The fossil fuel sector’s denial and disinformation campaigns have facilitated a sinister transition in place of a green one, transforming the problem of regulatory capture into something more expansive: the co-optation of nominally sovereign foreign governments in service of hydrocarbon interests. Nowhere has this transition happened more fully, and with less scrutiny, than Gillmor’s homeland of Canada.
Prior to his career as a journalist and author, Gillmor was a roughneck working the Alberta oil patch. As he recounts in On Oil, he worked through the first big boom — that of the 1970s — in the years immediately following the oil embargo by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) against the United States and its allies in retaliation for their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
Most Americans and Canadians alive at the time remember queues at gas stations, inflation, and the beginning of the end of postwar prosperity. This was the case throughout the industrial east of Canada as much as the United States. The western portions of these countries experienced the 1970s differently. Canadian oil — typically too hard to refine, too costly to transport, and generally too expensive compared with cheaper Middle Eastern sources — suddenly had a considerable advantage: reliability.
The fossil fuel sector’s denial and disinformation campaigns have facilitated a sinister transition in place of a green one.
Gillmor describes working on the Alberta oil patch of the mid-1970s in Wild West terms. His compatriots were hard-drinking, disinterested in safety, and largely left to their own devices to get oil out of the ground and turned into profit as quickly as possible. He describes Calgary — Alberta’s largest city and business capital — as a city growing rapidly thanks to a massive influx of oil money financing glittering new skyscrapers, but with so little investment in civic institutions and urban planning that there was effectively no city to speak of. Gillmor recalls coming across a film shoot on a barren downtown street, only for a production assistant to inform him that the movie was set in a postapocalyptic wasteland. At the height of the 1970s oil boom, Downtown Calgary served as an excellent setting for a planet devoid of human life.
That iteration of Calgary, as Gillmor recalls, was one where Texan and Oklahoman accents were at least as common as any regional Canadian variety. The oilworkers were mostly imported, as were many of the executives and the Bible Belt evangelical Christianity that insisted oil was God’s gift to the righteous. Such messaging is as strong as ever in today’s Alberta. Premier Danielle Smith recently told a conference of Christian leaders that building a new pipeline to the Pacific Ocean was “consistent with the teachings of Jesus.” Alberta today is a product of that influence: a province that regards itself as custodian of Canada’s fossil fuel sector, despite much of the industry being foreign-owned and controlled by American shareholders.
Although the province is Canada’s fourth most populous (with a growing population of over five million), Alberta still tries to derive most of its operating income from oil and gas royalties. Predictably, this has resulted in inconsistent funding for provincial services — like health and education — and surprise deficits. The busts are always worse, and longer, than the booms, which are never nearly as good for the average Albertan as the oil and gas sector, and their partners in the political class, make it seem.
When Alberta Premier Ralph Klein announced the province’s budget was balanced in 2005, he issued CA$400 cheques to every “man, woman, and child” in the province. What wasn’t mentioned were the massive cuts to provincial services (as Gillmor relates, Klein shuttered three Calgary hospitals, fired thousands of nurses, and froze doctors’ salaries). Despite its apparently massive oil wealth, Alberta spends little on its own citizens. A substantial portion of that wealth is captured by the oil and gas industry through a combination of low royalty rates, tax concessions, and other forms of public support. Unlike Norway, which has been directing its oil wealth into a sovereign wealth fund now worth an estimated $1.7 trillion, Alberta’s rainy day fund is only worth about CA$30 billion. This is less than half of Alberta’s most recent budget, a completely inadequate sum to provide its citizens a long-term source of revenue.
It might not have been like this.