International Energy Agency says to keep fuel in the ground
For those who aren’t obsessed with the daily machinations of the global oil industry it probably came as something of a surprise to learn that the United States not Canada will become the world’s biggest oil producer within the next two decades.
In its latest World Energy Outlook the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that the U.S. will surpass even Saudi Arabia the current No. 1 in oil production before 2020 though the edge will only last a few years. This along with the projected growth of Alberta’s tarsands will allow North America — Canada the U.S. and Mexico — to export more oil than we import by 2030 about the time your newborn sons and daughters graduate from high school and enter the real world.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Not so much. The real world under this scenario will be a hotter and likely much more chaotic version of what we enjoy today.
According to the IEA which is no hippy-dippy environmental organization current policies would see North America and the rest of the world become even more reliant on increasingly dirty oil and spell disaster for the climate. It requires us to ramp up rather than decrease our use of greenhouse gas-rich oil. Under this scenario which is basically business as usual with no meaningful limits on carbon U.S. oil production will soar to 11.1 million barrels per day (bpd) around 2020 though Americans will be consuming more than 16 million bpd every day by then. (By 2025 daily demand in the U.S. will have dropped to 12.6 million bpd largely because of regulations to improve vehicle efficiency.)
This scenario the IEA warns would make it impossible to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius the threshold the scientific community believes will give us a 50-50 chance to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. As prominent NASA scientist James Hansen has maintained business-as-usual would be game over for the climate. It would pretty much lock us into a 3.6 degree Celsius increase in global temperature by 2035 (and as high as six degrees by the end of the century) putting us on track to parboil the planet beyond all recognition.
Such an increase in average global temperature would impact the lives of millions of people worldwide and cost untold billions of dollars to deal with. In Turning Down the Heat another report published this week by the World Bank the organization’s president Jim Yong Kim writes that “the 4 C scenarios are devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity including coral reef systems.”
As the IEA points out however there are other options. The inconvenient truth is that the only way to keep warming below the two degree tipping point is to improve energy efficiency invest heavily in alternative sources of energy and leave two-thirds of the energy industry’s proven reserves in the ground. That’s right — two-thirds of the coal bitumen oil and natural gas that Big Oil Big Coal and Big Gas plan on extracting needs to be left right where it is by 2050.
In this the “450 Scenario” the IEA models energy supply and demand that would help keep atmospheric carbon at 450 parts per million which gives us a 50 per cent chance of keeping the climate below the two degree threshold. In this scenario tarsands production tops out at 3.3 million bpd. Current production capacity of Alberta’s tarsands is 2.28 million bpd but the tarsands industry has over 7.1 million bpd of projects proposed and under construction.
This tells you something about the kind of future that awaits us under the aegis of the oil industry and the current Alberta and Canadian governments. They keep telling us they are developing the tarsands in a clean responsible sustainable even ethical manner because they know that’s what Canadians say they want. In the next breath they commit to developing the tarsands for decades to come.
We can’t have it both ways. As the IEA report makes clear we can’t keep burning tarsands oil and other hydrocarbons if we care at all about preserving stable secure societies and the relatively stable climate upon which they depend. Which raises a pretty big question: How much of our bitumen should Canadians plan on extracting refining and burning?
The only way to turn the tarsands into so-called “ethical oil” is to put a cap on how much we’re willing to allow the oil industry to extract and use the profits to transition Canada to a clean energy economy. While we’re at it we might as well keep that oil at home so we don’t have to import oil from less-savoury autocracies like Saudi Arabia and Russia. There’s no sense exporting it to China either a Communist country with a horrible environmental and human rights record when our national interests would be better served by becoming energy independent ourselves.
Of course a forward-thinking national energy strategy of this kind would require a larger role for both the federal and Alberta governments which is anathema to the free-market extremists who have risen to power in this country. But the “free” market is not free and never has been; it operates by the rules and regulations deemed appropriate to serve global and national interests by our democratically elected representatives.
Such a plan would reflect the Canadian ideals of fairness equality justice and environmental responsibility that I was brought up to believe were the foundation of Canadian society. It’s time to put our oil where our mouths are and leave most of it in the ground using the profits to build a clean energy future of which we and our children can be proud.
Jeff Gailus is the author of The Grizzly Manifesto and Little Black Lies a new book that will be officially launched at the Parkland Institute’s Petro Power and Politics conference on Saturday November 24.
