https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/actually-foreign-funding-flows-to-both-sides-of-albertas-oil-sands-battle/
[links in online article]
Actually, foreign funding flows to both sides of Alberta’s oil sands battle
Stephen Maher: Fear-mongering about U.S.-backed environmental groups is
a symptom of strain on the oil industry. Next will come demands for
government support.
by Stephen Maher
Jul 5, 2019
Last month, when Jason Kenney announced the creation of a $30-million
war room to fight for Alberta’s oil industry, one of the people standing
on stage with him, looking on approvingly, was Stewart Muir, executive
director of Resource Works, a British Columbia group that was created to
rally support for petroleum projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline
that will move Alberta bitumen to the Pacific.
Muir is one voice in a growing chorus that laments the attacks on
Alberta’s industry from environmental groups, particularly those that
take money from similar organizations in the United States.
The lead soloist is Vivian Krause, an independent researcher who has
followed the money from American foundations to Canadian environmental
groups, and has come to the conclusion that Canadian greens are acting
as the agents of American industrial interests who profit by
land-locking Alberta oil, in particular the Rockefeller election machine.
This conclusion, which could be charitably described as unproven, is a
powerful rhetorical tool for Alberta’s oil industry, providing a focus
for the anger of the many people in the oil patch who have been
struggling to pay their bills since American fracking boom drove oil
prices down.
You can’t campaign against changing market conditions, though, and every
good story needs a villain, so the oil patch’s spinners settled on
foreign-funded environmentalists who are in league with Justin Trudeau
in a conspiracy against hard-working Albertans.
It doesn’t matter much that the details don’t stand up to close scrutiny
when the audience is primed for a good yarn. Many in Alberta, for
instance, suspected that Trudeau spent $4.4 billion on the Trans
Mountain pipeline so that he could kill it, right up until he announced
that construction would begin this summer.
The fact is that both sides in the political struggle over the future of
the oil sands are taking their lead, and taking money, from Americans.
Muir, who stood with Kenney and Krause when Kenney announced his war
room, for instance, has taken $27,500 from Devon Energy, an Oklahoma
company that until recently had a piece of the oil sands.
The fact that he is working for American oil interests hasn’t stopped
him from denouncing those who take money from American environmentalists:
“At one level, this is the story of how American money was used to
weaponize eco-radicals on Canada’s west coast, resulting in economic
advantage for the good ole USA. Criminal that it’s still happening,” he
tweeted on April 13.
On the other side of the battle it is the same. Environmentalists
complain that the pro-industry forces take their marching orders and
money from the Koch brothers, the American dark-money men who fund
pro-oil think tanks like the Fraser Institute and write policy for
Republicans.
Both sides are right, because the battle in Canada is an extension, in a
way, of a death struggle in the United States, between an incredibly
powerful petroleum-industrial complex and those who believe that it is
destroying the planet.
It’s a political and public relations battle, but the winner may depend
on economic and technological struggles that are not yet decided.
U.S. President Donald Trump has surrendered American energy policy to
the climate-change deniers who serve masters in the oil industry, but
many states have continued to reduce emissions, by imposing auto
emission standards and switching to renewables away from coal.
Groups like Resource Works want Canada to back petroleum, and they seem
to have convinced Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer that the best way to
fight climate change is to export Canadian gas to Asia, so that Asians
can use it to generate electricity instead of burning higher-carbon
coal. Environmentalists argue that gas isn’t much better than coal and
we should be transitioning directly to renewables.
It’s a take-no-prisoners battle, with billions in long-term utility
contracts at stake, and the Canadian oil patch and its political allies
are increasingly strident in their arguments and techniques, painting
even moderate environmentalists like the people at the Pembina Institute
as enemies of the people of Alberta.
This new militancy is the result of the economic suffering in Alberta,
but also likely the result of changes in ownership of the oil sands.
Since 2016, when oil bottomed out at US$27 a barrel, seven international
oil and gas companies have sold Canadian assets. The most recent was
Devon, who helped fund Resource Works, which unloaded its oil sands
stake to Murray Edwards’ Canadian Natural Resources for $3.78 billion.
The 2017 departure of Shell, which was a big player with a more
pro-renewable culture than the other companies, likely helped nudge the
remaining players to a more militant stance, to the point that the
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is barely speaking with the
Trudeau government and has registered to advertise in the election in
October.
Although engineers have worked wonders to bring down the
average-per-barrel emissions, the oil produced at the vast mines around
Fort McMurray remains some of the highest-carbon fuel in the world. It
is also some of the costliest to produce.
The industry likes to point to projections that show continued strong
demand for petroleum for decades to come, but there are other, equally
likely scenarios, that show demand falling if policy makers around the
world move away from petroleum and toward renewables or nuclear. Oil
producers, in Canada and the United States, are under increasing strain,
which will inevitably lead to increased demands for government support.
This week, Kenney announced a $2.5-million public inquiry to get to the
bottom of the foreign dough that is attacking the oil sands, based, no
doubt, on the research of Krause.
This will inevitably produce a lot of headlines, a lot of sound bites
and lead to shareable memes circulating on the Facebook groups funded by
petroleum companies.
It may change public opinion, but the environmentalists are not the
cause of Alberta’s economic woes, and they are protesting the oil sands
because they are worried about the climate crisis, not because they are
puppets of foreign interests.
Amid all the yelling, Albertan taxpayers would be wise to keep their
eyes on oil men with their hands out for government money.
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