The oil and gas lobby is using the Russian invasion of Ukraine to promote scaling up oil and gas production and infrastructure.
PCM adds our support to this letter from Climate Action Network Canada and to its call for action.
The letter was signed by eighty-six civil society and grassroots organizations and sent on March 25, 2022.
You can see the full letter, with signatures, here.
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and victims of war around the world, and urge you and your cabinet to resist the oil and gas lobby’s demands for short-sighted policies to scale up oil and gas production and infrastructure.
We call on you to redouble efforts to swiftly adopt the climate policies your government has promised that bring us closer to a 1.5°C compatible pathway, and to implement a windfall tax on soaring oil and gas profits and redirect that revenue to the communities and families who need it.
This crisis has reminded the world how vulnerable our dependence on fossil fuels makes us. Western countries’ addiction to fossil fuels has funded Russia’s invasion and created untold suffering in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the climate crisis has caused floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires that are wreaking havoc on the lives of millions of people, as documented in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The only way to achieve energy security and climate safety is to break our addiction to oil and gas and accelerate the global transition to stable, renewable energy.
Other Western countries are rapidly realizing that energy security requires an energy transition. The last thing European countries want to do is to increase dependency on volatile foreign fossil fuels. Plans from Germany, the European Commission, and the International Energy Agency, while imperfect, all recognize that the quickest, cheapest, and surest way to ensure energy security is to ramp up energy efficiency measures and renewable energy.
Like Canada, the United States’ position as an oil- and gas-producing country (where production is at an all-time high) does not shield it from the price shocks of a turbulent global market. The Biden administration has so far resisted increasing its oil and gas production and loosening environmental regulations, rather emphasizing that “the way to avoid high gas prices is to speed up – not slow down – our transition to a clean energy future.”
Building more fossil fuel infrastructure – such as the Bay du Nord project – will not influence prices or supply today; it will only lock us into producing destructive fuels for decades after demand has peaked, risking stranded assets and driving the world toward further climate catastrophe. Industry lobbyists attempt to frame liquified natural gas (LNG) as a clean bridge fuel; however, not only can LNG be nearly as polluting as coal, but projects take years, often a decade, to come online.
Moreover, for Canada to extract more oil and gas simply cannot be positioned as ethical. Oil sands tailing ponds – sprawling waste pits almost twice the size of Vancouver – leach acutely toxic substances into groundwater, polluting Indigenous lands and drinking water. Resource extraction projects are linked with violence against Indigenous women and girls, as highlighted in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Given the “brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” as the IPCC report reminds us, there can be no further delays for scaling down fossil fuel production.
We urge you to:
● Implement a windfall tax on skyrocketing oil and gas profits.
Rising fuel costs are driving up already-high grocery bills, threatening food security in remote and Indigenous communities.
Oil and gas companies must not be allowed to profiteer while people suffer the consequences.
A windfall tax on oil and gas such as the one proposed by the European Commission should redirect revenue to the communities and families most affected by the rising prices.
● Swiftly implement your COP26 commitment to cap the oil and gas sector’s emissions at
current levels.
Until now, Canada’s highest-emitting sector has polluted with impunity, leaving other sectors, workers, and consumers to compensate for oil and gas companies’ failure to do their fair share.
The oil and gas cap currently being developed must require the fossil fuel industry to take on their fair share of the climate effort by reducing emissions by at least 60% below 2005 levels by 2030.
For your promise to cap emissions at current levels to be credible, new extraction projects – which by definition add pollution to the atmosphere – like Bay du Nord must be rejected by your cabinet.
● Support workers and communities through a Just Transition.
Workers deserve certainty about their future. Research shows most oil and gas workers are interested in skills training for
jobs in the clean economy – but we need a plan to get there.
The Just Transition Act that has been promised by the government must set up an advisory working group of which trade
unions are stakeholders, and the funding that comes with the Act must be scaled up – the CAD 2 billion Futures Fund promised during the electoral campaign is a small start but amounts will need to be vastly increased to fund the transition.
The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine must not be used as a pretext to justify expansion of destructive extractive industries, or to further entrench imperialism, militarism, and nationalism. Rather, it must galvanize global cooperation and solidarity in the face of intersecting crises.
Like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine has shown how quickly governments can act – and act together – in an emergency situation.
We call on you to apply that same urgency to the climate crisis, and do everything that’s necessary to keep people and our planet safe.
