Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

It was the 2009 annual summer retreat of the Green Group – the chief executives, presidents and executive directors of the largest environmental organizations in the United States – and their Canadian counterparts had wrangled an invitation for the first time.

The U.S. environmental movement appeared to be on a roll, with a new ally in the White House, the House of Representatives on the verge of passing a climate bill, and guarded optimism about a breakthrough at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen later that year.

That June, the green leaders gathered at the Airlie Center, a historic farmhouse turned conference centre an hour’s drive from Washington, in rural Virginia. Billed as an “island of thought,” Airlie is a sylvan retreat for American progressives: It was there that Martin Luther King Jr. laid plans for the Poor People’s Campaign and U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson announced plans for the first national Earth Day.

Read more

Robert J. Samuelson writes on economics for the Washington Post.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his re-election that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of the tarsands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

It would seem that Wednesday the Obama White House put a dagger through the heart of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. But did it? In a presidential election year, very little in American politics is exactly as it appears.

In accepting the State department’s recommendation that he not grant a construction permit to Keystone, President Barack Obama pointed out that he was heeding that advice not because of the merits of the pipeline project, but because “the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans … prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially (on) the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.”

This is political theatre, pure and simple. It is intended solely to solidify the “green” vote behind Obama in November’s presidential election and, for the general electorate, to make it appear as if Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents are truly to blame for the thousands of jobs that will not be created.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The Obama administration on Wednesday denied a presidential permit for construction of the $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline, ruling that a proper environmental review could not be conducted before a 60-day deadline set by the U.S. Congress to rule on the controversial oilsands project.

But Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., the company behind the 2,700-kilometre pipeline, has been given the option of making a new application — and company officials confirmed they will propose an alternative route for Keystone XL that avoids environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. State Department said its decision was “predicated on the fact that the Department does not have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess whether the project, in its current state, is in the national interest.”

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

With U.S. President Barack Obama’s extreme decision Wednesday to deny a permit to the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, Canada’s oil-sands industry, one of the few engines of investment and job creation in North America, stands on the brink of a slowdown.

Export pipeline capacity is expected to run out by around 2016, throwing today’s growth strategies into serious doubt.

Keystone XL, and its all-Canadian alternative, Northern Gateway, were supposed to be the main solutions to transporting growing oil sands production to new markets.

Both are stuck. To be sure, Keystone XL proponent TransCanada Corp. has been invited to apply for a new permit with a revised route that avoids environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska. But the reality is that there will be no pipeline decision — and it could still be a ‘no’ — until at least after the November presidential election, and possibly longer.

Read more

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

OTTAWA—The federal government says it will renew efforts to ship Canadian oil to Asian markets after the White House rejected plans for a $7 billion pipeline to move Alberta crude into the U.S.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Barack Obama in a phone call Wednesday he was “profoundly disappointed” with the U.S. decision on the Keystone XL project and pointedly said that Canada would seek other markets for its energy exports.

Soon after the two leaders spoke, Obama made public his decision to deny the application by Canadian energy giant TransCanada Corp. to build the pipeline, citing a “rushed and arbitrary deadline” imposed by Congress to review the project.

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said in a statement.

Read more

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Alan Broadbent is past chair of the board and current board member of Tides Canada. He is chairman and CEO of Avana Capital Corp. and founder and chair of Maytree.

Hello. My name is Alan, and I’m a radical environmental extremist.

I don’t know how I ended up being part of a group with a radical environmental agenda. It all happened so gradually.

I do remember being invited to join the board of the Tides Canada Foundation when it was founded over a decade ago. It seemed innocent enough, a registered Canadian charity that offered Canadians a chance to donate to protecting the environment and creating socially just communities. In fact, it seemed so Canadian. Silly me, but hey, this was over a decade ago.

In fact, I used to tell people that Tides Canada was just like a community foundation, say the Vancouver Foundation or the Winnipeg Foundation, except that instead of a geographical community it was a community of interest. A community of people interested in the environment and social justice.

Read more

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

In hearings that began this week on the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to carry tar-sands oil from Athabasca to the B.C. coast, we have a rare opportunity to insist on the world’s most carefully planned energy megaprojects ever.

In an ideal world, we would embrace conservation and greatly accelerated development of alternative sources of energy to make unnecessary the construction of Gateway and the even longer Keystone XL pipeline to take Athabasca crude the entire length of the U.S. to refineries on the Texas coast.

But that won’t happen, not for decades if ever. Canadians and Americans will ultimately consent to these two projects with their combined 4,000 km of three-foot-diameter pipe at a total estimated cost of $13.6 billion. Energy security will trump the many risks.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

It’s early days for the long federal regulatory review into the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline, but already it’s hard to feel optimistic that the project will get off the ground as proposed.

At least three major stumbling blocks surfaced repeatedly in the review’s important first days that are likely to dog the $5.5-billion pipeline, which would carry product from the Alberta oil sands to this community on the northern West Coast, throughout the two-year review process: aboriginal opposition, little community buy-in and lack of trust that it can be built safely.

They are essential building blocks of any major development in Western and Northern Canada, from liquefied natural gas plants coming to this town, to oil sands projects in Alberta, to potash mines in Saskatchewan. Even the much-delayed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline had them largely nailed down before Imperial Oil Ltd. and its partners moved forward with an application for regulatory approval.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Nathan Lemphers is a senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, a national nonpartisan sustainable energy think-tank. This op-ed originally appeared on The Mark.

Apparently, Canada is open for business, but closed to criticism, no matter how constructive. This is the clearest conclusion that can be drawn from Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s open letter to Canadians (“Radicals threaten resource development,” National Post, Jan. 10), in which he attacks advocates of responsible oilsands development as “radicals,” and dismisses the concerns of thousands of Canadians who want to have a say in the decision of whether to build Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

The $6.6-billion project would run two parallel pipelines carrying diluted bitumen and condensate along a 1,177kilometre route linking the oilsands in Alberta with the remote port of Kitimat on the northern B.C. coast. The pipelines would traverse hundreds of salmon-bearing rivers and streams, mountainous and landslide-prone terrain, the Great Bear Rainforest and the territory of more than 50 First Nations.

Read more

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CALGARY— Alberta Premier Alison Redford is questioning the credibility of federal hearings that have attracted more than 4,000 people requesting comment on Enbridge Inc.’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which has sparked a debate about balancing the economy against the environment and aboriginal rights.

The Alberta government will not be making a formal pitch during the National Energy Board’s regulatory review, which started this week in northern British Columbia, but the province has made no secret of its support for the pipeline that would help bring oil-sands crude to markets in Asia and the United States.

Ms. Redford told reporters on Thursday that she supports the independent regulatory process, as she did when a similar review took place in the United States regarding the divisive Keystone XL pipeline project, but she has concerns about the transparency.

Read more

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is a good idea, to judge from the information available thus far. But the regulatory process should go ahead and hear all concerns in an evenhanded way, as that process was designed to do. The federal government’s warnings about foreign influences and “environmental and other radical groups” are exaggerated.

Canada needs to trade with diverse markets, and China will have a huge appetite for oil for a long time to come. The pipeline, transporting petroleum from the Alberta oil sands to Kitimat, B.C., where it can be loaded on to ocean tankers, would serve the Asian market. Better access to international markets (not only through Gateway) could add $131-billion to this country’s gross domestic product between 2016 and 2030, and $27-billion in tax revenues, a paper published by the University of Calgary’s School of Policy studies argues.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was circumspect when he spoke with this newspaper’s editorial board in late October.

Read more