Pipeline MOU Chess Game OR REAL Renewable Solutions That Can Unite Canada - Sierra Club Canada

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Eroding climate policy was the real prize oil and gas interests were after: In exchange for a Pipeline MOU the Federal Government gave up an emissions cap (which could have saved thousands of Canadian lives from air pollution alone), clean electricity regulations, and it unnecessarily delayed methane reductions: all for a supposedly improved carbon price. But just seven days after signing the MOU the Alberta Government gutted industrial carbon pricing rendering it effectively useless.

It should come as no surprise: industrial carbon pricing can be very effective when paired with other policies – like the anti-greenwashing laws the Federal Government also needlessly weakened – but industrial carbon pricing is also inherently opaque making it a perfect way to appear to be taking climate action while doing nothing.

But the political theatre around the Pipeline MOU masked another layer of theatre, an attempt to frame urgent calls for climate action as unpragmatic and irrelevant to the Canadian conversation. This theatre centres businesses and political leaders as the agents of change and the rest of us as pawns in a chess game (ask yourself, how many pawns are left at the end of a chess game?). This theatre draws a false equivalence between:

The past mistakes of a climate movement that initially fell for oil industry spin that falsely suggested the average person could stop climate by consumer choices alone (it’s actually the ultra-rich and big corporations that bare the lions share of the blame).
And the premeditated, democracy-destroying, actions of oil and gas corporations that will cost millions of lives from climate change (minimum) and already help cause millions of deaths from air pollution.

These actions clearly did not have the same consequences. One side, our side, is fundamentally right and the oil and gas lobbyists are fundamentally wrong. You’ve heard all this both-sides-ism before of course: it’s the same tired lines oil and gas interests use after every crisis – like after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – and it has only one purpose: to try to crush your spirit and get you to give up your agency. You can defeat it simply by saying “No.”

Can the climate movement communicate better and connect our arguments to issues like the cost of living and fairness? Oh certainly, and as Markham Hislop wisely wrote recently we can talk in terms of economics. But we should never seek to appease, only to re-frame. We must do the town halls and tree plantings that reach beyond the climate-bubble but we must never put down the protest banners, never treat the climate demands of youth as unpragmatic, or fail to call injustice what it is. You don’t sell out the radical, you expand on it, that’s full spectrum resistance, and that’s ironically how climate denialists themselves operate. We can learn from them.

We need that bold climate movement right now more than ever: The MOU was the result of clueless advice to government. There are rumours that an insular culture within the Federal Government has led to anyone who questions oil and gas’ economics being labeled a heretic and silenced, and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) just made cuts that will hurt our ability to protect Canadians from climate impacts like wildfires and floods. Tensions between Alberta and the rest of Canada continue, have simply shifted to other issues for now, and will likely shift back once either MOU either falls apart or the economic futility of a pipeline (minus massive public subsidies) becomes apparent. People are now talking about the pipeline more than they were before the MOU. Calls from journalists to NRCan about whether or not sustainable jobs are even a priority go unanswered. We cannot simply ‘trust the market,’ businesses, or government alone to act wisely. The renewable energy transition is happening but as a recent report shows:

“At present, [the transition] is occurring in an unplanned, unsupported and chaotic way, with key disemployment decisions made unilaterally by fossil fuel employers in the interests of maximizing their own profits,”

Other countries are acting, the United Kingdom has just announced an ambitious clean energy plan (£40 billion in clean investment annually). But is NRCan secretly working to build a renewable future? Well, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, cuts funding like a duck, fails to answer questions like a duck, and shuts down all internal critiques of oil and gas like a duck, it’s likely to be a duck captured by oil and gas interests.

NRCan thinks there’s public support for a pipeline, but it’s the polite, theoretical, support one can get for a theoretical pipeline, and it’s support that’s already slipped since earlier in the year. It’s not the country-dividing, messy, reality of public opinion that would take place if the Federal Government tried to force a new pipeline through BC – one First Nations are clear that they don’t consent to. What polling actually shows, if the Federal Government ever bothered to get beyond their bubble, is that Canadians overwhelmingly prefer renewable energy development to oil and gas development.

Renewables could be the real unifying force for Canada if they take precedence over a pointless pipeline.

Oil and gas jobs decline even when production increases and the sector is now less than 1% of Canadian employment while clean jobs surge globally. Oil and gas is a small component of our national GDP, and the top four oil sands companies are sending a large share profits out of Canada to the United States, but these corporations are still our biggest polluters in terms of both climate and political theatre.

Will loopholes in carbon pricing be closed during upcoming negotiations and, if the MOU is broken, will the scrapped climate policies be put back in place or will a convenient excuse be found not to? Likely the latter, because that’s how appeasement works: you give an inch to oil and gas interests and they’ll try to take the whole field. But the one hope we have rests in you. No matter who you support, the government will not act unless it is held accountable – when we fail to do push we open the door for the lobbyists to keep taking ground.

The end of the oil and gas age is near – but you still need to create community, hold leaders to account, and cause trouble if we want the end of oil and gas to be both rapid and fair. So refuse to be a pawn.