential opportunities.”

The federal government has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise the important of the oil and gas sector, and especially the Alberta oilsands, to the Canadian economy and domestic energy security.

The efforts to shore up the reputation of the oilsands have been met with criticism, however, because the federal government has not released long-awaited regulations for the oil and gas sector.

The oilsands are Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 under the Copenhagen Accord, although a recent Environment Canada report showed Canada’s current weak emissions reduction measures will prevent us from meeting that target.

Last month Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott publicly criticized governments for taking action on climate change.

Prime Minister Harper said, “it’s not that we don’t seek to deal with climate change. But we seek to deal with it in a way that will protect and enhance our ability to create jobs and growth, not destroy jobs and growth in our countries.”

“No country is going to undertake actions on climate change, not matter what they say, no country is going to [take] actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country. We are just a little more frank about that,” he said.

In late 2013 the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the country’s largest oil and gas lobby body, claimed concerns over the oilsands were “ideological.” The claim was made in support of arguments against stronger regulations, documents released under Access to Information legislation show.

Another Environics poll released in November of 2013 showed Canadians are losing confidence that governments will take meaningful action to prevent climate change. Although Canadians feel it is the government’s responsibility to take the lead on emissions reduction, very few feel current governments will actually do so.

A poll by Ipsos Reid released in May showed 76 per cent of Albertans are in favour of stronger greenhouse gas regulations for industry facilities.

Recently in the prestigious science journal Nature a panel of experts called for a moratorium on new oilsands projects until Canada can properly assess the total environmental and climate impacts of development.

Today’s new Environics poll demonstrated Canadians might support that expert recommendation, saying the federal government should work on an economic strategy that reduces dependence on the oilsands and moves towards cleaner energy.

The poll asked 1,011 adults in an online survey the following question:

“Q1: Approximately what percentage of the overall Canadian economy do you attribute to the Alberta oil sands?”

The potential answers were: “2 per cent, 6 per cent, 12 per cent, 24 per cent, 48 per cent, Don’t Know.”

Image Credit: Alex MacLean, copyright. Used with permission.

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Aggressively tackling global warming through better public transportation and increased energy efficiencies could increase global GDP by between $1.8 trillion and $2.6 trillion annually, a new report has found.

Released on Monday, the report by the World Bank and the ClimateWorks Foundation said tackling global warming now would also save as many as 94,000 lives a year from pollution-related diseases and reduce crop losses.

The report — Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change — shows the potential gains from scaling up pro-climate policies.

“The report’s findings show clearly that the right policy choices can deliver significant benefits to lives, jobs, crops, energy, and GDP — as well as emissions reductions to combat climate change,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said.

Written in advance of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit in New York in September, the report looks at benefits that ambitious climate mitigation policies can generate across the transportation, industry and building sectors, as well as in waste and cooking fuels. It focuses on Brazil, China, India, Mexico, the United States and the European Union.

By 2030, the report said, pro-climate government policies on clean transport and improved energy efficiency in factories, buildings and appliances could increase global GDP growth by an estimated $1.8 trillion to $2.6 trillion a year.                                                                  

Those policies could prevent the production of greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to taking two billion cars off the road, the report said, while accounting for 30 per cent of the total emissions reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.

“This report shows that well-designed climate mitigation efforts can result in important economic and social benefits, and provides a frameworks for assessing those benefits,” ClimateWorks Foundation president Charlotte Pera said.

Meanwhile, another major study published Tuesday showed that the U.S. economy already faces multiple and significant risks from climate change.

The study — Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change to the United States — said it's clear that staying on the current business-as-usual path will only increase the nation’s exposure to climate-change-related risks.

“The U.S. climate is paying the price today for business decisions made many years ago, especially through increased coastal storm damage and more extreme heat in parts of the country,” the study said.

“Every year that goes by without a comprehensive public and private sector response to climate change is a year that locks in future climate events that will have a far more devastating effect on our local, regional and national economies.”

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Tom Steyer, retired founder of Farallon Capital Management, co-chaired the Risky Business project.

“Damages from storms, flooding and heat waves are already costing local economies billions of dollars — we saw that firsthand in New York City with Hurricane Sandy,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “With the oceans rising and the climate changing, the Risky Business report details the costs of inaction in ways that are easy to understand in dollars and cents — and impossible to ignore.”

Concurring, Paulson said the U.S. economy is vulnerable to an overwhelming number of risks from climate change.

“If we act immediately, we can still avoid most of the worst impacts of climate change and significantly reduce the odds of catastrophic outcomes — but the investments we’re making today will determine our economic future,” Paulson said.

Steyer said climate change is nature’s way of charging the nation compound interest for doing the wrong thing.

“The longer we wait to address the growing risks of climate change, the more it will cost us all. From a business perspective, given the many benefits of early action, it would be silly to allow these risks to accumulate to the point where we can no longer manage them,” he said.

Looking at climate impacts from now to 2100, the study notes that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years, leading to higher temperatures, higher sea levels and shifts in global weather patterns.

“By not acting to lower greenhouse gas emissions today, decision-makers put in place processes that increase overall risks tomorrow, and each year those decision-makers fail to act serves to broaden and deepen those risks,” the study warned.

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This is a guest post by David Suzuki.

Energy giant Kinder Morgan was recently called insensitive for pointing out that “Pipeline spills can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies, both in the short- and long-term.” The company wants to triple its shipping capacity from the Alberta tar sands to Burnaby, in part by twinning its current pipeline. Its National Energy Board submission states, “Spill response and cleanup creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers.”

It may seem insensitive, but it’s true. And that’s the problem. Destroying the environment is bad for the planet and all the life it supports, including us. But it’s often good for business. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico added billions to the U.S. gross domestic product! Even if a spill never occurred (a big “if”, considering the records of Kinder Morgan and other pipeline companies), increasing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day would go hand-in-hand with rapid tar sands expansion and more wasteful, destructive burning of fossil fuels — as would approval of Enbridge Northern Gateway and other pipeline projects, as well as increased oil shipments by rail.

The company will make money, the government will reap some tax and royalty benefits and a relatively small number of jobs will be created. But the massive costs of dealing with a pipeline or tanker spill and the resulting climate change consequences will far outweigh the benefits. Of course, under our current economic paradigm, even the costs of responding to global warming impacts show as positive growth in the GDP — the tool we use to measure what passes for progress in this strange worldview.

And so it’s full speed ahead and damn the consequences. Everything is measured in money. B.C.’s economy seems sluggish? Well, obviously, the solution is to get fracking and sell the gas to Asian markets. Never mind that a recent study, commissioned by the Canadian government, concludes we don’t know enough about the practice to say it’s safe, the federal government has virtually no regulations surrounding it and provincial rules “are not based on strong science and remain untested.” Never mind that the more infrastructure we build for polluting, climate-disrupting fossil fuels, the longer it will take us to move away from them. There’s easy money to be had — for someone.

We need to do more than just get off fossil fuels, although that’s a priority. We need to conserve, cut back and switch to cleaner energy sources. In Canada, we need a national energy strategy. And guess what? That will create lasting jobs! But we must also find better ways to run our societies than relying on rampant consumption, planned obsolescence, excessive and often-pointless work and an economic system that depends on damaging ways and an absurd measurement to convince us it somehow all amounts to progress.

It’s not about going back to the Dark Ages. It’s about realizing that a good life doesn’t depend on owning more stuff, scoring the latest gadgets or driving bigger, faster cars. Our connections with family, friends, community and nature are vastly more important.

Yes, we need oil and gas, and will for some time. Having built our cities and infrastructure to accommodate cars rather than people, we can’t turn around overnight. But we can stop wasting our precious resources. By conserving and switching to cleaner energy, we can ensure we still have oil and gas long into the future, perhaps long enough to learn to appreciate the potential of what’s essentially energy from the sun, stored and compressed over millions of years. If we dig it up and sell it so it can be burned around the world, we consign ourselves to a polluted planet ravaged by global warming, with nothing to fall back on when fossil fuels are gone.

Scientists around the world have been warning us for decades about the consequences of our wasteful lifestyles, and evidence for the ever-increasing damage caused by pollution and climate change continues to grow. But we have to do more than just wean ourselves off fossil fuels. We must also look to economic systems, progress measurements and ways of living that don’t depend on destroying everything the planet provides to keep us healthy and alive.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image Credit: Burning oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by SkyTruth.

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The message the federal government has been pushing through its ‘responsible resource development’ ad blitz in recent years is one of all Canadians benefiting from developing our energy sources (particularly the oilsands). This is why export pipelines must be built through our communities and LNG plants for natural gas constructed on our coasts. Canadian oil and gas must reach international markets for the economy to thrive, argues Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the infamous global finances referee, took a closer look at Canada’s energy sector – oil and gas primarily – earlier this year and finds the benefits from Canada’s energy boom still remain largely within the energy sector.

“There appears to be an important scope to increase inter-industry linkages across Canada that would lead to wider sharing of benefits from the energy sector,” concludes the IMF report released last January.

The IMF finds every dollar invested in the energy sector in Alberta grows Canadian GDP – an economic vitality indicator – by 90 cents. Of this growth, 82 cents remains in Alberta, mostly in the energy sector (67 cents). The leftover GDP growth is split between Ontario (four cents), the rest of Canada (three cents) and the U.S. (two cents).

“The (IMF) report also shows that the positive impacts of additional exports outside of the energy sector and the producing provinces are surprisingly modest,” says Andrew Jackson, senior policy advisor at the Broadbent Institute in a recent article.

Energy Sector Created Only 1.7 per cent of New Jobs in Canada from 2007 – 2012

Make no mistake the IMF report favours increasing Canadian oil and gas production and building more pipeline capacity. As one would expect the IMF sees impacts of the energy sector on Canada’s economy as positive. The report does not assess the environmental or the social consequences – particularly on Canada’s relationship with First Nations – of the energy sector, which have their own social and economic impacts.

IMF's breakdown of $1 investment in the energy sector scenario.

But the IMF almost appears disappointed by the energy sector’s contributions to economic growth and job creation in Canada:

“The energy sector accounts for only 0.1 percentage points of the average (2¼ percent) annual GDP growth over the last decade. Also, employment in the energy sector increased by less than 13,000 over 2007–12, against a total 752,000 jobs created over the same period in Canada,” states the report.

Health care and social assistance created 22,000 jobs in December 2013 alone according to Statistics Canada.

Photo from federal government's responsible resource development campaign.

While the IMF does not dare to say Canada is suffering from “Dutch disease,” it does conclude the energy boom has taken its toll on the Canadian manufacturing industry.

“Higher energy prices contributed to the real appreciation of the Canadian dollar since early 2000s, which has intensified Canada’s competitiveness challenges in non-energy sectors, particularly in manufacturing,” reads the IMF report.

Rapid Growth vs Slow Growth in Energy Sector – Modest Difference

The IMF gazes into the economic crystal ball to try to predict the future impacts of rapid versus slow development of the energy sector on the economy. If no additional infrastructure to export Canadian energy were to be built – the slow scenario – Canadian GDP would only decrease 0.5 per cent by 2020.

At the other extreme, if all proposed energy export infrastructure is approved and the energy sector develops rapidly (i.e. a 20 per cent increase in oil and gas production in the report) GDP would increase be 2 per cent by 2020. However, the IMF concludes there would be a certain downside to this growth:   

“the current account would be slightly negative, reflecting larger deterioration in the non-energy balance driven by higher imports demand from households and firms.”

Jackson says the “gap between the two scenarios is more modest than might have been thought” given the daily dose of rhetoric Canadians hear insisting the “approval of new pipelines to export oil and gas are central to Canada's economic future.”

IMF Recommendation: Strengthen Domestic Supply Chain

Strengthening Canada’s “domestic-supply chain” will increase the “spillover” benefits from the energy boom into non-energy sector industries according to the report. Building more domestic pipelines to connect western Canadian oil to eastern Canadian refineries is one of the recommendations:

“Canada’s internal market remains segmented, as refineries in eastern Canada are not connected with pipelines to western Canada…. and import much of their crude oil at the higher global (Brent) price,” argues the report.

“This has not only a direct negative impact on Canada’s energy trade balance, but potentially also an indirect one as it limits the competitive boost that Canadian manufacturing firms could derive from accessing a cheaper, domestic source of energy,” concludes the report.

All new pipeline proposals in Canada including TransCanada’s “nation builder” Energy East pipeline involve exporting Canadian oil to international markets. Enbridge’s recently approved Line 9 pipeline from Sarnia to Montreal may be the only exception, but Line 9 could easily be transformed into an export pipeline as well.

The IMF reports supports similar findings by the Canadian Energy Research Institute in 2011 that finds 94% of the economic benefits of expanding the oilsands remain in Alberta.

Image Credit: Government of Canada, IMF

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