Canada

I care more about GO electrification, public transit expansion, EVs, nuclear expansion, closing gas plants, making the building code close to passive house levels of insulation and airtightness and heat pumps galore.

While Doug Ford cuts fuel taxes and increases highway speed limits 10%, to burn 20% more fuel.

Canadians have to get something through our thick skulls. Every time voters in Ontario BC and Quebec tell Alberta they can't develop their oil, they are being incompetent hypocritical assholes.

It’s pretty rich calling the Québécois hypocritical assholes when we effectively destroyed an entire resource extraction industry in that Province that was on par with Alberta’s oil sands extraction operations.

Canada used to be the world’s largest supplier of chrysotile asbestos, with Quebec alone producing nearly 50% of the global supply from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Unfortunately, like oil we discovered this valuable mineral was — you know — killing people, so we wound that industry down. Quebec lost a very valuable industry where they had a commanding portion of the world supply.

So it’s pretty fucking rich to call people in Quebec “incompetent hypocritical assholes” when they went through the exact same thing in the last few decades, for very similar reasons.

Everyone should push hard to decarbonize their own economies before telling others what to do.

And it’s pretty hard to get that done when you keep putting more and more money into the infrastructure to maintain the oil economy. It de-incentivizes people from making the necessary changes to decarbonize. Building more pipelines to make it cheaper and easier for people to burn it in greater and greater quantities doesn’t slow climate change, and it doesn’t incentivize governments (or their voters) to make the changes this planet needs if we want to ensure it remains inhabitable for humans in the future.

And for those who think “our stopping pumping oil when so many other countries do it won’t change anything”, I’d like to point them to the current situation in the Straight of Hormuz, which itself has caused EV sales to be up nearly 3.5% globally from prior to the war and prices to spike globally.

Maybe everyone should decarbonize? Why should Alberta get special treatment and get to be the last ones in the world to get off of fossil fuels? This is a GLOBAL problem, not an Ontario, BC, Quebec, Alberta problem.

Anyway Alberta is being dumb. There are companies that want to develop wind energy in Alberta, but Danielle Smith blocks them. What happened to letting the market decide? Maybe Alberta could at minimum just let the market decide. But their leaders are in the pocket of oil companies... American oil companies. They're willing to sell out their own country to get the last scraps of oil revenue and then they'll move to the US leaving their province to economic depression in the future.

Peak oil for electricity was last year. Peak oil for transportation is coming soon. It's all downhill for fossil fuels.

It's an economic imperative for Alberta to transition it's economy. But they've been scammed by the oil industry into thinking they'll be making big money from oil forever and Global Warming was invented by Justin Trudeau or some such bullshit. If they continue to believe everything the oil companies say, they will be left behind by the world and become the poorest and most backwards part of Canada.

While you aren't entirely wrong we could also do actual realistic things to disincentivize fossil fuel extraction like remove government subsidies from it. Pass laws that not only require O&G companies to remediate the land (which we have but don't really enforce), but require that they put money into a fund proportional to the expected cost of remediation vs. the lifespan of the field. Or have the companies build the single-use transportation system to their ports of choice. Why do I, who would really like there to be a world for my kids in 50 years, have to pay for those things, or let companies absolutely devastate the land with no repercussions whatsoever?

And yes, before you say it, I'd like the remediation plans to apply to just about all resource extraction methods, not just the fossil fuels. Although if we just internalized the cost of releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere, O&G would die out in a couple years.

Paid shill drinking an expensive coffee in aisle five.