Alberta’s energy ‘war room’ has lost a doomed battle against the future

“War is but a cowardly way of escaping the problems of peace,” observed Nobel laureate Thomas Mann. This statement seems especially true in the case of the recently destroyed Alberta war cell—officially known as the Canadian Energy Centre—which wasted millions of dollars in a futile struggle against the future.

Former Premier Jason Kenney launched the CEC in 2019 to “quickly and effectively debunk all the Green Left lies about our world-class energy industry.” But railing against the world’s rapid transition to cheaper, cleaner forms of energy has done nothing to address the pressing issues facing a province still dangerously dependent on a declining fossil fuel sector.

The CEC had all the assets Alberta had in its “war” against the oil industry’s perceived enemies. With an initial budget of $30 million in public funding, it was incorporated as a private company to avoid outside scrutiny under the Access to Information Act.

Four years and millions of dollars later, this weary warrior seemed capable of damaging his own credibility. A litany of embarrassing episodes followed, including the war room’s battle with an animated Bigfoot character on a children’s show, a Twitter spat with the New York Times, and the CEC repeatedly having to go back to the logo drawing board after multiple accusations of copyright infringement.

Even the image of their office dog, “Bean,” turned out to be an uncredited stock photo. Andrew Leach, an economist with Alberta Energy, observed: “One might wonder whether the crisis unit’s sole mission was to make all other government spending look like a bargain.”

In fact, the CEC was funded largely by oil and gas companies, through carbon pricing paid to large emitters under Alberta’s Technology, Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program. Credible carbon pricing models aim to reduce emissions by sending a meaningful economic signal to industries and individuals to discourage them from using our atmosphere as a free dumping ground. Instead, revenues from Alberta’s TIER program directly funded oil industry outreach efforts so questionable that the CEC was required to register as a foreign agent under U.S. law designed to combat foreign interference.

What brought the Alberta crisis team (and perhaps the Pathways Alliance) to a screeching halt appears to be new federal requirements for accuracy in oil industry advertising, which won’t come into effect until the fall. Even the threat of information liability seems to have made these two well-funded discussion forums, which for years flooded Canadian media with pro-oil messages, buckle like a sheet of paper. Perhaps sunshine is indeed the best disinfectant.

As Alberta waged its well-funded information war, the urgent “peace issues” that affect so many Albertans went unaddressed. Oil production and carbon emissions have skyrocketed, while oil sector employment has fallen by more than 33,000 jobs over the past decade due to increasing automation in an industry struggling to compete with lower-cost jurisdictions. This ongoing purge of oil sector employment is expected to approach an additional 50,000 jobs by 2040.

The relentless imperative to cut jobs will only accelerate as cleaner energy technologies threaten to displace high-cost, high-emission producers like Alberta. The International Energy Agency recently predicted that global oil demand would peak in 2030, leading to a global glut of up to 8 million barrels per day.

Investment in clean energy is on track to hit $2 trillion by 2024, double that amount for fossil fuels. In Alberta’s Potemkin Village, political leaders seem to think that local restrictions on clean energy can stem this global tide. This latest skirmish against the accelerating energy transition has succeeded in pushing only $11 billion in renewable energy investment out of the province, which would have totalled 6.3 GW of generating capacity.

The costly legacy of Alberta’s oil era is another “peace problem” that has been ignored for so long that there aren’t even accurate estimates of the unfunded environmental liabilities that will burden future generations. Estimates of the cost of cleaning up abandoned wells and tailings ponds range from $60 billion to $280 billion. The tens of millions wasted so far on Alberta’s war cell would have been better spent on reducing some of that unpaid debt.

Perhaps the demise of the CEC, the Pathways Alliance and other instruments of the oil industry’s information warfare have helped change the game. Former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s recent landslide victory as leader of the New Democratic Party, the official opposition, also bodes well for more peaceful and productive years. He has built his impressive political reputation on building bridges rather than waging war. Alberta may be ready to give peace a chance.