Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People. Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways. By Nicholas Kusnetz November 21, 2021  Oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and the Canadian giant Suncor have transformed Alberta’s tar sands—also called oil sands—into one of the world’s largest industrial developments. They have built sprawling waste ponds that leach heavy metals into groundwater, and processing plants that spew nitrogen and sulfur oxides into the air, sending a sour stench for miles.  Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People. Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways. Scientists say oil production must begin falling immediately. Canada’s tar sands are among the most climate-polluting sources of oil, and so are an obvious place to begin winding down. The largest oil sands companies have pledged to reduce their emissions, saying they will rely largely on government-subsidized carbon capture projects.Yet oil companies and the government expect output will climb well into the 2030s. Even a new proposal by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to cap emissions in the oil sector does not include any plan to lower production.  Some lawyers and advocates have pointed to the tar sands as a prime example of the widespread environmental destruction they call “ecocide.” They are pushing for the International Criminal Court to outlaw ecocide as a crime, on a par with genocide or war crimes. While the campaign for a new international law is likely to last years, with no assurance it will succeed, it has drawn attention to the inability of countries’ existing laws to contain industrial development like the tar sands, which will pollute the land for decades or centuries.
   https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112021/tar-sands-canada-oil/

 Greenhouse gas emissions from the global energy industry are still rising – report.  Greenhouse gas emissions from the global energy industry hit new highs last year “despite record growth in wind and solar power”, the Guardian reports, covering the “statistical review of world energy” formerly produced by oil giant BP. The paper says emissions climbed 0.8% last year, quoting Juliet Davenport, president of the Energy Institute which now leads the production of the report, saying: “Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again. We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris agreement.” The newspaper continues: “Solar generation climbed by 25% in 2022 while wind power output grew by 13.5% compared with the year before. However, the renewable energy boom was eclipsed by a modest rise in global energy consumption of 1.1% last year – compared to a 5.5% increase in 2021 – which meant more oil and coal was burnt to meet demand, the report found.” The Times reports the figures under the headline: “World struggles to kick fossil fuel habit.” It says: “Oil, gas and coal together accounted for almost 82% of global primary energy consumption last year, barely down on the previous year, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.”                       https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-global-energy-industry-still-rising-report/

Here’s the Only Path to Real Change in Alberta Canada [and any other worldwide petrostate.] Until the province steps out from the petrostate curse, elections scarcely matter.  Andrew Nikiforuk 24 May 2023The Tyee  Amid the smoke of raging wildfires another damn Alberta election seems to be rumbling down a familiar road of bitumen-paved illusions.  To no one’s surprise neither the NDP or the United Conservative Party really want to address the root of the province’s dysfunction: its traumatic addiction to bust-and-boom oil revenues with no institutional checks or balances on their corrosive power.  This refusal to change explains much about the province’s enduring political dysfunction — its perpetual fiscal rollercoaster (it is always either cutting or splurging); its one-party Soviet-like rule; its indifference to environmental pollution in the oilsands; its aversion to a sales tax; its slavish deference to oil interests; its failure to deal with more than $260 billion worth of abandoned wells, pipelines and other oil liabilities; its growing political extremism and its increasingly aggressive posture to the rest of Canada.                                                        History shows that petrostates are twice as likely to engage in conflict with their neighbours than non-petrostates. They invariably turn into intolerant bullies because they have the money to do so. Petrostates shun accountability. Nor do they like to look in the mirror of their vulnerability.  In the weedy garden of human politics, petrostates stand out like genetically modified wheat. By definition a petrostate is any country or jurisdiction (from Wyoming to Nigeria) where revenue from oil, gas or coal exports exceeds 10 per cent of GDP.  Because of growing bitumen exports to the United States, Alberta’s dependence oftenexceeds 26 per cent. Meanwhile oil and gas account for half of Russia’s exports and about 15 per cent. Petrostates, like the powerful commodity that defines them, are pretty volatile places that routinely live beyond their means. During booms (high oil prices) they tend to be delusional high spenders, and during busts, they can’t pay their bills and claim victimhood.  Petrostates also create a Midas-like culture of rent-seeking wherein people ask for things without reciprocity. The Alberta government encourages newcomers to come and make a killing as opposed to [staying and] enjoying a living. Petrostates prefer greedy subjects to sober citizens. Since 2008-09, Alberta has lived the paradox of repeated and massive deficits despite record high oil production. Karl, an astute U.S. political scientist, has long written about the poisonous character of petrostates. Their central weakness is that they rely on unstable oil revenues from a few corporate players instead of a secure tax regime funded by citizens.  This dependence severs the critical bond of taxation from representation and puts the state in a perpetual conflict of interest. It explains why Alberta blindly champions the industry and eternally boasts that it has the lowest tax regime in Canada and no sales tax. Four companies now account for 80 per cent of oilsands production and 25 per cent of the province’s GDP. A government dependent on the proceeds of just four companies tends to defer to its funders,,,,read on                https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/24/Only-Path-To-Change-In-Alberta/ 

From peak to plummet in 15 years: Coal continues its precipitous decline". This is not an economic cycle that is simply going to go away. It is a real phaseout across the industry of the use of coal."   Over the last decade, the U.S. energy sector has made a dramatic pivot away from the greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuel. Research shows it continues to do so at an astonishing pace. Nearly half of the generating capacity seen in 2011 is expected to vanish by the end of 2026, according to a report published Monday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think-tank focused on the global energy transition. The analysis also found that coal use by U.S. electric-power producers could hit just 400 million tons this year. And roughly 40 percent of the country’s current coal-fired capacity is set to close by 2030.  “People were not predicting it was going to happen that quickly,” Seth Feaster, the report’s author and a data analyst at the institute, told Grist. “This is a long-term structural decline. This is not an economic cycle that is simply going to go away. It is a real phaseout across the industry of the use of coal.” Coal’s precipitous decline has resulted in large part from the natural gas boom and the rise of renewable energy. Their falling costs — owing to technological innovations and government incentives, like those in the Inflation Reduction Act — have made it cheaper to replace 99 percent of operating U.S. coal plants with solar and wind farms, according to a recent study from climate and energy think-tank Energy Innovation. Last year, more electricity came from renewables than from coal for the first time in U.S. history.  “Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources. It’s just no longer cost-competitive with renewables,” Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, told the Guardian.             https://grist.org/climate-energy/from-peak-to-plummet-in-15-years-coal-continues-its-precipitous-decline/