Western Standard - June 16, 2023


Liberals table 'Just Transition' legislation in House

Topics
just transition just transition legislation
Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Dan Bilzerian Coal Jonathan Wilkinson
Subsidized media is controlled media Here comes the Just Transition

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

155.34

Word count

2,077

Sentence count

113

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Western Standard's energy editor, Sean Pulser, joins me to discuss the Canadian government's new plan to transition to a net zero energy economy, and why it's bad for Alberta's oil and gas workers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Hello, Western Standard viewers. I'm Nigel Hannaford for the Western Standard.
00:00:05.320 I have with me this morning, Sean Pulser, the Western Standard's energy reporter, energy editor.
00:00:12.180 What are you, Sean?
00:00:13.380 I think I'm a little bit of both. You're wearing both hats.
00:00:16.380 All I know is that Sean Pulser's articles are trending at the moment
00:00:19.780 because they deal with a very important subject that came down yesterday,
00:00:23.680 and that is the federal announcement of the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Strategy,
00:00:30.200 which sounds about as interesting as a long drink of warm water,
00:00:33.580 but it actually is of vital importance in this province and, indeed, to the rest of the country
00:00:39.420 because, really, it's just that old just transition,
00:00:43.820 the removal of good, well-paying energy jobs from the economy
00:00:49.680 and substituting with, well, I guess the famous phrase was truckers and janitors.
00:00:54.940 Not that we have anything against truckers and we certainly need janitors, 0.99
00:00:59.720 but they're not always six bigger salary jobs.
00:01:04.620 So, Sean, what is going on here?
00:01:07.700 What is the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act supposed to do,
00:01:12.560 and why is it bad for Alberta?
00:01:14.260 Well, it's supposedly to transition people away from, I guess, 0.98
00:01:22.780 what they consider to be higher emissions.
00:01:26.280 They want to say polluting, but I don't think that that's really the case.
00:01:29.420 Higher emissions jobs into this so-called net.
00:01:31.280 Is carbon dioxide a pollution?
00:01:33.860 A pollutant?
00:01:35.200 Well, the carbon dioxide that comes from the birds and bees definitely isn't,
00:01:38.620 but, you know, there's probably a case to be made
00:01:41.040 that the stuff that comes off the top of the smoke stack could be considered polluting.
00:01:46.320 Well, carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide.
00:01:49.040 It's the other crowd they're worried about, perhaps.
00:01:51.120 Well, you can't breathe pure carbon dioxide.
00:01:53.320 If I put you in a room with pure carbon dioxide,
00:01:55.640 you're going to die, unfortunately. 0.86
00:01:57.680 That's an editorial board meeting. 0.98
00:01:59.520 Anyway, sorry I interrupted you.
00:02:01.000 Carry on.
00:02:01.860 What's this act about?
00:02:03.740 Well, it's about transitioning to net zero jobs,
00:02:06.320 which in itself doesn't sound like a bad thing,
00:02:08.280 but I guess the point is you're taking away from one pile
00:02:13.580 and you're putting it into the other at a time
00:02:16.580 when Alberta is ramping up on things like hydrogen from natural gas
00:02:22.480 and also to fill world oil demand,
00:02:26.680 which is up about 10 million barrels a day since the pandemic.
00:02:31.280 So it's a fairly substantial number.
00:02:33.840 Oil demand is going to hit over 100 million barrels a day this year
00:02:37.840 for the first time in the last three years.
00:02:41.060 So I want to circle back to that point
00:02:45.580 because you had an insightful article yesterday about some of the estimates.
00:02:49.280 But as I understand it, the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act,
00:02:55.920 in which we see the just transition,
00:03:00.060 is in quite a lengthy suite of legislation.
00:03:03.980 This is just the first part of it that was issued yesterday
00:03:08.480 and it has to do with what, forming an advisory council?
00:03:12.560 Basically an advisory council that reports to the government
00:03:15.140 on the policies of, I guess, in some kind of totality
00:03:20.000 on how it's going to affect workers, presumably in oil and gas,
00:03:24.040 because they are assuming that world oil demand
00:03:27.980 is going to fall by about 75% by 2050 to 24 million barrels a day.
00:03:33.260 And that was the number that really caught my eye.
00:03:36.720 And I had to go back and do some double checking.
00:03:41.200 Well, forming an advisory committee doesn't sound too bad.
00:03:44.420 It's where it goes from there.
00:03:46.560 Danielle Smith, the premier, came out very strongly against this
00:03:50.240 and basically said, look, this is provincial jurisdiction
00:03:53.700 that you're interfering with and we're not going to let you do it.
00:03:56.460 Why is she so exercised about it? 1.00
00:03:58.140 Because it ties in with this idea of emissions caps,
00:04:03.600 decarbonizing the power grid by 2035 instead of 2050,
00:04:09.300 as we've agreed.
00:04:10.820 The whole range, the whole gamut, fuel emission standards,
00:04:18.540 all these things that are supposedly going to tie into this reduced demand number
00:04:23.420 of 25 million barrels a day, which the whole policy in its totality
00:04:28.980 is predicated on.
00:04:31.380 And where does that number come from, Sean?
00:04:34.240 It comes from the International Energy Agency.
00:04:36.180 It's called their net zero scenario, which is basically the unicorn
00:04:41.680 and rainbow scenario.
00:04:43.340 If everybody had, this is what everybody in the world would have to do
00:04:47.660 if we are going to hit net zero as a planet by 2050.
00:04:51.460 So that means immediate cessation of investment in any new oil and gas
00:04:58.220 or fossil fuel, including natural gas, coal.
00:05:02.240 So does this agency have other scenarios?
00:05:04.440 They do.
00:05:05.220 They have a policy scenario, which is what would happen if all the countries
00:05:12.320 did what they said they were going to do, that they've committed to
00:05:14.980 under the Paris Accord.
00:05:16.320 And that number is not 25 million barrels a day.
00:05:19.200 It's probably closer to about 75 to 80, maybe even 90.
00:05:25.020 So we're talking instead of 75% reduction in oil demand,
00:05:29.240 maybe anywhere from about 15 to 20.
00:05:32.040 So really, the writers of this legislation have just grabbed the number
00:05:37.860 that looked best to them, fitted their narrative best, and gone with that.
00:05:41.940 But it doesn't really mean that there's any strength to it.
00:05:45.300 Is this, what did you say, rainbows and unicorns?
00:05:47.540 Yeah, it fits Canada's narrative.
00:05:49.640 So if we are going to achieve net zero by 2050 and assuming that everybody else in the world
00:05:57.020 is going to do this at the same time simultaneously, and assuming that somehow Canada really makes
00:06:03.260 a meaningful difference in the whole totality of the emissions picture, you know, given that we are only 1%
00:06:10.360 of global emissions, then that is the number that they would use.
00:06:14.880 Now, in the U.S., they have the Energy Information Agency.
00:06:19.520 So it gets a little confusing because you have the IEA and you have the EIA.
00:06:23.520 So the Energy Information Agency is the U.S. government's energy advisory, whereas the IEA is based in Paris.
00:06:31.920 Now, what the EIA is saying in their base case is that oil demand is going to go up to about 105 million barrels a day,
00:06:40.560 and it's going to stay there.
00:06:41.520 That's roughly what it is now, isn't it?
00:06:44.080 Yeah, well, it's a little, so we've gone from about 90 million during the pandemic back up above 100
00:06:49.660 for the first time, and so I think we're about 102, and then so in the next couple years,
00:06:55.580 they're forcing it to go up to about 105, and then pretty much flatline around 100.
00:07:01.640 So that's what the Americans think?
00:07:02.980 That's what the Americans think.
00:07:03.980 The Canadian government chooses to think that everybody is going to do what the Canadian government
00:07:08.860 thinks is best, and the oil demand will plummet to 25% of what it is today.
00:07:14.100 Well, there's absolutely no chance.
00:07:15.400 And they're basing this legislation on that assumption.
00:07:17.540 They are, and there's absolutely no chance that the world is going to hit net zero by 2050
00:07:22.420 because India and China, which account for a combined total of about 40% of the world's total emissions profile,
00:07:30.980 have not committed to net zero.
00:07:33.120 I think it's 2060 in India's case and 2070 in China's.
00:07:37.520 So how are the Indians, and this very much relates to the assumptions behind this legislation,
00:07:45.240 how do the Indians and the Chinese generate electricity?
00:07:49.660 What do they burn?
00:07:50.960 Coal.
00:07:52.300 Coal and more coal?
00:07:53.640 Coal and more coal.
00:07:54.960 Well, I mean, China has added probably the most renewable sources of any other country in the world,
00:08:00.500 but the fact is that they are still adding a coal-fired power plant a week.
00:08:05.920 So the solution worldwide would seem to be switch from coal.
00:08:13.120 If the solution in Canada is to switch from coal generation to gas generation of electricity,
00:08:20.100 then wouldn't that be a worthwhile thing to do worldwide?
00:08:24.380 Yes, absolutely.
00:08:25.280 So we have the gas.
00:08:26.980 They have the coal-fired stations that need replacement.
00:08:30.500 So what's the hold-up here?
00:08:32.760 I noticed that the federal government, when it suits them, says,
00:08:36.380 oh, well, it's all one atmosphere, so we have a right as the federal government
00:08:40.020 to intrude into your provincial jurisdiction and set the rules for you,
00:08:45.440 something that Premier Smith is challenging, of course, but, I mean, that's the federal point of view.
00:08:49.660 But when it becomes worldwide, then suddenly the one atmosphere argument doesn't apply anymore.
00:08:58.840 What's going on there?
00:08:59.960 Well, we have enough natural gas in Canada that if we did export it to all these countries,
00:09:05.380 we could offset our whole entire emissions profile just by exporting LNG to China.
00:09:13.800 The problem is that we don't have the infrastructure.
00:09:16.780 We don't have the ports.
00:09:17.820 We don't have the facilities.
00:09:18.880 We don't have the pipelines.
00:09:19.900 And we have a very onerous regulatory regime that precludes these things from getting built.
00:09:25.320 Now, you say, Sean, that we don't have these things, but we were on the track of building them.
00:09:29.800 The Northern Gateway was a pipeline to the coast.
00:09:35.080 There were, at one point, multiple, like almost an embarrassingly unlikely large number of applications
00:09:44.300 to build LNG plants on the coast of British Columbia.
00:09:48.180 Where have they all gone?
00:09:48.840 Well, Nigel, I know that you're reaching retirement age.
00:09:54.620 So the question I have to ask you is would you put your pension into the hands of the Canadian government
00:10:01.720 to approve these projects to get them done?
00:10:05.160 And so really what the issue is, is investor confidence.
00:10:10.160 So the people who have these hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in New York and London
00:10:17.060 and Switzerland around the world, when it comes to looking at Canada as a place to be investing those dollars,
00:10:26.160 generating reasonable rates of return in your lifetime, hopefully, so that you can enjoy your retirement.
00:10:31.660 I shall live forever.
00:10:32.520 I'm a Republican.
00:10:33.460 Anyway.
00:10:33.940 So basically that's the other piece of it, is the investment puzzle.
00:10:40.100 And Canada is becoming known around the world as a place where you cannot get things done.
00:10:46.160 Didn't used to be that way 10 years ago.
00:10:49.380 Well, there it is.
00:10:51.440 Last question then.
00:10:54.120 Yesterday, the Federal Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, made the announcement,
00:10:59.760 this is what we're going to do.
00:11:00.760 This is the first step in 10 actions that we're going to take.
00:11:06.020 And immediately, Premier Smith came out with a counter statement.
00:11:12.440 What was the gist of that?
00:11:14.020 That it's non-negotiable.
00:11:19.820 Well, you know, the Alberta advantage is predicated on infrastructure, access to resources, supplies.
00:11:30.820 She has a very ambitious plan to build out hydrogen infrastructure for just as one example, which is it's going to require more natural gas, not less.
00:11:43.880 The same thing with reaching some of these clean energy goals, because there's this attitude in Ottawa that somehow they're going to be able to do it with the NDP and the trade unions,
00:11:55.740 when in fact all the expertise is siloed here in Calgary.
00:12:00.260 I mean, we are producing the oil and gas, so if anybody's going to figure out how to do it with lower emissions, it's going to be here.
00:12:07.220 It's not going to be over there in Ottawa.
00:12:09.780 Do you put her statement yesterday in terms of her Sovereignty Act, where she basically said, look, if you try to legislate in our area of jurisdiction, we're going to say no?
00:12:20.240 Because that's pretty much what she said.
00:12:21.460 I think it's coming to that, and I think she's been very cautious right now about using it as a big stick, but it is definitely going to be the line in the sand.
00:12:33.640 This is going to be like, once you cross this line, then that's it.
00:12:36.400 We are going to have absolutely no choice but to ignore it.
00:12:43.180 Or to use it, however you want to.
00:12:46.220 Sean, thank you very much.
00:12:47.580 This is illuminating.
00:12:48.540 You're doing a great job on the energy file, and I think you're going to be the busiest man in the office here for months to come.
00:12:54.920 Thank you, Nigel.
00:12:55.420 Thank you very much.
00:12:56.340 Thank you.
00:12:57.360 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
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