Alberta lacking green initiative and jobs, say environmentalists

About a year ago, Alberta’s then-finance minister Iris Evans made a bold prediction while waist-deep in a global recession: Alberta, Canada’s economic engine, would shed only 15,000 jobs in 2009. And by 2010, the province’s economy would be well on its way to recovery.

In the ensuing 14 months, 84,000 Albertans have lost their jobs — more than five times Evans’s optimistic prediction — many who had worked in the province’s bread-and-butter industry: oil and gas. But environmental groups say there is a solution to Alberta’s boom-bust energy economy: Renewable energy.

RePower Alberta, a tour spearheaded by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, aims to educate and persuade the public, industry and private investors to move the province away from a fossil-fuel economy towards green energy. It’s a transition they say will create thousands of new jobs, diversify the province’s economy and reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint.

Additional excerpt: 

“It’s just a matter of people becoming aware of the potential,” says Sheryle Carlson, associate director of Sierra Club’s Prairie chapter, after recent tour stops in Peace River and Grande Prairie. “The old ways of doing business are still going to be there, it’s just they’re shifting to a new market.”