The days of infinite growth in Alberta’s oilsands are over with the Alberta government’s blockbuster climate change announcement on Sunday, which attracted broad support from industry and civil society.

“This is the day that we start to mobilize capital and resources to create green jobs, green energy, green infrastructure and a strong, environmentally responsible, sustainable and visionary Alberta energy industry with a great future,” Premier Rachel Notley said. “This is the day we stop denying there is an issue, and this is the day we do our part.”

Notley and Environment & Parks Minister Shannon Phillips released a 97-page climate change policy plan, which includes five key pillars.

1) Carbon will be priced economy-wide at $30/tonne by 2018.

2) Coal-fired power plants will be phased out by 2030.

3) Oilsands emissions will be capped at 100 megatonnes (Mt) per year (recent Environment Canada figures predicted a 2020 output of 103 Mt from the sector), which amounts to allowing current construction to go ahead, but that’s it. That means to expand production beyond current projects, per barrel emissions will need to be reduced.

4) Methane emissions from oil and gas operations will be cut by 45 per cent in 2025.

5) 30 per cent of all electricity will be generated by renewables by 2030.

It is a staggeringly significant proposal, one that far surpasses anything the former Progressive Conservative government imagined in the course of its 43-year reign. The announcement — delivered at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science — was benefitted by appearances from CEOs of Suncor, Canadian Natural Resource Ltd. (CNRL), Shell and Cenovus, something far-right activist Ezra Levant dismissed by alleging the massive energy companies “don't represent the industry.”

Environmental groups such as the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada were also on stage. Getting all of those players in support of one climate strategy is a huge testament to the leadership of University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach, who chaired the climate change panel.

Climate Change Policy Plan Garners Broad Support

With the exception of the rabidly conservative Wildrose Party and former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, it seemed every serious player in politics and industry celebrated the announcement. The NDP-affiliated Broadbent Institute, headquartered in Toronto, concluded: “On a public policy Richter scale, Alberta’s new Climate Leadership Plan is an 11.”

Shell Canada announced that “these measures provide predictability and certainty and will help ensure that producers can responsibly develop and grow this significant Canadian resource while also addressing global concerns about climate change.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Notley in a tweet now favourited over 1,300 times as “a very positive step in the fight against climate change.”  Political blogger Dave Cournoyer accurately dubbed it a “pigs fly” situation.

All of this means a whole lot given the impending Paris Climate Change Conference (COP 21).

Canada ranks 15th out of 17th countries for greenhouse gas emissions according to the Conference Board of Canada, with Alberta contributing 36 per cent of national emissions in 2013 despite only accounting for 11 per cent of the country’s population.

The expected spike in oilsands expansion was widely expected to nullify all other sources of emissions reductions in the Canada. The fact that Alberta, and by extension Canada, is now going into COP 21 with a detailed plan to address the province’s largest source of emissions – oilsands development and coal-fired power plants – speaks volumes about the desire to be taken seriously on the world stage.

Climate Plan May Increase Social Licence for Oilsands Operations

Another component that ostensibly drove oil execs to hop on the green bandwagon was the need to accrue “social licence,” or the support required to build pipelines to export its products. The veto of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline represents what happens when such social licence isn’t secured.

By addressing runaway emissions, Alberta-based companies might actually stand a chance to build infrastructure like the Energy East pipeline, which would transport 1.1 million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick every day.

“The province’s climate strategy may allow our sector to invest more aggressively in technologies to further reduce per barrel emissions in our sector and do our part to tackle climate change,” said Tim McMillan, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

“We encourage the province to follow a balanced approach, recognizing that our sector can only become a global supplier of responsibly produced oil and natural gas if we are competitive on the world stage.”

The fight over pipelines is unlikely to dissipate. While Sunday’s announcement was a giant step in the right direction, it’s still not enough to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a statement from Greenpeace.

“These policies are important first steps, but much bigger emission reductions will be needed for Alberta to do its part to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius,” Alberta climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said.

Hudema also noted that the province still has no short or long-term emission reduction targets.

“Targets give an important signal to business, let the world know where Alberta is headed, and help ensure that direction leads to the reductions that science and equity demand,” he said.

The Pembina Institute has historically supported a higher carbon tax than what was proposed on Sunday – with $40/tonne in 2016, $50/tonne in 2017 and $60/tonne in 2018 — but the plan is an indisputably major upgrade from the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which taxed Alberta’s largest emitters (103 at last count) at the equivalent of $1.80/tonne.

George Hoberg, professor in the forest department at the University of British Columbia, notes there’s still plenty of work to be done but that: “Today is a day for celebration. Alberta has bent its carbon emissions curve, and provided a lever to Canada to show real climate leadership.”

Ultimately, the future of Canada’s environmental reputation may rely on the work that Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna complete during and after the Paris conference. But Sunday’s announcement out of Alberta sets quite the standard.

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The government of Alberta’s continued reliance on the tar sands as the province’s main economic driver has put Premier Alison Redford in a very awkward position recently. With the market for foreign oil drying up in the US, her government is facing a $6 billion budget shortfall. For the first time in many years, Alberta is being forced to reach out for a little help from its neighbours, but the reception has been chilly.

The trouble began last year, when British Columbia Premier Christy Clark discovered that putting her unqualified support behind Enbridge’s plan to run its Northern Gateway pipeline through the province would constitute political suicide in an election year.

Whatever Clark’s motivations may have been—environmental or political—the result is that now they are in the midst of a struggle that Maclean’s Magazine calls, “the greatest political rivalry since former Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams ordered the Canadian flag removed from every government building in a dispute with the feds over offshore energy royalties.”

Then late in January, Redford met with Ontario’s new Premier Kathleen Wynn and by all accounts, relations were similarly strained. Several municipalities in Ontario have expressed concerns over the environmental dangers involved in Line 9, which was constructed in the 1970s and may not be up to carrying the highly corrosive bitumen being put out by the tar sands.

To be fair, this mess isn’t all Redford’s doing. Given Alberta’s history, it’s not surprising that other provinces might be wary of her advances. As Parkland Institute director Trevor Harrison pointed out last year in an op-ed piece for the Winnipeg Free Press, Alberta’s energy policy has historically leaned towards isolation and contempt for the rest of the country’s wishes.

In 1982 while serving as mayor of Calgary, Ralph Klein ran into a similar problem attracting investors to his city because of the open contempt he showed for the eastern workers seeking jobs in the province’s newly developing oil patch. With characteristic bluntness, he called them “bums" and "creeps” and blamed them for the rise in crime in his city. 

During his 14 years as Premier, the famously cantankerous Klein steered Alberta through much of the oil boom, but showed little interest in sharing or saving the wealth, preferring instead to spread it around in the form of “prosperity bonuses” of $400 to each Alberta resident in 2005. It’s sobering now to think that if that money had been saved, the interest alone might have gone a long way to digging Alberta out of its current financial hole. It’s even more frightening that, while the rest of the world was beginning to accept the hard lessons of climate change and oil dependence last year, the Alberta Wildrose Party promised a new round of bonuses beginning in 2015 should it have been elected.

Klein also had little interest in federal calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2002, as part of a campaign to keep then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from ratifying the Kyoto Accord, he famously dismissed warnings about climate change by wondering whether the first ice age was caused by “dinosaur farts.”

The message from the Alberta government has always been, the oil is ours and how we mine it, refine it and sell it is no one’s business but our own. Now that position is simply no longer tenable. In a recent address to the Alberta people, Redford laid out the challenges before the province and promised to find a way out without crippling social programs or, magically, raising taxes.

What she didn't say was that Alberta can no longer afford to make policy as though it were cordoned off from the rest of the country. It needs the help of other provinces to export its oil and that means taking into account the concerns of those who have not been blinded by a couple of decades of short-sighted prosperity.

But it is not enough to simply look for new markets; if Alberta is to free itself from this uncomfortable cycle of boom and bust, Redford must begin to rethink this reliance on the tar sands and find ways to diversify the economy. The question is, can the province let go of decades of rhetoric and take a new road?

In her address, Redford said that oil and gas “are our assets.” I disagree. In the 15 years that I lived in Alberta I learned that, as well as being a province of extraordinary resource wealth, it is a province rich in industriousness. Redford’s constituents are willing to work hard to secure their future, so why does she, like her predecessors, insist upon leading them down a path that puts them at the whim of politics and world markets?

Why not skip that inevitable pain and redirect some of that skill and ingenuity into clean, renewable energy industries that we know have a future? 

Image Credit: Government of Alberta.

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