The Ethical Case for Canadian Energy | Politics Explained

when you look at the impact of the extremists we are being vilified for attempting to build our nation we're the best in the world at what we do this is canada's oil sands the beating heart of a canadian energy industry that's been not only the source of incredible amount of wealth but also intense debate with supporters pointing to its economic and ethical benefits while opponents demand unapologetically to leave it in the ground but what's the truth about canada's most controversial industry d

oes it present a sort of existential threat to the environment or is it a safe reliable source of energy on which the world can and should rely the liberals are trying to bury that industry i think we should be doing the opposite i like to say thank goodness for the world that the world sounds was put in canada my name is aaron gunn and this is politics explained [Music] we can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow uh we need to phase them out the oil sector isn't automatically going to well it's g

oing to be years if it comes back if at all so basically you're saying oil is dead oil is dead over the past two decades a loud persistent and well-funded campaign to dismantle canada's energy industry has rocked much of western canada's economy with activists and celebrities issuing their clarion call to leave it in the ground and what they claim is a fight for the survival of the environment we need to put a price tag on carbon emissions and eliminate government subsidies for all oil coal and

gas companies the fact is fort mcmurray looks like hiroshima fort mcmurray is a wasteland it's like someone took my skin and peeled it off my body over a very large surface i hurt but before rushing to phase out canada's largest industry it might be pruned to ask a simple question just how essential is oil and gas to the functioning of the modern world and the daily lives of canadians i sat down with author and energy analyst david yeager to ask him just that i think the current figure is 85 of

the energy that powers the world economy as we know it comes from fossil fuels but it's ubiquitous in the sense it's everywhere but nobody seems to know where it comes from so you flip the switch on the wall and the power comes on and you don't really think of where it came from despite billions of dollars in subsidies for renewables like wind and solar 84.3 percent of global energy production still comes from fossil fuels down only 1.8 percent since the year 2000 and since overall aggregate dem

and has continued to increase thanks to developing countries like china and india aggregate consumption of fossil fuels has continued to increase as well with oil consumption increasing 25 percent coal consumption increasing 60 percent and natural gas consumption increasing 64 over the past 20 years and the international energy agency doesn't expect demand to peak until the year 2040 and this isn't just some accident the world before fossil fuels was cold dark and an incredibly difficult place t

o live with low life expectancy high child mortality and almost no disposable income one billion people in eighteen hundred ninety percent of people not getting 2 000 calories we're just 220 years later and 7.6 billion people and look at us look at how well all of us live so all this middle class people people like you and me most likely if things hadn't changed would be dead let's start there and if we were alive almost for sure would be starving yeah cheap reliable powerful energy has been the

catalyst to the growth in population and wealth fossil fuel driven revolutions in agriculture industry and transportation have completely transformed our societies leading to dramatic and unprecedented increases in global gdp that mere increases in energy consumption almost exactly and it's not just an energy where these hydrocarbons have proven so transformative today oil is an essential ingredient and everything from our clothes and cell phones to pharmaceuticals and asphalt and more than 100

million barrels of it are consumed every single day but where does this leave canada the truth is canada however reluctantly is an energy superpower we are the fourth largest producer of oil in the entire world and the fifth largest producer of natural gas combined they form by far this country's most important industry so if you think about the jobs for example natural resources canada in 2018 estimated there were probably about 500 000 direct and indirect jobs um in the oil and gas sector and

because of the oil and gas sector right the oil and gas sector is three times the size of the automotive sector in terms of gdp and it's seven times seven times the size of the aerospace sector which is mainly centered in quebec so it's massively important in terms of tax revenues to governments over the last 20 years the oil and gas sector alone was responsible for almost half a trillion dollars in tax revenues and royalties right and property taxes so everything put into one pot almost 500 bi

llion dollars while the origins of canada's energy industry date back to the 1800s it wasn't until 1947 in leduc alberta that canada first arrived on the international scene when imperial oil struck black gold with an exploratory well on a rural farm 50 kilometers south of edmonton beginning alberta's and canada's first major oil boom this was an example of what's called conventional oil which today accounts for 37 percent of all of canada's oil production i wanted to see how oil like this is st

ill produced in alberta today and if it poses any particular and unique threats to the environment as activists often claim the first thing i noticed as we approached the pump jacks was how little impact they had on the surrounding environment in fact this landscape though used to pump oil was pristine a fact reinforced to me by earl hickock a veteran of the alberta oil industry and they're they're implying somehow that we're poisoning all this land and i'm looking out past your camera here at 2

00 cattle and i'm thinking that is not a bad thing it's beautiful so the people accusing that it's an environmental disaster are not given the straight goods one of the ways these pump jacks are able to recover so much oil with minimal environmental impact is by using a new technology called horizontal drilling this allows wells to be dug horizontally in different directions from a single drill pad accessing oil kilometers away with little surface disturbance they go down and then they go out ar

ound 90 degrees and how far can they go and they're going under people's homes and farms and so in fact the the far well here and i live in the area yeah i'm about three kilometers down the road yeah and that far well goes down and then whip stocks and goes lateral for about 2.8 kilometers so it is literally in my backyard and how far down exactly would it be a mile a mile down 5 000 feet so it's a mile down so nobody knows if you look around this area and it's beautiful we love it here in total

there are around 150 000 pump jacks currently operating in alberta but pump jacks and conventional oil extraction are only a small part of the total oil and gas industry in canada the oil sands of northern alberta are the third largest oil deposit ever discovered on the planet representing 97 of canada's proven reserves but unlike conventional oil the oil sands of alberta are a mixture of sand water clay and a particular type of oil called bitumen which is too heavy or thick to flow on its own

instead it is recovered either through mining or using in-situ extraction methods and represents 63 percent of canada's current oil production this is the oil that activists are obsessed with leaving in the ground an obsession that we now know thanks to a leaked powerpoint presentation got a big boost back in 2008 when a new alliance was born between over 100 canadian environmental groups and billion dollar u.s foundations this alliance was called the tar sands campaign and from the start their

strategy has always been crystal clear to stop the construction of new pipelines that canadian oil needs to reach international markets and the results of this activism along with a helping hand from justin trudeau has been absolutely devastating with the cancellation or abandonment of three critical pipelines northern gateway energy east and through activism in the united states keystone xl even though that country's own oil industry has continued to rapidly expand only the much delayed trans m

ountain pipeline expansion remains under construction and that had to be bought by the government before being able to proceed and instead of saying wow we have this incredible incredibly advanced sector that can help the transition the liberals are trying to bury that industry by shutting off its access to world markets and regulating it out of existence and i think we should be doing the opposite i do not believe there is a nation in the world that has a large resource base like this with acce

ss to ports that has intentionally obstructed access to tidewater between 2014 and 2020 the united states built 66 pipelines canada built two in addition to wreaking havoc on the canadian and especially the albertan economy these decisions have led to canadian oil being almost completely beholden to refiners in the united states leading to what's known as the price differential or discount on canadian oil something that costs the canadian economy billions of dollars each year but even worse it h

as also led to the embarrassing reality of eastern canada having to import almost a million barrels of oil from other countries every single day from the day trudeau came in the anti-pipeline approach to protect the coast of bc with the tanker ban again brutal hypocrisy the fact that we allow the st lawrence to be the main source of oil for canada rather than pipelines makes no sense a lot of people don't realize we're importing uh over a half million barrels a day from the east coast to the ref

ineries out in the east so we should be using canadian oil my belief but we're not well it seems crazy to me that you know with the third third largest oil reserves in the world we're still importing foreign oil yeah exactly we need to get pipelines built by the way that is a consensus among canadians overwhelming majority of canadians support pipelines it's just the political elite that disagrees but even though the vast majority of canadians support additional pipeline capacity activist celebr

ities who aren't even from here have continued their assault on the oil sands and the nearby town of fort mcmurray first of all when i got to fort mcmurray when i got out of the uh when i got out of the car the first thing i smelled was fuel and then i realized that was the air when she grew up they could bring water from anywhere and drink it and use it and now they can't so i traveled from calgary to fort mcmurray to check it out first hand the entire drive was beautiful countryside as i appro

ached the city there was no smog and no toxic fumes only the countless burnt trees caused by a devastating wildfire back in 2016 that also destroyed over 2 000 homes but the trees like the town are already starting to grow back i met with one of fort mcmurray's most outspoken residents and founder of oil sand strong robbie picard to get his take on celebrities trashing the city he calls home how on earth could we take someone seriously who who flies around in private jets has yachts hundreds of

millions of dollars um has some of the highest carbon footprint there is and they come to our community um under the gauge that like it's it's polluted and dirty which it's not i mean the air is crystal there's no smog our water's good the celebrities don't care they don't care what happens here they don't care about indigenous rights they're doing whatever they can for their own brand or whatever virtual exactly none of their lives with their movie careers would exist without fossil fuels none

of them so why are we somehow putting them on a pedestal where they possess the intelligence to tell us how to live but i get a kick out of hypocrite politicians and the worst is elizabeth may on one hand she makes a statement and statements from politicians hurt oil is dead that's affecting people's jobs mortgages i mean but then she takes pit selfies with with her daughter or whoever on a private plane and then she has i would argue the largest commute from the salt spring islands over to otta

wa so how about practice what you preach if it's so urgent do your campaigning over zoom now i know you want to uh we've talked about it we've talked about a lot of great things i know you want to go show us some things around fort mcmurray and show us the oil sands industry in action robbie and i headed out first to fort mcmurray's airport to check out what the oil sands look like from above [Music] we're just flying over right now the heart of alberta's oil sense it's 165 billion barrels the t

hird largest reserves on the entire planet after venezuela and saudi arabia and the size and scope are just incredible it's massive and it's uh it really is you can see it right here canada's number one resource [Music] equally impressive to the size and scale of the oil sands development is its peaceful coexistence with canada's boreal forest unlike almost any other jurisdiction in the world the government of alberta requires companies to remediate and reclaim 100 of the land after the oil sand

s have been extracted meaning the land must be returned to a self-sustaining ecosystem complete with local vegetation and wildlife in fact some of the earliest oil sands operations have already been reclaimed today and turned into parks and trails including one that we visited during our stay not exactly the apocalyptic picture painted by celebrity activists how does it make you feel when you see some of these kind of high rolling celebrities coming into town saying it looks like there was a nuc

lear bomb dropped on on the city all that kind of stuff how does that make you feel basically slandering the city that that you call home well can you really take these people seriously they're actors you want to talk about the biggest generators of ghg gases let's talk about private jets let's talk about private yachts let's talk about these films that they make and how much petroleum products those films use because as you know they can't do without it you know i i don't list i watch them on o

n film and i laugh at them on tv that's the truth and i think that's what most people should do because they're ridiculous i don't believe they truly care about the cause because if you cared about the cause then you would try as much as possible to practice what you preach what these celebrity activists and woke politicians don't want people to know is that canada has the highest environmental standards in the entire world and despite being a major producer of fossil fuels with the coldest aver

age temperature on the planet we still only contribute 1.6 to global greenhouse gas emissions and emissions per barrel in canada's oil sands have actually decreased an incredible 36 percent since the year 2000 we're the fifth largest let's go run through the numbers again the fifth largest producer of natural gas and oil on a barrel of oil equipment business basis number 22 in terms of methane emissions over the last five years alone canada has reduced its flaring emissions by about 49 even whil

e oil and gas production went up by 25 so if our oil and gas sector is the best in the world for environmental standards is it possible that canada has an environmental obligation to produce as much of the world's oil and gas as possible in fact wouldn't that be the best way to reduce global emissions canada produces natural lng using hydroelectricity it's the cleanest lowest emissions lng in the world if all we did in canada was to replace global lng with canadian lng we would make an enormous

difference to emissions one of the things i find very interesting is that if every oil producing country decided tomorrow to adhere to the same environmental standards that canada does we would immediately reduce global emissions from oil and gas by 25 and yet we're importing oil from countries that have no concern for the environment and don't care so it's really uh stunning to me that environmentalists would be picking on the lowest emissions lng in the world even if they don't believe it repl

aces coal it's good enough just if it replaced lng we know that there are countries outside of canada such as saudi arabia russia and other opec regimes that would gladly flood the market to replace canadian production at a detrimental cost to the environment we would do more for the global environment if we would export more but putting aside the environmental implications of us producing even more of the world's fossil fuels looking at the other top oil exporting countries like saudi arabia ve

nezuela and iran is there an ethical and humanitarian case to be made for canadian oil and gas what would happen globally if canada stopped producing hydrocarbons tomorrow well of course autocracies and tyrannies would take over right you know saudi arabia you'd have russia um they would take over even more production one of the studies we did at the canadian energy center was to look at what we call tyranny oil and tyranny natural gas and what we found is right now almost half of the production

around the world comes from countries considered not free this means almost half of all the oil and gas produced in the world comes from oppressive dictatorial regimes like saudi arabia where public executions by sword are still common practice these countries often treat women as second-class citizens deny rights based on sexual orientation and punish anyone who dares question the authority of the regime they're also often propped up using the profits from oil and gas let's suppose we give in

to the anti-oil and gas activists and say we won't have oil and gas after 2030 or whatever it is they want okay russia and china and saudi arabia will be there to produce all the all the oil and gas in the world that the world needs so look greenhouse gas emissions they're they're real but the notion that we can somehow transition overnight because of a political decree is very helpful to riyadh to moscow and beijing over the past 200 years the world has been transformed by fossil fuels from a c

old and dark agrarian society to one of wealth prosperity and endless opportunity and while some countries have begun to transition away from traditional hydrocarbons it is a transition that if it happens at all will be measured in decades not years and until we get there canada and canadians have to ask themselves a very important question where should the world get this energy from should it come from countries like saudi arabia nigeria or iran or as long as the world needs and demands resourc

es should as much of those resources as possible come from right here in canada well i'm quite comfortable putting our energy industry against that of almost any other country whether it's russia or venezuela canada is an icon we are the leaders look it's our number one net export and it is the single most ethical source of oil in the world we take care of our environment better than anybody else does and we take care of our people better than anybody else does we're the best for emissions reduc

tion safety canada should be the last barrel that's ever produced so i would say this idea let's single out the oil sands the world really should be saying thank god that the canadians are the ones taking care of it because what other country would have done what we've done with it we in canada do it better than anywhere in the world so when they do it better somewhere else let me know my name is aaron gunn and this has been politics explained [Music] [Music] [Music] you