Category: oil and gas

Trillions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies

Part of the trillions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel producers reflects governments undercharging supply costs (rights and royalties), but most involve implicit subsidies, including undercharging for environmental costs. Eliminating gifts to fossil fuel producers would raise public revenues while reducing greenhouse gas emissions…

Contortions of logic and promises

The BC NDP government taxes fossil fuels severely to discourage consumption by citizens. That is an appropriate policy choice but the same government turns around and offers huge public subsidies to producers with the aim of increasing production and leading politicians pretend that is free of environmental harm since the fuels will be burned in places other than British Columbia.

Oilberta – updated Dec 07/2019

Alberta has long been a puppet of the oil and gas business but Kenney’s compulsion to deliver benefits to this private sector is unprecedented. It is as if Alberta’s right wing government looked at what Norway has been doing and decided to do the exact opposite. In the first 13 weeks of the 2019-20 fiscal year, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund declined by $156 million to $18 billion. In the last eight weeks, Norway’s wealth fund increased by C$55 billion, a rise of 4% to C$1.46 trillion.

Sacrificing the future

Norway made a choice to take a material share of oil and gas revenues and distribute the value of its non-renewable resources to citizens over multiple generations. Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan chose to benefit whichever corporations happened to be involved when production of oil and gas took place…

Fossil fuel fanaticism

Fossil fuel promoters had either not read the FCA judgment, or reject it for their own reasons. Many of these people applauded when a court jailed opponents of Trans Mountain expansion but judge the courts wrong when they disagree with a decision.

Ministry’s cozy relationship with industry costs taxpayers billions

As is typical of resource management, the regulating ministry sees its prime purpose is to enhance growth and profitability of companies extracting resources. the public share of produced values is no longer material. This cozy relationship costs taxpayers billions of dollars, money that could be spent on renewable energy, transit, daycare, education or many other responsibilities of government.

Canada inflating the carbon bubble

Canada, British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan are today committed to pumping billions of dollars into the inevitable carbon bubble. Delaying transition to renewables to extract additional wealth from fossil fuels is dangerous Smarter people than Notley and Trudeau prefer a different approach.

Climate change denial and the economic policy of idiots

Committing billions of taxpayers’ dollars to ensure the public carries all economic risks of the Trans Mountain project is not only financially unsound, it requires a commitment to climate change denial similar to that of Trump’s EPA assassin Scott Pruitt. The positions of Canada and Alberta show absolute ignorance of today’s economic world…

Inevitable change

This weekend, Kinder Morgan Canada Limited (KML) suspended all “non-essential activities and related spending” on its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. They blamed “continued actions in opposition to the project.” That’s only part of the story…

Questions

Does Justin Trudeau identify with the thousands of people who demonstrated in opposition to Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion or the handful of people who showed up to an industry sponsored counter protest?

Socialized losses, privatized gains

Every megaproject conceived and executed by BC Liberals in recent years has ended with massive cost overruns, despite the predictable “on-time and on-budget” claims. Most involved contractors with foreign domiciles. Check out the Port Mann bridge project, South Fraser Perimeter Road, BC Place renovation, Vancouver Convention Centre, Sea to Sky Highway, Northwest Transmission Line, etc.

Politics, journalism and easy virtue

G20 country governments are providing $444 billion a year in subsidies for the production of fossil fuels. In Canada, at the federal level, this amounts to a minimum of $1.6 billion, mainly through tax expenditures. At the provincial level, tax breaks amount to a minimum of $979 million annually. In fact, the numbers are even larger. Fossil fuel companies recognize values gained when sympathetic politicians are there to determine financial policies so oil and gas producers spend extravagantly to sustain a synergetic relationship. In recent years, they’ve courted journalists and media companies whose financial comforts have been in decline. Many of those have turned out to be of easy virtue.