n an interview published in the New York Times on the weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama made his most extensive comments to date on the Keystone XL pipeline project, saying Canada could “potentially be doing more” to mitigate emissions from what he pointedly called the “tarsands,” adding for good measure that the project would create no more than “maybe 2,000 jobs” during construction. This does not bode well for approval of the $7.6-billion TransCanada project to carry 830,000 barrels a day from the Alberta oilsands to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. That’s oilsands, Mr. President, not tarsands. The Canadian oilpatch, as well as the Alberta and federal government, have spent a fortune rebranding and even the New York Times now refers to bitumen from the Canadian “oilsands.” Only the environmental lobby in the U.S. still uses the tarsands nomenclature, so Obama was simply playing to his eco-base. But it’s Obama’s comments downplaying job creation that are astonishingly inaccurate. Here’s the full quote from the Times interview: “My hope would be that any reporter who is looking at the facts would take the time to confirm the most realistic estimates are that this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline — which might take a year or two — and after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs in an economy of 150 million working people.” No one has ever heard of a $7.6-billion construction project that would create only 2,000 jobs at most. TransCanada has very different number of eight times that — 9,000 jobs in construction and another 7,000 in manufacturing. “We have and can factually rebut each point the president has made,” TransCanada spokesman James Millar wrote in a weekend email to the media. While there’s not much percentage in publicly taking on the president of the United States, Millar has a point when he says TransCanada’s not pulling its numbers out of thin air. “There is no reason for us to overinflate our numbers,” Millar said. “We have to answer to our board. We have to answer to shareholders.” It’s called corporate governance. Markets and regulators expect transparency and accuracy in the forecasting done by publicly traded companies. Obama had only to read or be briefed on the environmental-impact statement of the U.S. State Department, which last March found Keystone would have virtually no effect on oilsands production, since Canadians would find other markets. And on job creation, the report stated: “Including direct, indirect and induced effects, the proposed project would potentially support approximately 42,100 annual jobs across the United States over a 1- to 2-year construction period.” While the State Department forecast of 3,900 construction jobs is much lower than TransCanada’s, it’s twice as many jobs as Obama is talking about. So why was Obama talking down Keystone as a creator of jobs? Here’s the answer, in his own words: “Republicans have said that this would be a big jobs generator. There’s no evidence that that’s true.” Yes, there is, from his own State department. Obama did acknowledge one “potential benefit for us integrating further with a reliable ally to the north on our energy supplies.” Which is to say Canada, not Venezuela, Nigeria or Saudi Arabia. As for Canada doing more on emissions reductions, Obama said: “We haven’t seen any specific ideas or plans.” He added that “would go into the mix in terms of (Secretary of State) John Kerry’s decision or recommendation on this issue.” And here’s where Alberta has a story to tell. Back in 2008 it was the first jurisdiction in North America to require industry to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It also has a $15-per-tonne price on carbon. It has invested more than $1 billion in carbon capture and storage, and has created a fund that is helping to finance more than 40 clean-energy projects. On the R&D side, the industry is working to reduce emissions intensity. As Alberta Premier Alison Redford put it in a recent Q&A with Policy magazine: “We know that what industry is doing right now is reducing the intensity of emissions with respect to production on a per-barrel basis.” Then there’s the sheer hypocrisy of the Americans lecturing Canadians on climate change when the oilsands account for just over 0.1 per cent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, while the U.S. coal-fired electricity industry accounts for more than 40 times that. Finally, as a lawyer, Obama might take time to read the energy chapter of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, in which we gave them security of supply in return for security of access. Or as Redford has put it: “We promised to be good suppliers if they promised to be good customers.” We ought to be right in their face in reminding the Americans of that. lianmacdonald@gmail L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine (policymagazine.ca) © Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 01:20:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015