From the Edmonton Journal
Although the Selfie King’s extended political honeymoon is starting to ebb — witness the blowback over his tough guy act in Parliament two weeks ago — we’re no closer to a final decision on key energy infrastructure projects than we were when Trudeau was elected in October.
This isn’t a fresh observation, of course. Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, among others, has chronicled the Trudeau regime’s chronic aversion to decision-making, and its affection for seemingly endless consultation and protracted regulatory reviews.
In the meantime, with Canadian energy policy adrift, anti-capitalist, anti-fossil fuel crusaders such as Naomi Klein are only too happy to fill the vacuum, flying around the country and delivering instructions to the hoi polloi on how we need to change our evil ways to save sacred Gaia.
Klein was at it again Sunday, oh so helpfully linking the Fort McMurray wildfires and climate change while addressing a University of Calgary conference. “If we are serious about keeping warming below 1.5 C (the target set at the December climate confab in Paris), it does kind of mean the end of the fossil fuel era,” she declared.
Well, here’s the thing. You know, kind of.
While Klein never fails to draw a crowd in Canada, where she gets the celebrity treatment on college campuses and her radical views get heavy promo on the state-funded CBC (her filmmaker hubby Avi Lewis’s ex-employer), the rest of the planet seems to care not a whit.
Most energy exporting nations are simply carrying on as usual, building new pipelines and LNG projects at a furious pace. The result? While Canada’s energy resources remain largely landlocked, the U.S. and other exporters — from Saudi Arabia to Iran, Qatar, Kuwait and Russia — are only too happy to fill the void.
The U.S., for decades the world’s biggest consumer of oil and natural gas, is now busy ramping up exports of both. The U.S. government ended its 40-year ban on crude oil exports in December and in February Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass export terminal in Louisiana became the first in the continental U.S. to start exporting LNG.
One of the key export markets for U.S. crude oil is (you guessed it) Canada, where imports of U.S. crude soared nine-fold between 2008 and 2015, and U.S. production grew faster than in any country on Earth.
While two major Canadian oil pipeline projects to the West Coast — Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, B.C., and Kinder Morgan’s planned TransMountain pipeline expansion to Burnaby, B.C. — have been conditionally approved by Canada’s federal energy regulator, they remain stillborn.
Their ultimate fate rests with Trudeau and his foot-dragging cabinet.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is building new pipelines as fast as it can. In 2014, the U.S. added more than 8,000 kilometres of oil pipelines, a 9.1-per-cent jump over the previous year, according to the U.S.-based Association of Oil Pipelines. And during the 2010-14 period, the U.S. added more than 19,000 km to its oil pipeline network.
Put differently, the Association of Oil Pipelines notes, that’s roughly 12 times the length of Keystone XL pipeline the Obama government rejected after years of delay.
With TransCanada’s proposed Energy East oil pipeline still just a gleam in the eye of its proponent, Eastern Canada’s refineries will remain a key target of U.S. producers and other foreign suppliers — including Saudi Arabia — for the foreseeable future.
Klein’s influence on Saudi oil policy, as you might guess, seems rather limited. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t been lecturing in Riyadh of late. Or Moscow, Tehran, or any number of other foreign oil capitals.
On the LNG side, Sabine Pass is merely the first of several U.S. export terminals that will come into service over the next few years. Several others are already under construction.
