The war launched by Russia against Ukraine has brought economic sanctions against gas and oil previously imported to Europe.
Oil and gas
The increase in the price of these fossil fuels has stoked the embers of sunset industries of eastern Canada’s oil and gas production and heated up the pressure to build pipelines to export western resources to Europe. CBC News reports that Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey says his government is promoting the province's oil to NATO countries, as the war in Ukraine rages. He said his government is pushing Newfoundland and Labrador oil as an alternative to Russian fossil fuels.
"We have right here what the world needs as well, and that is to relieve some of our NATO partners of the tyranny of Russia and their stranglehold on the energy around the world," he said, when asked about the provincial government's efforts regarding the war. Furey said they're not trying to capitalize on what he noted is a humanitarian crisis, but did say his government is "making sure that our voice is heard internally and externally" with regard to the province's offshore oil industry.1
Michael Gorman of CBC News reports that the Goldboro Nova Scotia LNG project could be revived as a floating barge while demand grows for non-Russian gas.
Goldboro Nova Scotia
Pieridae Energy abandoned the land-based project last summer amid cost concerns.
There would not be a need for a 5,000-person work camp, for example, during construction, although Millar said the full-time workforce would be similar — about 150 people. He said the company would build a "small hotel" by the site to provide lodging. The construction that would be required includes a jetty and a spur of a pipe to connect the vessel to the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline. While some barges have their own power supply, Millar said Pieridae has talked with officials at Nova Scotia Power about requirements if the barge it leases does not have its own power source.2
A report in the Economist asserts that climate change must be adapted to as well as opposed even as efforts to reduce its impact on lives and ecosystems are falling ever shorter.
Previous reports on impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation relied on prediction. In this one the authors need only to look around them to catalogue increased flooding, more heatwaves, stressed ecosystems and millions of lives that have become harder to live. The “emissions gap” that dogs climate policy is well known. Though the reductions in emissions that the world’s countries have pledged themselves to make are steeper than they used to be, they still fall well short of those needed to give the world a good chance of keeping the rise in average temperature relative to pre-industrial levels well below 2°C. The new report highlights a parallel adaptation gap. Though efforts to reduce the impact of climate change on lives and ecosystems are greater than they once were, the extent to which they fall short of what circumstances require is increasing, as impacts pile up apace.3
Natasha Bulowski, News, Energy, Politics, Ottawa Insider with the National Observer writes that Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, is rebuking Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s assertion Canada must “get some pipelines built” to help “defang” the Russian President.
“The solution to global energy problems is not to increase our dependency on fossil fuels,” said Guilbeault. The best way to improve the energy security of European countries is to simply reduce dependence on oil and gas “regardless of where it's coming from,” he said. Even if Canada could build more pipelines to increase oil and gas capacity, this would take “a number of years” and wouldn’t address the crisis people in Ukraine and Europe are now facing, he added. The real solution, he says, is to “quickly deploy renewables and cleantech” to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas.4
Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, reviews the idea that Europe will want to replace Russian oil and gas with fossil fuels from elsewhere.
If Europe does face a gas shortage, immediate solutions are needed and costly investments for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and similar projects will take years to get approved and built, she added. “Making investments in new fossil fuel facilities that won't be built in the time they need and then will be white elephants as the continent shifts away from fossil fuels is not an obvious solution for Europe,” said Harrison, referring to the European Union’s pledge to reduce emissions 55 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030.4
A press release from the Climate Action Network asserts that Canada’s oil and gas industry's current attempt to lobby for fossil fuel expansion should be recognized as the desperate ploy of an outdated industry that has never failed to capitalize on a crisis.
In the spring of 2020, Canada’s oil and gas industry used the pandemic as an excuse to press the federal government to water down or suspend environmental regulations and to delay the introduction of UNDRIP legislation. Its current attempt to lobby for fossil fuel expansion should be recognized as more of the same: the desperate ploy of an outdated industry that has never failed to capitalize on a crisis. This week’s IPCC report, cataloguing an “atlas of suffering,” underscored the dire consequences of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels and the urgent need to break the habit. As Svitlana Krakovska, the climate scientist heading Ukraine’s delegation to the IPCC, said when her team was forced to withdraw from the negotiations to move to bomb shelters: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”5
Cloe Logan, writing in the National Observer, reports that environmentalists, citizens and academics are urging the federal government to reject Newfoundland offshore oil project known as Bay du Nord.
“The Bay du Nord project poses significant environmental risks and it would undermine the urgent global effort to reduce emissions and protect climate stability. Instead of expanding oil production, our priority challenge right now is managing a wind-down of oil production that allows workers and communities to seize the benefits of the low-carbon energy transition,” said Carter. “Approving Bay du Nord would take Newfoundland and Labrador in the wrong direction — both in terms of the climate crisis and long-term economic security.”6
The time frame for building new LNG facilities and pipelines is long and the “just transition” for workers in Canada’s GHG producing industries needs immediate retraining for green energy careers. To delay GHG reduction action may eliminate the existing workforce from transition and exacerbate the consequences in more intense storms, fires, and floods in Canada.
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