Last month, Alberta didn’t just announce it had transitioned entirely off coal as an energy source; the province kicked the fossil fuel six years ahead of a wildly ambitious schedule. The scale of achievement this represents defies exaggeration—and contains a warning for oil fans everywhere. […] what happened to coal is coming for oil next.
Virtually every major analyst that isn’t an oil company (and even some of them, like BP) now expects global demand for oil to peak around 2030, if not sooner; McKinsey, Rystad Energy, DNV, and the International Energy Agency all agree. This places Canada in a uniquely vulnerable position. Oil is Canada’s biggest export by a mile, a vital organ of our economy: we sold $123 billion worth of it in 2022 (cars came in second, at just under $30 billion). Three quarters of that oil is exported as bitumen—the most expensive, emissions-heavy form of petroleum in the market and therefore the hardest to sell. That makes us incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in global demand. Think of coal as the canary in our oil patch.
Extractive industry is heavily required if we’re going to get off fossil fuels
Can you explain why? As in, why does Canada need so much mining when there are other wealthy nations that don’t focus so much on it?
Maybe all nations do, idk
Because we are the second largest country in the world and have vast amount of natural resources… why shouldn’t we develop them?
All the materials being used by these tiny (geography-wise) European countries that many consider to be “better” than us certainly aren’t coming from those countries… why shouldn’t it come from us?
Shouldn’t that mean we are, economically, in a better position than those tiny European countries?
I’m not too savvy but I always thought Canada’s economy is worse than the average Western European country. Maybe that’s not true either.
We’re worse off because we severely limit our development of our natural resources and a lot of what we do develop is exported in a fairly raw state (we don’t do much value adding).
