Ukraine war creates contradictory ‘truths’

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/03/2022 (1017 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Truth is always the first casualty of war. Propaganda and disinformation rank alongside smart weapons and dumb bombs as an essential tool of warfare today. Social media acts as a weaponized accelerant, modernizing the old adage that a lie will get halfway around the world before truth even gets its pants on.

But wars create new truths. These are the “truths” we come to believe, as a consequence of conflict. Some require years to take root, congealing into a new historical narrative that shapes public opinion for generations. Others are more sudden, causing abrupt, consequential changes in public policy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spawned a new truth that Canada can and should replace Russian oil and gas in Europe with Canadian oil and gas. This obscures another truth: that burning more oil and gas anywhere will simply add to climate change. This collision of competing truths will make for even messier climate and energy policy in Canada, and in the world.

There are good reasons to wean Europe off Russian energy. Bankrolling Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs with petro-dollars is as distasteful as it is immoral. The rapid imposition of economic sanctions on Russia by Canada, the United States and the European Union is unprecedented. If there was ever an historical moment to act to shift energy demand away from authoritarian Russia to democratic Canada, it is now.

Advocating strongest for this step is Canada’s petro-province, Alberta. And why shouldn’t it? Awash in black gold once more with record rises in oil and gas prices, Alberta would reap (with Canada) a massive “war dividend” from selling liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European customers and oil to the U.S.

It is why Premier Jason Kenney hastened to Texas the other week to tout Alberta as a secure replacement for “dictator oil.” He pressed for the resurrection of the Keystone XL pipeline to the United States by the Biden administration and the Energy East pipeline to Atlantic Canada by the Trudeau government.

None of this is poised to happen. Trans Canada itself dismissed the notion of restarting its Keystone pipeline, while Energy East continues to have no political purchase within either Ottawa or Quebec City, which hold the regulatory and political keys to it moving ahead.

Better news for Alberta is that the Trans Mountain pipeline to the British Columbia coast is still alive, bankrolled by Canadian taxpayers. It will give Alberta oil access to new tidewater markets in Asia and Europe, rather than being forced to sell at a discount in its traditional U.S. market simply because all the pipelines go north-south.

It’s not even clear Europe wants our energy, even if we could get it to them. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency released a “Ten Point Plan to Reduce the European Union’s Reliance on Russian Natural Gas.” The word “Canada” is not mentioned once.

This does not sound like a continent ready and willing to embrace Canadian fossil fuel, no matter what label we put on it.

This energy truth is conditioned by a climate-change truth. Just days after Russian warred against Ukraine, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth scientific assessment report on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. It does not make for comfortable reading.

Right now, the world is on track to reach an increase of 2.7 degrees C by the end of the century, not the 1.5 degrees C target we need to stay below to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Climate change’s truth will have to compete with a newly emboldened energy-security truth. And vice versa. The clear and present danger of Russia to the international security order constitutes an emerging danger to the global climate order. Russia, the world’s fourth-largest country emitter, remains friendly to, even aligned with, China, the No. 1 emitter and India, the No. 3 emitter. That means tough sledding ahead to rally ongoing global climate action.

At the height of the Cold War, president John F. Kennedy decried the danger of nuclear weapons to humanity in his famous 1963 peace speech — words that take on new meaning today. He said: “… our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Mutually assured destruction (MAD) from nuclear weapons was the Cold War’s deterrence totem. How ironic, in the days of “hot peace” to come, if MAD remerges for a whole other reason.

David McLaughlin was Clerk of the Executive Council in the government of Manitoba in 2020-21. He was campaign manager for the PC Party of Manitoba in the 2016 and 2019 elections.