Apart from Opposition Leader Rachel Notley's excellent speech, almost nothing was reported in the corporate media from the Alberta Federation of Labour convention. That reflects the fact that no media organization in Canada now has a "labour beat" whereas 50 years ago, every daily newspaper had a labour beat and in some cases, e.g. in Windsor and Sudbury, it was the major beat. Before the premier spoke on Saturday afternoon, not a single corporate media reporter was in the room at the AFL biennial meeting. I was one of the speakers and so I heard the reports each morning indicating that there were zero media people present.
More's the pity. One of the best speeches was by Energi News columnist Markham Hislop. Hislop demonstrated that the claims of the UCP during the election, fronted by Vivian Krause, who mostly earns her income as a speaker for the oil, gas, and minining industries, regarding oilsands opponents in Canada, are misleading, to say the least. The media, he noted, almost never report how much money the anti-oilsands-expansion campaigns have received. Hislop noted that at their peak they received about $4 million from various funders. He called that a "rounding error" versus the $10 billion a year that the oilsands companies have earned in profts in recent years despite the economic downturn of their industry. They easily outspend the environmentalists in making their case.
Krause and Jason Kenney have suggested that the environmentalists are simply puppets of big American oil companies whose charitable foundations fund Canadian anti-oilsands work so as to strand Canadian oil and buttress the American industry. But that makes no sense. The Rockefellers made their fortune from oil but are no longer part of that industry. And the charitable foundations did not concoct a plan to hire Canadian environmentalists. The reverse happened. The environmentalists approached foundations for funding. But, noted Hislop, that funding slowed to a trickle when former Premier Notley announced her Climate Leadership Strategy in November, 2015. The foundations believed that strategy balanced environmental and energy industry needs even if the anti-oilsands organizations did not. So, most of the money that Krause and Kenney claim that they want to stop reaching environmentalists stopped reaching them long ago.
Anyway,the environmentalists whom Krause wants to pretend are agents of American oil barons are not just anti-oilsands, they are against all oil. Increasingly, so is the whole world. Hislop is a strong supporter of the Notley government's efforts to reduce Alberta reliance on oil extraction in favour of upgrading of the oil and sponsoring renewables, as well as diversifying the economy away from just fossil fuels. He pointed out that a relatively small decline in oil demand tanked global oil prices in 2014. It led to oil companies using artificial intelligence to lower their costs (and therefore jobs) so that they could continue to thrive while energy prices are low. They aren't going to increase their labour intensity if miraculously oil prices come back to 2014 values; they will instead just make super-profits.
In any case, at some point, perhaps in 20 years, though it could come much sooner, and when it comes it will be overnight, demand for oil will fall precipitously. Sixty percent of oil is used for transportation and a swift introduction of driverless, electric cars could cut that transportation demand in half quickly. That would put oil prices in the basement and expensive-to-produce, low-quality oil like the oilsands product might be cut out of the market completely.
Or mass electrification of urban transit in Asia, already developing quickly, could take a giant leap, with impacts similar to what driverless vehicles might cause.
In both cases, if Alberta is caught without an economy that has made a big transition from the oil economy to a new, low-carbon economy, Alberta would find itself in a huge crisis. And the paranoids like Kenney and Krause, not the environmentalists, would be to blame for that lack of readiness.
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