If no environmental regulations are required when times are good in the tar sands, why is it ‘crazy’ to impose them when times are bad? Yet that was what the Prime Minister told the House of Commons early in December. The country has been aghast since then.
The main problem with what the Hair told the House of Commons was that there was an immediate assumption that regulation would include penalties to the oil and gas sector of the economy. What he said exactly was “it would be crazy economic policy—to do unilateral penalties on that sector.”
What the Hair seems to have made clear is that there will be no environmental controls for the oil and gas sector under a Conservative government.
Heavy carbon pollution, pipeline ruptures, train derailments, trucking failures all have free rein in Tory territory.
Which begs the question, why do oil and gas sector advertisers in Canada show beautiful scenery in their extensive television and print advertising? If that is the image the oil and gas sector want the public to believe in, why are there no incentives from government towards achieving that objective?
What they might not want you to know is that production of tar sands oil creates approximately three times the carbon pollution of normal crude oil refining?
The one thing for sure is that very few members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) are smiling when the price of the standard barrel of crude oil drops below $60. It means no tar sands exploiter is making money. No oil refinery wants to pay premium prices for that tar sands bitumen to make synthetic crude.
And the CAPP members are hardly saying nice things about the Saudi oil marketers as they deliberately lower the price of crude oil. The Saudis can still make money at $20 a barrel if they have to. The Saudis just love our free market system. They are teaching an object lesson to Canadian and Venezuelan ‘heavy oil’ producers.
And the Hair is caught in between. While consumers are enjoying the partially lowered prices at the gas pumps, he is not about to be the one telling the mid-East oil producers to raise their prices. Nor would he impose environmental rules on the tar sands when Venezuela has no controls. The Hair is a free-market guy.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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