Global Warming, Canadian Energy and the Working Class
Note - For this commentary we
rely on:
·
The
projected combined energy needs of Canadian industry, residential, commercial
and transportation use as published by the Government of Canada website Energy
Regulator to 2050.
·
For C02
emissions we rely on the IEA Data.
·
For
pipeline routes we rely on Enbridge Crude Oil Map 2020 and other authentic sources as Noted.
Global warming is a scientifically proven universally
accepted threat to humanity. The urgency
of reducing its effects on humanity and the planet is accepted as a necessary task
by all rational people.
The task is confronted in real existing economic and
political conditions of our time. The
task unfolds in the midst of capitalism at the final monopoly stage of its
development and the class struggles that arise from that reality.
Nor does the task begin with an ideal end result. The task is undertaken in political and
technical conditions that are in motion and far from ideal or simplistically
resolved. There is no straight line from
where the working class is to where we need to be.
Canada is a developed state-monopoly capitalist country
deeply integrated with the largest global economy - the USA. Canada is the sixth
largest producer of energy accounting for 4% of total global production. Energy production accounts for 10% of GDP and
23% of total Canadian goods exports in 2019. Oil and gas exports totaled $122 billion of
which 96% or $121 billion, were to the U.S.A.
It is legitimate and necessary for workers to be constantly discussing issues
related to energy.
Workers do not simplify or contract out our class interests
to others. Adjusting slogans and
programs and demands aligned with existing productive forces impacted by
accelerating applications of science and technology is of vital interest to wage
earners regardless of which sector of the economy we sell our labour power. We are one class and no sector is dispensable.
The effect of global warming does not fall equally on all
social classes. It is the urban and
rural labouring masses, wage earners, First Nations and Indigenous people and
the poor that are its first victims.
Is the Class Struggle Over?
The overarching social divide of the present era is widely
promoted in the corporate mass media to be between those who oppose global
warming and all others. Such messaging
originates with capitalist governments, their think tanks and “enlightened”
capitalists and billionaires who have a “plan” to oppose global warming. The objectives have been set by 195 nations
that have signed the Paris Agreement.
Authoritative special interest groups such as the Sierra Club,
Suzuki Foundation, Green Peace, Council of Canadians and university faculties
advocate for solutions that converge on demands that monopoly capital, producers
of all carbon emissions, reform itself. Such
advocacy rarely takes into account the effects of such reforms on workers, or
that workers have anything relevant to say, or role in determining the solutions.
For such interests - there is no class struggle, only the
moral imperative of saving the planet. A
billionaire or a worker are equally responsible. “We are all in this together”.
Such a classless standpoint provides moral cover for those evading
confrontation with US-NATO imperialism’s preparations for nuclear war. The possibility of nuclear war is the
immediate threat to planetary and human life. Evading such truth is impermissible for anyone
claiming to be concerned about the survival of the planet.
Global warming has become a profit-making opportunity,
making billions for “green capital” investors. Carbon emissions are traded on the stock
market as any other marketable commodity.
Big oil monopolies and their think tanks use blackmail,
demanding public treasuries pay it a price to reduce carbon emissions. Jason Kenney, Alberta leader of the UCP, is
demanding $30
billion of federal funds as the price for reducing carbon emissions.
Above class theories of global warming are used by finance
capital, promoted by its governments, think tanks and mass media, to divert the
working class away from the struggle for its own immediate vital interests into
a cheerleader for this or that “green endeavour”. It obfuscates the working class from viewing
itself as the decisive class power in determining the future economic
development of the country.
The active struggle to assure the future energy needs of the
country, and that it serves the people and not monopoly profit, is a class
issue central to the struggle for the sovereignty of Canada and its future
independent economic development. Without
energy self sufficiency there can be no socialism.
The profit system is the impediment to a more rapid
transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. The obstacle to non-fossil fuel energy
economies of scale is state monopoly capitalism and its fundamental law of
maximum profit.
Science and technology already available can be used to
mitigate carbon emissions and accelerate the transition. However, it is appropriated by monopoly and
placed at the service of elites of wealth and privilege, squandered on the militarization
of the economy, and to perpetuate the system of private property, wage slavery and
mindless mass consumerism.
Under such actual social and class conditions the suggestion
that workers and their families should be compliant victims of the transition
to a carbon free economy, should accept the destruction of their livelihood, is
support for their exploiters.
The Present Needs of the Canadian People for Energy
The energy resources systems that exist now and that 38
million Canadians rely on are indispensable to the needs of the country to the
end of century. To say otherwise is to
approve and abet a rapid de-industrialization of Canada.
The opportunist evasion of such reality is conveniently subsumed
in the slogan of a “green energy economy” which its advocates can’t define and
are powerless to enact and which is left to the market to define. The Federal Government reacting to the changes
in capitalist market realities have outlined their policy
called “A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy” that reflects this reality
of “left to the market” green energy transition.
The federal plan has five main elements:
·
Home Retrofits and Energy Management Tax
Credits - much of the standards for this type initiative have been defined
by LEED;
·
Zero-Emission Transportation – “Work with
partners in the year ahead on supply-side policy options…”. Currently GM and FCL are in talks with the
Federal Government on incentives and loan guarantees to retool plants for
Electric Vehicles. Ford
was given $600 million to make EV’s in Oakville after threatening to close
the plant in June
2020;
·
Carbon Taxation – This is a continuation
of taxing carbon and transferring the taxes collected. This will transfer
the costs onto workers who are forced to drive long distances in commuting
to work;
·
Business Loan Guarantees - Private Public
Partnerships through Canadian Infrastructure
Bank Loans for Green Infrastructure Development. One of these projects is
the Pirate Harbour Wind Farm at Port Hawkesbury Paper in Nova Scotia;
·
Plant 2 Billion Trees and Carbon
Sequestration – The total investment over 10 years is to be $3.7B and will
partner with provinces, territories, First Nations, private landowners
and other conservation groups.
The federal plan is an admission of the seriousness of the
problem but woefully inadequate to solve it since it is dependent on a
corporate buy-in which means it must be profitable to its bottom line.
Development of the green energy economy is dependent on
monopoly that subordinates all science to the law of maximum profit. This is the case in the development of
Electric Vehicles (EV) in Canada which is part of the federal plan of affecting
supply side production of vehicles. December
2019 GM closed its Oshawa
Plant throwing thousands of auto workers out of work.
One year later Unifor President Diaz hailed the return of GM
to Oshawa and its $1B investment in the Oshawa Plant. Ford received $600M in federal support for
the development and manufacture of EVs while GM
and Fiat are still in talks with the federal government.
However as much as the green energy plan is championed as a
great victory for the move to a carbon neutral economy, GM
CEO Mary Barra said that the move back to Oshawa was necessary;
“We have been operating our
full-size pickup plants around the clock to meet exceptionally robust demand
for the Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra in the United States and Canada.
The fact is we simply can’t build enough. And because we expect demand to
remain strong, we must increase our capacity.”
In other words, we will continue to produce carbon emitting
vehicles so long as there is demand while at the same time take anything that
is offered to produce EV’s when we consider it more profitable.
Supply and Demand Side Economics
The cheerleaders for the closure of the “tar sands” fail to
make the connection, or refuse to acknowledge that demand side economics are
part of the equation.
Unifor’s demand
that federal government continue with the “Industrial Technological Benefits Program
through the Joint Strike Fighter Capability Project and expand the program to
additional military purchases” to help the struggling Canadian aerospace industries
along with other programs to develop and build carbon emitting planes is
further indication that some industries get a pass by the green economy crowd
while other workers in the “tar sands” are required to give up their jobs to
save the planet.
What unemployed worker wouldn’t accept a green job if it were available?
A green economy works for some workers fortunate enough to
win the lottery on which plant, technology or industry is selected as the most
profitable for green investment.
For other workers, a vague promise for jobs at some future point
in time in the meantime are vilified as “tar sands workers” and abandoned to
populist rhetoric of the “I Love Alberta Oil & Gas” yellow-vest lobby,
right-wing Calgary think tanks and the barren politics of the UCP.
The promise of green jobs is proclaimed without regard for
the consequences on the living conditions of those directly affected right now.
Consider a few contentious examples,
The issue has become a major diplomatic crisis between Canada and the USA.
Applying the logic of the primacy of the existential threat
of global warming, the actions of the US Governor should be applauded as a
victory, since it will remove 50 megatons of carbon emissions created by
Chemical Valley in Sarnia. The loss of 3000 Sarnia refinery jobs and a crisis
for the Ontario economy is therefore “regrettable” collateral damage, the price
that must be paid to save the planet.
Now presumably Line 5 can also be added to the CPC list.
A Line 5 blockade by Governor Whitmer will result in
thousands of Ontario jobs being threatened with layoffs or possibly permanent
terminations as the oil and chemical monopolies use a disruption as an excuse
to rationalize. Sarnia Mayor Mike
Bradley has indicated
that 3000 jobs in several refineries are directly affected.
What has been the response of the suppliers of the oil?
Imperial CEO Brad Corson, indicated that Imperial feels the
probability of the blockade but in the event of any disruptions contingency
plans to feed their refinery assets will include delivery through the St.
Lawrence Seaway, other pipelines and rail.
Mark Little, Suncor CEO, also believes the probability of
the shutdown is low. However, he
indicated that if it were to occur additional costs associated with other
transportation means to its refineries in Sarnia will be recovered from strong
local fuel markets. In other words,
there will be a cost increase passed on to consumers.
Rail VS Pipelines
Advocacy of pipelines versus rail as a safer method of
transporting oil and gas is rejected by ardent environmentalists and simply
evaded by the CPC. Railway workers dying
in derailments, incidence of near disasters in Saskatchewan and the possibility
of more Lac Megantics is therefore regrettable collateral damage. According to the slogans of environmentalism oil
“should remain in the ground” – and apparently also the workers. Case closed.
Likewise, solidarity with rail unions demanding Transport
Canada enforce safety regulations regarding train crews’ right to refuse unsafe
working conditions, demands that the CPR and CNR operating oil tanks in
violation of code standards for the transporting of hazardous materials can be
set aside or considered of low importance compared to the existential threat of
global warming. If there were no oil it
wouldn’t have to be transported. Case
closed.
For emphasis we restate what we said at the outset of this
commentary;
“An ideal end result cannot be used as an evasion of the hard
realities of the class struggle right now”.
Shut Down the “Tar Sands”
Consider the Communist Party of Canada’s 2015 electoral
energy program demand to
shut down the Alberta “tar sands” in five years. Why just Alberta since oil is also produced in
BC and SK? Alberta “Tar sands” has a more sinister ring to it.
Communist Party Leader Liz Rowley restated the Party’s
position on shutting down the “tar sands” during the CPC International Women’s
Day online celebration where she
said,
“…a People’s Recovery will…nationalize energy, close the tar
sands and build renewable energy guaranteeing the jobs of workers displaced in
the transition…”
The correct term is
bituminous sands. The production of oil from bituminous sand is
of two
types, open pit mining and in situ using high pressure steam to release the
oil from the sand.
Canada has one of the largest deposits in the world in
Athabasca, followed by Venezuela, Russia and the USA. The CPC does not address
the issue of carbon emissions from similar mining and processing operations in
Venezuela, Russia and the USA, only Canada.
Why not call for the shut down of all oil producing
countries’ oil industries, why not Venezuela, who in terms of size and
population is very similar to Canada. The Communist Party does not address that
issue.
If global warming is the greatest existential threat
confronting humanity such rationale would lead the Communist Party to conclude
that the US blockade of Venezuela leading to the collapse of its energy sector
resulting in the mass impoverishment of its working class should be supported.
On June 16th 2016 in
the aftermath of the fires in Fort McMurray AB, the leader of the Communist
Party of Canada at its 38th Convention, after attributing the fires
to climate change arsonists, demanded governments retrain “tar sands workers” and
provide equivalent jobs. The CPC
leader concluded by calling for the immediate shut down of the “tar sands”
the main source of jobs in the community.
Fort McMurray is a city of 67,000 in the municipality of Wood Buffalo. The city has schools, a college with university accredited programs, a hospital, large recreational and cultural facilities that serve many surrounding communities. Not only does the oil sands mines and upgrading facilities support Fort McMurray but they also support other Alberta communities such as Ft. Saskatchewan, Edmonton, Hardisty to name a few. Where would all these people go if the “tar sands” are immediately shuttered?
The CPC for many long years routinely uses such hyperbole
and leaps of logic in its publications and statements to arbitrarily decide
which carbon emitting sectors of the economy can be sacrificed and which
retained.
Before proceeding further, we
believe it is important that words that besmirch the dignity of labour such as
“tar sands workers” should not be used by communists or any other groups
claiming to speak for the working class. Such pejorative language is not used to
describe visible minorities gender or sexual orientation and is not acceptable
to describe workers in a similar manner.
We are unionized and non-unionized skilled trades, office workers, professionally certified technicians, technologists, engineers, scientists, healthcare professionals, hi-tech workers, clean energy and environmental professionals, first nations, and LGBTQ2S+. Women and men from Alberta, from all over Canada and the world engaged in the discovery, extraction, processing and delivery of petroleum products to domestic and foreign markets. That is not dissimilar to what most Canadians employed in other value-added industries also do.
We are workers forced to sell our labour power in the extraction, processing, transportation and refining of bitumen and natural gas to energy, transportation and refining monopolies. These monopolies appropriate the products we produce containing surplus value resulting from our unpaid labour time. This appropriated unpaid labour time is marketed by these monopolies to the Canadian, US and other foreign markets and that enrich the preferred investor-owners enormously.
We are employed by monopolies as are auto workers, auto parts workers, transportation workers, defence productions workers, plastic manufacturing workers, workers producing good food and junk food, Amazon workers, Postal workers, communication workers. We apply no derogatory or pejorative terms to our brothers and sisters engaged in wage labour. Nor do we accept any derogation of our work such as “tar sands workers” engaged in producing “dirty oil” to destroy the planet. We are workers as all others forced to sell our labour where there is a market for it in order to live and survive.
Carbon emissions and where it comes from
Carbon emissions occur everywhere
in Canada. Canada’s total carbon
emissions as a percentage of global emissions is 2%. Not a small per capita number and partially
explained by the fact that Canadas is the second largest land mass in the world
and has very long and cold winters. Alberta
bitumen mining and processing is the highest single emitter compared to other
sectors of the economy accounting for
60 Mt of GHGs per year, representing 8.5%
of Canada's total emissions and about 0.13% of global GHG emissions. Other
sectors are shown from Stats Can below.
Determining the cause of emissions cannot be simplistically
confined to the supply side of the energy industry. The other reality is the demand side. Carbon emissions from Canada would of course
be largely eliminated if there was no demand for fossil fuels.
In 2018, the oil and gas sector accounted for 193 megatonnes
of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2 eq) (26% of total emissions), followed
closely by the transportation sector, which emitted 186 Mt CO2 eq (25%). Why haven’t the environmentalists and the CPC
called for the total ban on the demand side use of all fossil fuels everywhere in
Canada, and put a five-year timeline on it? Ipso facto no more carbon emissions from
Canada. Case closed.
The CPC seems incapable of analyzing the demand side requirements of fossil fuel energy use even though its leadership lives in the industrial heartland of the country which is the greatest consumer of fossil fuel energy in the country and without which most of its manufacturing industry would die in a few months.
Real Energy Needs of Canadians Right Now?
Thirty-eight million Canadians each day rely upon a continuous
supply of energy from the existing historically evolved integrated Canadian
energy system comprising fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear electrical, natural
gas, solar, wind and biomass. Thermal
coal generation is now largely phased out and the major Canadian contributor to
carbon emissions comes from mining and export of coal used in steelmaking that
is mined and shipped to foreign markets from Elkford BC.
According to Energy
Regulator Canada this total supply in 2020 was 14,000 petajoules.
Western Canadian oil, conventional and bituminous, is the primary
energy source for the entire transportation system of Canada, accounting for
3200 petajoules of fossil fuel energy or about 22% of total combined energy use
in the country.
Let us consider the effects on the Canadian people and the
working class if the 2016 CPC demand to shut down the “tar sands” in five years
that now, in 2021 would be upon us. Consider what removal of 22% of Canada’s
energy supply would actually mean.
The 3200 petajoules of fossil fuels removed starting in 2016
would by now have had to be totally replaced by other sources of energy,
otherwise the entire transportation system would have collapsed. Such a transition would require that all
fossil fueled transportation including rail and air as well as heavy equipment
and agricultural machines would have to be converted to zero-emission.
What would that alternative energy supply be? The entire transportation system would have to
be converted to electrical or hydrogen. The
most optimistic forecasts predict that happening at the end of the 21st
century. Moreover, as it happens, it is a
gradual problem-solving process and not a precipitous leap as the CPC proposed. Five years?
No problem! Case closed.
If reducing green house gas emissions was as easy a
proposition as the Communist Party has suggested
we are sure that other scientists would have concluded the same
calculations. Such “back of the napkin”
economics as clever as they may seem for a captive membership would be laughed
out of any real scientific and engineering discussions as nonsense.
Taking the present supply of fossil fuel amounting to 3200
petajoules out of the integrated energy mix would have an enormous impact on
other sectors reliant on electrical and natural gas. Electrical and natural gas supplies would have
had to increase in five years by 22% otherwise industrial, residential, and
commercial use would be in an unmanageable crisis. Some environmentalists are also opposed to the
expansion of natural gas and others also against any nuclear generation and
some even for decommissioning of hydro dams. The CPC does not comment on such demands that
if implemented would return Canada to where it was in the 17th
century.
The non-fossil fuel sources of energy that would make up a
22% short fall in total energy supply in five years, to now 2021, could only be
the result of ramping up solar, wind and biomass. There are advances being made in these carbon
neutral sources but the horizon for its mass application was not remotely
possible in the time line from 2016 to 2021. Delegates at the 38th Convention of
the CPC were persuaded to vote for such a timeline anyway.
At present, wind, solar and biomass use in Canada accounts
for about 100 petajoules of the 1500 petajoules of residential energy, 500
petajoules of the 6000 petajoules used by industry and a negligible amount that
barely registers as a component part of present commercial use.
The jobs of millions of Canadians employed in the industrial
and manufacturing sectors of the economy rely on about 7200 petajoules of combined
refined petroleum products (RPP’s), electrical and natural gas energy.
The CPC leadership gave scant study to such matters.
The CPC’s demand five years ago to shut down the “tar sands”
by 2021 in the light of such aforementioned realities should by now have caused
the CPC to critically reassess its energy program statements and cease reacting
with contempt and scorn to those who point out such contradictions.
Such ill considered classless nonsense by the CPC leadership
is driven by a greater consideration, to be popular with the emotional and
radicalized environmental “left” that gives scant attention to the realities of
the Canadian economy.
In failing to consider a working-class response to the
complexities of the energy needs of Canada we leave a clear field to the
apologists of Big Oil and their think tanks and abandon energy sector workers
to the populist rhetoric of the reactionary right.
The History of Pipelines
The CPC seems to have forgotten about the struggles it led for
an all-Canadian natural gas pipeline in the mid-1950’s. Some of us still alive, participated and are
not inclined to recant or explain anything preferring to let history speak.
The Canadian public intervened in the great natural gas
pipeline debate that rocked the country and Parliament and in 1954-55 and after
a bitter struggle compelled the natural gas profiteers to retreat ensuring that
Trans Canada Line One, was built on an all-Canadian route. Cosmopolitan financiers who didn’t give a damn
about Canada, wanted the line to go south of Superior and market Alberta gas to
the USA for a fast buck. That struggle
was won and for over 60 years Canadian communities from Alberta to Quebec have
enjoyed an assured supply of natural gas from Line One.
The CPC’s no pipelines of any kind, anywhere at anytime
prevents it from even discussing a proposal for an all-Canadian route for
Alberta crude to reach Canadian refineries and assure energy self sufficiency
for eastern Canada and the employment of millions of Ontario and Quebec industrial,
manufacturing and service workers.
The CPC by its quest for popularity has set aside its own
history on the struggle for Canadian independent economic development and
energy self sufficiency relinquishing the ground to the likes of Dianne
Francis and the National Post.
Similarly, there is silence from the CPC on refining capacity
in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan or BC.
The CPC has no position on expanding Canadian refineries and the fact
that without increasing such capacity Canada will be totally dependent on US
and off shore supplies for refined petroleum products.
At the same time the CPC leadership claims to uphold
Canadian sovereignty and economic independence. Presumably with the caveat that
so long as Canadian economic independence can be achieved without contributing
to global warming.
What Is to Be Done?
What is to be done now, about the stubborn realities of
Canadian energy needs and use as the transition to alternative sources of
energy evolves? Those
who consider global warming as the primary existential threat to humanity refuse
to discuss it.
Such is the measure used by a classless thinking to decide what
is moral, what is ethical, what is liberating, what is progressive, what is
futuristic, what is scientific, what is revolutionary and what is
counter-revolutionary.
Ardent environmentalists believe it is possible, by an act
of will, to leap from the present dependency on fossil fuels to a new “green
economy” that it cannot clearly define and is powerless to build.
Should anyone be so impertinent as to point out such basic
realities the response is to sulk, express outrage, anger, despair, lash out,
or lapse into elegant discourse in learned halls or into absurd 21st
century Owenist attempts to live off-grid primitive life-styles.
When slogans do not align with facts the answer to the
problem according to the CPC and all passionate environmentalists is to demand
that facts be adjusted to satisfy the slogan. The possibility that a higher-level discussion
is upon us, that new slogans are needed that reflect more accurately new
problems, that strategy and tactics must include solving dire problems faced by
working class families today would involve a self-critical approach. Such a novel idea is an uncomfortable
challenge to notions of leadership infallibility.
Global warming is NOT the greatest existential threat to human survival
Consistent activists for peace and socialism and human
survival are guided by the truth that the greatest immediate threat to humanity
and all life on the planet is the threat of imperialist instigated nuclear war.
It is not global warming. A
nuclear war will decide definitively the issue of global warming since there
will be no life to overcome it and the world would be plunged into a global
nuclear winter – thus solving global warming. The struggle against global warming is
inseparable from winning the struggle for nuclear disarmament and the latter leads
the former.
That is the starting point for a Marxist discourse with
environmentalism if there is to be any hope of uniting with it in a serious
struggle for human survival.
Science is a category of human creativity existing at all
stages of class society and historical materialist development, neither
intrinsically good nor bad but a ground of class struggle for its service to
progressive development and to the needs of the people and their vital
interests.
Marx, Engels and Lenin and all of their consistent adherents
accepted and studied science so that it served the cause of the working class
and its struggle for a new society socialism. They were exacting in its study, measured and
precise in the language they used in polemics, statements and programs. They were temperate and sober and realistic as
to what was necessary always assuming full responsibility for the consequences
of what they advised and quick to revise any outmoded proposals and demands.
That is the measure today for anyone who believes that monopoly capitalism is the final rung of capitalism beyond which there is only socialism.
