Oil and gas executives in Canada are calling on Canadian federal leaders to take their cues from U.S. President Donald Trump — they’re asking the government to declare a national energy crisis to fast-track expensive fossil fuel infrastructure that would increase production and export capacity.
“By declaring a Canadian energy crisis and key projects in the ‘national interest,’ the federal government will be able to use all its available emergency powers to ensure that the dramatic regulatory restructuring required to expand the oil and natural gas sector is rapidly achieved,” reads an open-letter from 14 oil and gas executives, addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet.
If the country boosts fossil fuel production, even if paired with carbon capture technology, global carbon emissions would still rise because the vast majority of emissions from fossil fuels comes when the fuel is burned. Climate science is clear that the planet will continue to warm to dangerous levels — leading to worsening extreme weather, premature deaths, lost species and disrupted economies — until greenhouse gas emissions reach net-zero (in other words, reduced until any remaining emissions created are offset by their removal from the atmosphere).
The companies behind the letter include pipeline giants Enbridge, TC Energy, South Bow and Pembina Pipeline as well as major oil and gas producers like Imperial Oil, Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources, MEG Energy, Cenovus Energy, Tourmaline Oil, Strathcona Resources, Arc Resources, Veren and Whitecap Resources.
According to an analysis of company spending plans, collectively, the signatories to the letter are already planning to spend more than $280 billion over the next decade increasing oil and gas supply and reaching new markets. But the companies now say to expand they need the federal government to “reset its policies and regulatory frameworks.”
Specifically, the fossil fuel executives say federal environmental assessment requirements and the West Coast ban on tanker ships of a certain size, are “impeding development and need to be overhauled.” They also want to see major projects approved within six months of filing an application, a commitment from the federal government to abandon industrial carbon pricing and its promised cap on oil and gas pollution, and for Ottawa to increase the amount of loans it is willing to backstop for Indigenous groups who want to invest in new oil and gas projects.
Environmentalists derided the request.
“As the source of almost one third of Canada's carbon pollution, letting oil and gas CEOs off the hook for doing their fair share to fight climate change would make Canada a climate pariah, just like the Trump administration,” said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada in a statement. “We can’t ignore that oil companies backed Trump’s rise to power and now demand Canada copy his declaration of an energy emergency to give them an unfair advantage against their clean energy competitors.”
The company officials say Canada is at a turning point and the country should grow its fossil fuel economy by boosting production and rapidly building new pipelines and LNG export terminals to reach new markets. The group claims that exporting Canadian LNG can help the world lower its carbon emissions, especially if Asian countries are willing to swap coal-fired electricity generation for gas — a position wildly at odds with climate science.
According to a recent study from Cornell University, emissions from American LNG are 33 per cent higher than coal, when processing and shipping are taken into account. The findings add to a growing pile of evidence that the “bridge fuel” argument for LNG put forward by fossil fuel companies, is bunk. In China, for instance, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found growing LNG imports have not reduced the country’s coal demand due to cost, energy security concerns and the “meteoric rise” of renewables.
“LNG is likely to play a trivial role in supporting the clean energy transition in China’s power sector. Even outside China’s power sector, LNG is doing little to displace coal consumption,” said Ghee Peh, an energy finance Asian coal markets specialist with IEEFA in a statement. “Chinese investments in coal-based iron and steelmaking capacity still far exceed natural gas-based processes, and full decarbonization will require non-fossil fuel alternatives rather than a shift from coal to gas.”
The call to ramp up fossil fuel production for exports comes as Canada and the United States square off in a trade war, triggering public debate about building new pipelines to reach new markets. But ramping up fossil fuel exports goes against the grain of global energy forecasts from the authoritative International Energy Agency, which expects global oil demand to peak by 2030.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has embraced many items on the oil and gas industry’s latest wishlist. Like the executives behind Wednesday’s letter, he is calling for the removal of industrial carbon pricing, scrapping the oil and gas pollution cap, enticing Indigenous nations to support resource extraction projects with financial incentives, and repealing the federal environmental assessment for major projects.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she “wholeheartedly” supports the letter from oil and gas executives, accusing the federal government, which spent more than $34 billion building the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline to help companies reach new markets, of doing “everything they can to keep our oil and gas in the ground.”
“To leave this treasured resource in the ground would be an outright betrayal of current and future generations of Canadians,” she said in a statement.
The oil and gas industry is Canada’s largest and growing source of carbon emissions domestically, but its exports to other countries are even more damaging to the planet. In 2023, the most recent year data is available, the oil and gas sector’s exported emissions surpassed one billion tonnes — significantly more than the country’s domestic total.
Since 2012, Canada’s domestic emissions have fallen about six per cent, from 744 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2e to 702 Mt in 2023. Over the same period, exported emissions from fossil fuels have grown 58 per cent, from 651.7 Mt to 1029.9 Mt.
Even if the fossil fuel industry’s requests this week to the government to boost production and exports are ignored, emissions are still projected to get worse in the coming years thanks to the opening of the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline last year, and this year’s scheduled opening of LNG Canada.
John Woodside / Canada's National Observer / Local Journalism Initiative
Comments
You can be sure that the execs felt this was such an important letter they all flew in private jets to Calgary to sign it.
Dictator Trump stretches (violates?) the laws and constitution of the USA to declare emergencies. Canada goes by the rule of law and Carney must not imitate the tyran.
The Canadian oil and gas companies are mostly owned by non-Canadians. To do business in our country, they must respect our laws and principles, i.e. environmental protection.
If not Alberta, at least the federal government must completely stop any form of help to oil and gas industries.
This makes my physically sick to read. Air quality and heat already make spring, summer and fall in Alberta unrecognizable from my youth. Wildfires burning up our forests and displacing persons and animals is dystopian. Can’t even skate on ice outside all winter any more, or count on snow for skiing. And air quality in winter is changing, too, with many more dog walking days occurring in a shroud of muck over downtown Calgary. Ever present drought. Without adequate water for drinking, livestock and crops, how will we live off the land that we deride so eagerly? Water, not oil, should be on our minds.
Their disconnection from the ecosystems that sustain us is shocking. Their derision for the non-human inhabitants of Earth - who are integrated with these ecosystems - is disgusting. Billions of dollars spent on extreme weather events in North America and subsidies to an industry that is harming us. Worse impacts in other parts of the world that we selfishly ignore and that the Oil Execs deem disposable.
Change is hard, but it is beyond time for change. My family benefited from oil and gas exploration for 3 generations. But I am an Albertan waiting for Alberta to rise up and lead us into the next phase of human exploration. Oil and gas will be part of it, but it can no longer be all of it, and can no longer grow without impunity. Nothing can, and we are fools for thinking that is so. Political power wielded by Oil Execs should be concerning for everyone: they are not advocating for affordability, reconciliation, housing or sharing the wealth. They do not care about us.
Big Oil mimics the game plan of Big Tobacco. Their actions are in complete opposition to climate science - agreed upon by 97% of climate scientists - and the tenets of the Paris Agreement. Renewable energy is here, and it’s growing exponentially in markets that let it. Non-renewables are not only harming us and our home, they are finite. Where are the solar and wind barons? Why does Big Oil cling to increasing emissions instead of reaping the benefits of a new economy? Their inability to consider 1) a timeline beyond the next quarter’s financial report and 2) a global population who are inter-connected in this closed system is unconscionable. There are many solutions, and the costs to invest in them are less than the costs to our infrastructure and health (Project Drawdown). Of course, pay now and benefit later is never a business plan for Big Oil, but running a country and protecting citizens and ecosystems cannot be undertaken like a business. Government is not a business. International treaties are not a business, they are a moral obligation to all who inhabit this planet.
The climate crisis is a health crisis: reduced air quality, extreme heat, water contamination from heat, fires, floods and sea level rise, changing disease patterns from warming, injury from wildfires, floods, and extreme storms, and challenges to food availability and quality (Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate, IPCC, Lancet Countdown). It’s happening now. Big Oil cannot escape the effects of a warming planet on their own health. Self-preservation should trump greed, but it sadly does not. Shame on them, and those who listen to their selfish greed-mongering.
Well said, Shannon!
Wholehearted agreement here.
Exactly so, well-written.
well written. Well said. Full agreement from me.
Exemplary comment. Kudos!
These 14 oil industry executives should be locked in a room with 14 research directors from the international insurance industry. The latter is one of the few large global corporate conglomerates that have done the math, and have experienced first hand paying for the damages caused by climate related drought and storms.
OPEC writes reports using impecable computer models that indicate oil and gas demand will keep growing out to 2050 and beyond. Pro oil politicians and industry mouthpieces cite the reports to support their stances.
Where OPEC gets derailed is with the assumptions supporting their models. They fail to accurately account for the growth of renewables, especially in China.
The IEA and other independent analysts have done the math and concluded fossil fuel demand will peak in or about 2030 due to the phenomenal growth in renewables.
What this means is that any new (and much of the existing) oil and gas infrastructure are destined to become stranded assets and objects for rust to accumulate on sometime in the 2030s.
Alberta (my old home province) has no Plan B. Danielle Smith made sure of that by forcing the fast growing renewable energy industry to jump impossibly high hurdles.
Moreover, Smith not only puts all her eggs into the USA (export market) and OPEC (futures) baskets, she then tries to blackmail the federal government to build many nore pipelines and underpin CCS and industry expansion using taxes paid by all Canadians, or else separatism will mushroom in Alberta.
What a fool's game. Several OPEC nations themselves are building massive arrays of solar in the desert, clearly hedging their bets on their overly rosy predictions that oil is forever. And Canadians will not tolerate much more separatist talk before they challenge Smith to get on with actually holding a referendum, making every Albertan put their Canadian citizenship on the line and to potentially suffer through very tough negotiations with the feds on the division of Alberta's assets. Alberta does not own airports, national parks, TMX, military bases, Furst Nations land, federal buildings etc. And the feds have deep equity stakes in highways, railways and communications assets.
In the end, sticking with oil is, as mentioned, a fool's game.
The fossil-fuel industry has long conflated its interests with the public interest. Welcome to the petro-state.
O&G companies speak of the project approval process, not the project review process. This hugely destructive industry arrogantly assumes that all their proposed projects should be green-lit as speedily as possible. Trampling all opposition and environmental concerns in the process.
O&G companies resist all regulation, no matter how sensible.
Fossil-fuel expansion torpedoes Canada's climate plan.
The IPCC warns that the world must nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050 to keep warming below the danger limit of 1.5 C.
IEA's Net-Zero by 2050 report says no new investment in fossil fuels after 2021 to limit global warming to 1.5 C.
No time for fossil-fuel expansion.
Naomi Oreskes (CBC Radio, 2017): "It's such an idiotic argument, it's really hard to give a rational answer to it. If you are building pipelines, you're committing yourself to another 30, 50, 75, 100 years of fossil fuel infrastructure. If we're really serious about decarbonizing our economy, it means we have to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure."
Canada's O&G lobby routinely inflates its own importance:
From 2016-23 Canada's energy sector DIRECTLY contributed 10.2% on average to GDP. Including oil & gas, nuclear, hydro, coal, and renewables. Petroleum accounted for 4.5%. Crude oil represents a fraction of that. The oilsands sector represents a fraction of that.
Subtract (astronomical) externalized environmental, climate change, and health costs — and subsidies (visible and invisible).
Canada's O&G lobby — the biggest threat to Canada's democracy — actively opposes, campaigns against, attacks, and undermines the federal Liberals and their half-hearted climate policies, while funding their enemies. (We are long past the point where the Conservatives, the network of right-wing think tanks and social media groups, Postmedia, and Freedum-convoy types may be called mere opponents.) Even as the Liberals and provincial NDP bow to Big Oil's demands and give the industry nearly everything on its wishlist.
The Liberals need to grow a pair and tell the O&G industry to take a hike.
"If the country boosts fossil fuel production, even if paired with carbon capture technology, global carbon emissions would still rise because the vast majority of emissions from fossil fuels comes when the fuel is burned."
If the country boosts fossil fuel production, even if paired with carbon capture technology (CCS), global carbon emissions would still rise because CCS can capture only a fraction of carbon emissions — and captures no other pollutants.
Even using the industry's gross under-estimates, Canada's oilpatch is the fourth most carbon-intensive on the planet, behind Algeria, Venezuela, and Cameroon. Canada's rating is nearly twice the global average.
Rystad Energy: "Among the top 10 oil and gas producing countries, Canada had the highest CO2 emission intensity per barrel of oil equivalent."
"Climate science is clear that the planet will continue to warm to dangerous levels … until greenhouse gas emissions reach net-zero."
Given CO2's long atmospheric lifetime, warming will continue for some time after we reach net-zero.
Observed warming to date is due to emissions from decades past. The full impact of today's emissions won't be felt for years. More warming is in the pipeline even if emissions stop tomorrow.
The extra heat trapped by extra CO2 takes centuries, even millennia to disperse down through the deep ocean.
Most of the heavy lifting in global warming is done not by CO2 itself but by feedbacks in response to elevated CO2.
Climate impacts (e.g., sea level rise) are likely to continue for centuries, if not millennia, due to climate feedbacks (changes in water vapour, lapse rate, clouds, and surface albedo: loss of summer Arctic sea ice, melting ice sheets, etc.)
It may take centuries for the Earth to reach a new equilibrium.
Thank you for bringing this up. Few people understand this. Some seem to think that just reducing emissions by some fraction will stop the warming.
We're going to see a lot of this kind of thing, and not just from the oil biz. We're facing a crisis, and to the very rich, that means it's time for disaster capitalism. "The Shock Doctrine" (Naomi Klein), aka "Shooting the Hippo" (Linda McQuaig) never went away, they're always waiting for a chance to do the playbook.
That's really the big risk--big corporations, mostly transnational, and rich traitorous fuckwads like Kevin O'Leary (only with real money, not mostly pretend), will be trying to take advantage of this situation. So just when Canada really, really needs to be looking after Canadian interests and the Canadian people, they're going to be trying to channel it into policies that let them suck more profits out of the country, deindustrialize us even more, and impoverish Canadians. This is bad enough when they're taking advantage of a normal shock, but in this one it would mean weakening Canada to the point where many might decide to give in and knuckle under to Trump. They don't give a damn, they have no loyalty to Canada or its people. So we really have to work hard to stop the disaster capitalists this time.
I learned recently that Kevin O'Leary now has citizenship in the UAE. I wonder what led him to that action?
I agree that the Canadian government needs emergency powers - to shut down the oil and gas industry, over perhaps five years.
Those who signed the letter should be charged with attempted homicide of all the people to be killed by the increased fires, floods, droughts and starvation if they got their way.
I love how oil & gas execs, Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre continue to spout carbon capture technology as a solution so they can expand fossil fuels even more. Carbon capture technology has already proven to be a failure in the EU (most failed to deliver or capture as claimed) and the return on carbon capture technology is not worth the cost.
It is time that oil & gas, Danielle Smith, and Pierre Poilievre Conservatives be called out on something that will not work. If they are so keen on carbon capture technology, tell the industry to use their own money, not taxpayers, if they feel that is a solution. If it comes out of their pockets, you will get no takers.
The requested abuse of emergency power being asked is a disgrace, especially coming from most being American owned operations.
I also find it ridiculous how they say co2 is not a problem while saying that storing underground is a good thing.
It seems irrational to expect sanity when we are (in my opinion) clearly moving at quick time (further) into an era of insanity. So, i'm disgusted but not at all surprised at what the "fossil fuel exec's" want; how will the Liberal party respond if they form the next government? i'd guess not just bau, but bau on steroids. This insanity i refer to seems to be very contagious!
Poilievre said he'll build pipelines to the four cardinal directions and do his version of Drill Baby Drill. Deep, deep federal debt with no viable return and economic incompetence will become a controversial topic to hang around Conservative necks if they form government, even with their susceptibility to MAGAnomics and likelihood to cave to Trump before too long.
Carney is being coy, which in itself is a mixed message. Despite a decade of his narratives on clean energy, he is now open to more pipelines (likely as part of the reality of campaign strategy in this country) but couches it in terms of the private industry building it.
That brings into mind the need for building business cases and conducting feasibility studies. Notice how no oil company has stepped forward to build any pipeline on its own for years? Maybe they've already done the math.
Energy East would be anywhere between 3,500 and 6,000 km, depending where they put the terminus. Exporting oil/gas to the EU means the longer version pipe and at least 10-15 years to consult, finance, permit and build it to the Atlantic coast, but first through 1,000 km of the Canadian Shield. Then there's the task of building an LNG facility and/or oil export seaport infrastructure.
What would that be altogether, $150B? $200B? $300B? Would any federal government step up to assume that cost without a cost-benefit analysis? Clearly, the private sector is not, and I suspect they've secretly taken the IEA reports to heart that world fossil fuel demand will peak before too long and start to decline before Energy East is even half completed.
In 10 years the EU will have stopped or greatly slowed the import of LNG and oil and will have made huge progress building out solar, wind and geothermal, with a little green hydrogen added for steel making and as a substitute for fossil gas. Asia and the global South will have been economically colonized by China and its cheap solar and wind power, as events proceed in the evolving patterns as at present.
If Energy East is meant to replace oil and gas imported from the US to Central and Eastern Canada, it will still take at least a decade and 3-figure billions
Why not simply convert to electricity? Quebec is very likely to agree, given its vast legacy hydroelectric network. If a Carney government moves as promised in clean energy, then adding interie segments across provincial boundaries is much, much more affordable than new pipelines, even for the private sector that he wants to involve. The technology is already off the shelf, and the national grid is already largely built out. Making east-west improvements to the grid and adding major clean power corridors to the North is all we need.