Why are we losing our heads over oil and gas tariffs?

U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to place tariffs on “Canadian” oil and gas exports and poof! The climate crisis has disappeared from the political radar of Canadian politicians. Could we not try, for a minute, to keep our heads about us and remember the bigger threat that is poised to swallow us all up?

The salient responses to Trump’s threats reveal once again that no Canadian government takes seriously the unfolding transformation of the Earth’s climate. No government has ever had a meaningful plan to transition our economy from dependence on fossil fuels. 

If the climate crisis had been taken seriously as a threat to Canadians’ livelihoods and well-being — not to mention as a test of our moral responsibility to minimize harm to even more vulnerable populations around the world — the phasing out of oil and gas exports to the United States would have been at the top of our political agenda long ago. The obvious first step in reducing our extraction of fossil fuels is to phase out exports, maintaining a domestic supply only so long as necessary to build the alternative energy infrastructure. 

Earth has warmed by an estimated 1.6 C since the pre-industrial era, largely because of the burning of fossil fuels. A further warming to 3.0 C, to occur by the end of this century, is very possible, due to the feedback effects we have set in motion and the weak measures on tap to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 

Computer models, while not yet capable of capturing the full complexity of the consequences of this warming, predict catastrophic implications for biodiversity and human survival on our planet. One of the world’s top climate scientists estimated in 2009 that a planet warmed by 4 C might at best be able to support one billion humans. Sit with that thought for a minute. Consider that previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions have underestimated how quickly the climate system could unravel.  Recent studies indicate that the earth’s climate may be much more sensitive to CO2 levels than previously estimated in IPCC reports.

The social and political questions are: What will we do about global warming, and who will do what? Countless books and articles have offered answers to these questions. Many think it is important to ask — given the historic responsibility of the early industrializing countries and the high-consumption populations of the Global North for most of the GHG emissions that have accumulated in our shared atmosphere — what would be a just way of allocating responsibilities to reduce these emissions. 

A study I come back to often, published in March 2022, combined a rigorous assessment of science with well-considered criteria for determining the responsibilities of countries to reduce their GHG emissions. It asked what implementation of the Paris Agreement’s commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 C (a limit already surpassed) would mean, in terms of the time frame and scale of reductions needed (given the remaining global carbon budget). 

In a nutshell, this study argued that it was only fair that countries having the greatest economical means to reduce their emissions should be the first to do so. The richest countries will also need to assist the poorest, financially, to reduce their emissions while developing low-carbon energy supplies. 

These principles of justice have been foundational to global agreements on GHG reductions for decades and were reaffirmed at the Paris COP in 2015. They have already been applied to the phasing out of coal power generation. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has called for the OECD countries to cease coal production by 2030 and for developing countries to do so by 2040. 

Financial institutions have been called upon to stop financing coal projects. The same principles apply to oil and gas, and the Anderson and Calverley report calculated how they could be implemented. Their study identified five groups of countries, classified by their capacity to reduce GHG emissions without crippling loss of GDP per capita. It concludes that the 19 “highest capacity” countries, with an average non-oil GDP per person (GDP/capita) of over $50,000, must end their production of oil and gas by 2034, and achieve a 74 per cent cut by 2030. This group produces 35 per cent of global oil and gas and includes the USA, UK, Norway, Canada, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. Other countries fall into one of the other four capacity groups, whose phase-out schedules are staggered accordingly.  

As Canadians, we cannot control the actions of other countries’ governments. The only matters we can control are those within our own political jurisdictions, and I believe that it is both our moral obligation and in our interests as Canadians to do everything we can to rein in this gathering global catastrophe. 

Such efforts are not pointless, even if they are insufficient. Jurisdictions that take the lead in realizing deep decarbonization via a just transition that leaves none of their citizens behind can model to the world that such a path is achievable. They can inspire people elsewhere to organize and follow. They would make it harder for climate-change-denying regimes to justify their inaction. And they will achieve enormous health and security benefits for their citizens as their communities become more resilient to the impacts of climate destabilization. 

We may not be able to avert the changes to our physical environment that are coming, but we can still create societies that will have a better quality of life in many respects than we have today. These things are within our power, if we act collectively, through our political and civil institutions. 

Instead of educating citizens to build consensus about the need for change, instead of involving citizens in creating a positive, hopeful vision of a post-carbon future, our governments have helped perpetuate a fantasy about never-ending oil and gas extraction being somehow consistent with human survival. 

I use such stark terms to emphasize the reality of the conflict: millions of people have already died or been driven from their homes because of global warming; millions — possibly billions — will meet the same fate within one human lifetime if we are unable to arrest the rise in global temperature. No jurisdiction will be exempted from this reality. 

So, when Donald Trump says Americans do not need Canada’s oil and gas, I say, “all the better for us.” Let us finally seize the opportunity to phase out extraction for export. Let us face the reality of what this requires of our governments in terms of the regulation of financial institutions, public investment, public ownership, the redirection of research, and measures to guarantee income security. 

The climate-transformed world is not just coming; it is here. It is time for Canadians to decide whether our primary battle at this moment should be to protect oil and gas exports to the United States or to build a future in which we — and our descendants — can survive and flourish.

Laurie Adkin, is a professor emerita in the University of Alberta's political science department who has been researching and teaching the political economy of climate change and Canadian climate policy since the 1990s.