Nostalgic for a time without progress

The oil rig holds a certain Romantic allure to many Canadians, especially Albertans. Though not at all objectively beautiful or even pleasant, pumpjacks nodding along in canola fields nevertheless dot the remembered landscape of our childhood oil country roadtrips. For some, the stink of the refinery is as much a part of fond summer memories as running barefoot through the scorched grass, armed with the shiniest new nerf guns that boom time wages could buy. It isn’t hard to see how this Romanticism translates to adult life: the idealized roughneck who works a hard and dangerous job for good money and a good economic future for the country; good and honest labour that whatever else you might say about it, is less of an ethical quagmire than the same operations in Saudi Arabia. In these times of increased economic uncertainty and reduced mobility, of good jobs being paywalled behind expensive degrees that don’t suit every worker, and even those jobs struggling to keep up with inflation, it’s no wonder that the appeal of the oil sector holds so much sway: “If only we embraced our oil sector better”, so the thinking goes, “it would be like 1973 all over again - a time of fossil-fueled prosperity.”The plain truth is that you might as well command the tide to go out. The nostalgic future that many imagine for our fossil fuel industry – a future that is no different from the past, except for all the iPhones – hinges on a faulty premise: that Canada can stop the world from changing.

We often imagine the choices are between a green future and a continuation of the current status quo. A popular analysis of the now-axed carbon tax, for example, counted costs against a world where the climate wasn’t changing at all – where no towns would need to be rebuilt after burning, no illnesses exacerbated by skies full of smoke, no roads melted under the scorch of the summer sun. The world as we remember it, instead of the world that will be.

But the reality is that the energy transition is happening. It is accelerating globally every year. It is accelerating in all the Northern European social democracies you might expect, and many of the autocratic oil-rich states you wouldn’t. Oil demands in China are plateauing, and their investments in alternative energy have exploded. Texas has installed more solar energy than any other U.S. state. Despite the Republican rallying cry of “drill, baby, drill”, the current administration may even be accelerating the energy transition by making reliance on unstable trading partners for energy more risky. If the president of the United States can’t command the world to stick to oil, what, honestly, is Danielle Smith going to do?

For people who cling to the Nostalgic Future as a last bastion of hope for economic security, this inevitability may seem dystopian. Nostalgia can only reflect a vision of the past, and has no room for new ideas. Thus, a decline in demand for oil necessarily means a decline in jobs, less money, less stability, less relevance for Canada on a global stage, and higher costs for goods that are currently made cheap by the proximity of the petroleum industry. It’s not entirely unwarranted fear; Canada is a top five producer, exporter, and consumer of oil globally, and if we carried on at our current level of dependence on the fossil fuel sector, we would face a challenging market in the near future.

Nostalgia is represented by rose-tinted glasses for a reason; it conceals things from view. In reality, oil industry jobs are set to decline by 93% between now and 2050, regardless of policy. In reality, Canada provided somewhere between 4.5 and 81 billion dollars in taxpayer money to pop up the industry in 2020 alone – an industry in which over 70% of major oil sands shareholders are based outside our borders, and take their profits home. In reality, taxpayers are already at risk of being saddled with up to $260 billion in clean up costs associated with orphaned wells, despite mixed messages from policy makers. These things are true, and will be true tomorrow, and would be true even if someone finally pressed the “fix climate change” button and we could all go back to our gas-guzzling F150s with a guiltless conscience.

But nostalgia conceals unrealized opportunity too. Because we have never had a world that runs on clean energy before, we struggle to imagine that transitioning away from fossil fuels would let our clean energy sector grow by a factor of six, and faster in Alberta than anywhere else, easily replacing all the lost work in traditional energy with better, healthier, more financially stable jobs. We struggle to imagine a strong export market in the absence of oil, although Canada is well-situated to build world-leading industries in EV manufacturing, green chemistry, carbon capture, and hydrogen production, among other low-carbon fields; again, good, stable work with less mortal danger. We even struggle to imagine that green energy might be cheaper, although B.C., Manitoba and Quebec, which rely primarily on hydroelectricity, have the lowest energy costs in the country, and Alberta, which depends on fossil fuels, has among the highest.

The best-case scenario in embracing the nostalgic future that oil hawks desperately try to sell is that nothing substantially changes, and this will still mean worse and fewer jobs, worse health, worse air, higher energy costs, higher insurance to cover climate disasters, and less and less money in the vault as foreign shareholders take their profits home. The worst case, barring climate catastrophe, is that Canada fails to prepare for the future that really is coming; fails to pivot to industries that we could thrive in, fails to reskill its workers and to take care of those left behind. The worst case is that we tell our young people, who are terrified of climate change and desperate for any sign of hope, that we can do nothing but give up.

Nostalgia might make for a good story, but it’s a terrible strategy. Betting on the past won’t bring back prosperity; it’ll only leave us unprepared for what’s next. Canada deserves a future built not on a faded old Polaroid taped up on the fridge of a house that’s falling down, but on the possibility that what comes next may be better and brighter than we can currently dream.

Written By: Carolyn Dallimore, Policy Strategist - Engage