"Ethical Oil" by Ezra Levant
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on September 4th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Reviews,
Politics,
Energy
This weekend I read the book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands by Ezra Levant. I have complicated feelings about Ezra Levant, and I was certainly of two minds about buying this book. On one hand, it's an interesting topic. On the other hand, it's Ezra Levant, someone who I view as trying to inject the Canadian body politic with the same poison that's killing the United States an inch at a time à la Fox News, and that's not something I want to support financially. In Levant's favour, when it comes to the civil liberties and journalistic freedoms which make public dissent possible, Ezra is not just a cynical ideologue playing for his team first, last and only; he is the real deal, willing to stick up for anyone's rights, even people he doesn't agree with. What clinches it for me was the fact that he was the only person with a media outlet (when he ran the Western Standard magazine) who had the sheer balls to publish the Danish "Mohammed Cartoons." Furthermore, he was hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission as a consequence of doing so, winding up out of pocket something like a hundred grand to defend himself, and succeeded in staring them down. It is ultimately in honour of that swinging pair and that single, decisive act to defend freedom of speech in Canada from religious oppression that I threw a few bucks his way, and now a few links, too, via giving my impressions of his book.
Levant's position is that when considering the ethics of oil sand oil, the proper comparison is not to a Utopian, perfect energy source but to its actual competitors, i.e., oil from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. In the process he savages anti-oil-sands protesters such as Greenpeace, which I have to admit, I really enjoyed. I really hate Greenpeace quite a lot. They're such mercenary, lying weasels that they make a juicy target for anyone not in awe of their aura of environmental sanctity, an aura acquired almost wholly through their expertise in self-promotion rather than any actual merit. I particularly liked his exposure of Greenpeace China. Apparently, Greenpeace's idea of "engaging" China to improve their environmental record is to lick the Communist regime's jackboots to a high sheen.
Levant's argument is all right as far as it goes. In areas other than freedom of speech, Levant is not a principled actor, he is a staunch partisan, and you have to take everything he says with a grain of salt, because he will cherrypick and distort at will to bolster his side. The anti-oil-sands environmental Left itself is disingenuous about its reasons for opposing the oil sands, which leaves Levant with an easy target. Yes, there is no comparing Alberta to Saudi Arabia - in practically every measure imaginable, Alberta is morally, politically and environmentally superior to Saudi Arabia. Yes, the environmental lobby goes after Alberta like it were the world's worst offender not because that is anything close to true but because due to Alberta's and Canada's civil liberties, it is the only target even remotely possible to affect with the tactics available to the environmental movement. And yes, as usual, the environmental movement's hyperbole does not match up to scrutiny. Of course, the accusations of fear mongering, while true, are a bit rich coming from a hatchet-man for the Right. Pot-kettle-black - it's hardly as if the Left owns a monopoly, or even a controlling interest, on that particular family of tactics.
In my view, the opposition to the oil sands really hinges around global warming. Of course, there is also the environmental movement's usual horror for highly visible and destructive operations like open-pit mining, and their usual disdain for the concept that humans have to have a footprint on this earth in order to survive. These are the same people who will tell you out of one side of their mouths that everything can be solved with windmills, and then if you try and build a windmill, they will oppose it out of the other side of their mouths because it is noisy or it kills birds. Be that as it may, I think that global warming is what is really behind the calculations of the more thoughtful strategists on the left.
Levant does not accept the scientific view of global warming. He dismisses global warming concerns without actually explicitly taking sides by portraying it as a scientific controversy, as opposed to a scientific consensus under attack by a politically-motivated lobby (but a right-wing politically-motivated lobby, which makes it OK), and pulling out the old chestnut about how small the human contributions of CO2 are relative to the total amount in the atmosphere, arguments designed to make the the reader feel comfortable with the real level of risk of continuing business as usual. Levant can be just as tricky and/or self-deluded as his opponents, and it is worth remembering that.
He also leaves the wrong impression about what would happen if the Alberta oil sands oil really were shut out of the US market. The brunt of his argument seems to come out of the classical economic idea that demand creates supply and that scarcity can be factored out of any calculations. I.e., if the United States doesn't get its oil from Canada it will get it from somewhere else, the implicit assumption seeming to be that it will be at the same price, ignoring the fact that we are at or past peak conventional oil. Without this assumption, it's not just a matter of picking your supplier - shutting a supplier out of the market also affects price, which affects the amount which will actually be consumed, making the calculus significantly less cut and dried.
The overall thrust is that worrying about carbon dioxide emissions related to the oil sands is futile because the same amount of oil will be burned anyway, and the level of risk is not really certain and probably not very high in any case.
Of course, anthropogenic global warming is real, and it is a real threat. If the Left has any grand strategy, it is this: seeing that the public relations battle to get some kind of limits or price tag placed on carbon emissions is lost for now, the fallback position is to rely on scarcity and high prices to drive the technological change that would ultimately lead to de facto emissions reductions. We can still get into a lot of trouble just burning our conventional reserves, and coal for electricity, goes the putative thinking, but at least supply limits will put a natural price on carbon emissions which will ultimately work in humanity's favour. But, if the oil sands can be developed to a point where it is economical at a price of oil the world economy can bear over the long term, the present carbon economy will go on much longer, and the total amount of carbon which can be transferred to the atmosphere by humans will be dramatically higher.
The environmental movement disingenuously hopes that if they can sabotage the oil sands by other means, that other countries' non-conventional oil somehow will not get developed and higher oil prices and attendant pressure to change the energy basis of our economy can be obtained. Alberta's oil sands get targeted precisely because they are located in a civilized, democratic country which is vulnerable to the kind of tactic which would get you killed in the dictatorships where the vast majority of the world's remaining oil reserves are located - and because the free press in Alberta and the West ensure that attacks on the oil sands will get media coverage.
Personally, I think that the Left's campaign against the oil sands is ultimately pointless, and that as much as I enjoy Greenpeace getting a good reaming, there is no "debate," and the impact of Levant's book will basically be nil beyond making Albertans and people on the right feel better. Granted, if the US did shut out the oil sands, over the short term there would be no good way to get that oil to other markets, and so there would be a short-term impact on world oil prices as the United States would be forced to bid for more oil from other suppliers, leaving less for everyone else. But I think we all know that's not going to happen. The political climate in the United States, the land of Fox News, is not exactly what anyone would describe as "radical leftist." Anything which would cause economic damage to the Unites States will not be allowed, period. The Tea Party will mobilize a mob to Washington, and the Democrats will fold just like they do on every issue, because they are a bunch of giant pussies. And even without the impact of this modern right-wing mass movement, the old Republican-Democrat traditional political system would never have allowed something so diametrically opposed to US interests to get very far.
There is no threat to the oil sands - Levant is just using the opportunity to score some easy partisan points against, granted, in this case a deserving target. At worst, there may be some condemnation in the form of cosmetic sanctions which will simply cause more oil sands oil to flow to a different part of the US economy. If it goes far enough to actually threaten the oil sands, the right wing media machine will go to work and put a stop to it.
I actually understand the reasoning behind doing whatever it takes to stop Canadian synthetic crude from getting to the US market from the point of view of what is at stake in terms of climate change. My point would be that Levant is right about a) the relative unsavoriness of the US's alternative suppliers and the importance of diminishing their political influence, b) the fact that the US is going to pay whatever it takes to get the oil it needs, from wherever it can get it. Point b) could have some surprising implications. The Canadian oil sands is only one of many possible sources of synthetic fuels that are potentially economical at oil prices we have seen in recent times. Shutting down the oil sands is not going to change anything. Oil doesn't have to get that much more expensive before it starts to make sense to make crude from coal, which the US has in abundance.
One way or another, we as a civilization have the capacity to put a heartstoppingly huge percentage of the fossil carbon in the ground into the atmosphere, at a price of energy which will choke economic growth and globalization, but which nevertheless we will be able to afford. Playing games with supply is not going to get us out of this trap, because there simply isn't any way to win at that sort of game. There is no political alternative other than to succeed in persuading the population that global warming is a problem worthy of attaching more costs to carbon emissions now instead of later. That will be a hard sell before the effects of global warming become so pronounced as to be undeniable by anyone (at which point the situation will be dire and hard if not impossible to mitigate or reverse).
Ultimately, you can't have seven billion people on earth and not have very serious impacts in order to support human life. If you think you can oppose every human activity that inconveniences wildlife, you are either deluded, or else being disingenuous about the massive human die-off required for your organic paradise. Projects with the scale of environmental impact of the oil sands cannot be categorically rejected. In fact, any truly long-term sustainable energy source will probably also involve major impacts to the environment which we will have to balance against the necessity of ensuring human welfare.
What gets me is that Levant himself, despite his political affiliation, seems to admit that the oil sands comprise no more than a snooze button for our society's ultimate energy problem. When he talked about the oil sands' positive economic impact on the Wood Buffalo region, Alberta and Canada, he talks about those benefits "probably" being extended over a person's whole working life. "Probably!?" Here Levant is inadvertently flirting with the idea that even this massive oil reserve may be past its peak in a single human lifetime - a mere eyeblink in the span of human history. Then what? To anyone who cares about their grandkids, or posterity in general, how is this good enough? The oil sands is not exactly fixing our near-term supply emergency, now is it. And how is one or two generations' economic prosperity (assuming global warming and the consequences of permanently high energy prices don't catch up with you first) worth the risk of long-term, catastrophic social and economic destabilization posed by global warming that Levant so lightly brushes off? I don't think there's any point to attempting to shut the oil sands down, beyond the public pressure which is driving the oil sands companies to control the impact of their operations, but I don't think the oil sands extraction is exactly a good thing or something to be really proud of, either.
Full disclosure: the same argument of course applies to my native Newfoundland's offshore oil, and I love the prosperity oil brings to Newfoundland as much as any Newfoundlander. I understand and sympathize with the embrace of the prosperity the oil sands brings to Fort Mac. Both operations are temporary sources of wealth, and I hope that Alberta and Newfoundland are able to make investments from their oil money which ultimately bring them longer-term prosperity when the oil is gone. But it will end, and objectively it is necessary to put that aside and even argue against Newfoundland's best interests.
The only plausible way out of the energy trap we are in that I see is if a next generation biofuel is developed which does not take potable water, is "self-hosting" (its energy costs can be taken from a share of its own output leaving an "energy profit" and not requiring any fossil fuel inputs), and can be processed into synthetic crude at a price for the whole cycle which is competitive with synthetic crude made from fossil carbon. Such an energy source, if it existed, would be most easily produced in tropical, coastal areas (lots of sunshine and brackish water), so the end result of my ideal scenario is much the same as that of those who directly oppose the oil sands - Alberta gets screwed. Combined with greatly increased fuel efficiency and weak economic growth taking the bottom out of demand, which the high price of oil needed to make the oil sands economical is bound to drive in any case, Canada will probably not be an energy superpower of any kind in a sustainable future.
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