Canada

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.