Happy stampede, Calgary readers! Given the Alberta news of the week, I can’t hold myself back from re-upping this piece from January, when I likened Alberta-federal relations to a saloon fight. The only bit I got wrong was the prediction that it would feel like it for the next three or four months. I should have said years!
Anyway, since I foolishly used up my Western metaphor six months early, I’ll tell you about what I’ve been reading this summer, and how it relates back to Alberta politics. I’ve just finished Stephen Markley’s novel The Deluge. It’s not exactly an escapist beach read. Rather, as described in the Guardian, it’s “a story of incremental chaos, political lethargy and scientific minutiae, and it is utterly mesmerising.”
Against the backdrop of ever-worsening natural disasters (fire, flood, monster storms), it traces the descent of American politics further toward fascism, using the power of the state to stamp out environmental activists. The characters include a scientist vilified for trying to warn about what’s to come, working class folks left behind and slipping into the jaws of drug dependency, and activists who try literally every conceivable strategy for political change.
I’ve read a few dystopian novels over the years, and I can’t remember one that has scared me like The Deluge. Why? Because it starts right where we are today and tells the story of how we become accustomed to the chaos and inequality as it becomes progressively worse.
So it’s fair to say that I’m not in a terribly receptive frame of mind to read the mandate letters for Alberta’s new ministers of Energy and Environment. The content is predictable. There’s no climate emergency in sight, and absolutely no sense of urgency - or responsibility - as the planet experiences the hottest days ever.
Instead, bold (if dubious) claims that “our energy sector is by far the most environmentally responsible and innovative” [not clear from the context whether that’s in the world, or the “free world”]. (Either way, the folks from Fort Chipewyan would like to have a word.)
It’s clear that conservative politicians here in Alberta and elsewhere in Canada see opposition to carbon taxes as a winning stance, framing it in terms of ‘affordability’ and feeling no obligation to talk about climate policy beyond a vague handwave in the direction of carbon capture and storage and a solemn pronouncement that all will be well by 2050.
Now I’m not a climate scientist, but just watching the news of unprecedented heat, drought, flooding and crop failure it’s pretty clear to me that things are going to be a terrible mess by 2050. Unfortunately, there are no voices in the formal Alberta politics sphere willing to push back against the claim that the federal government’s goals aren’t ‘realistic’ or ‘feasible.’ Arguably, kicking this can down the road is neither realistic nor feasible, but no one in the government or the opposition seems willing to say this.
Meanwhile, the Smith government is carefully framing the issue not as a question of climate policy, but as a dispute in which Ottawa is trying to return the province to its original status as a jurisdiction without constitutional control over its natural resources. This aligns with the well-established narrative of western alienation that maintains that the province is treated unfairly, and that Ottawa will willingly impoverish Albertans in pursuit of its self-interested objectives. It’s a narrative many Albertans can slip into like they would a pair of well broken-in cowboy boots.
My hope is that there’s room for negotiation and compromise between the federal and Alberta governments behind closed doors. My fear is that both Trudeau and Smith have compelling political incentives that discourage such cooperation. And the saloon fight continues while the world burns.
When I hear people spout off about our energy sector being environmentally responsible I often wish the Athabasca River flowed south instead of north.
Interesting that the mandate letter to Brian Jean doesn't contain the word "nuclear", just "small modular reactors".
We trapped all the beaver, poisoned the wolves, skinned all the buffalo, glysophated all the cropland,strip mined the coal, subterraneanly carpetbombed or fracked all the conventional oil and gas....we might as well go small nuclear on the tar sands, not large nuclear as was originally planned. We can stiff the Americans by selling all that gas and oil via Trudeau's pipe to the Chinese communists who we a planning to have a war with after we smash Russia.
Sounds like a plan!
Game on!