LNG Ambition, Pipelines, and the Climate Debate in Canada

This week on the podcast, Jackie and Peter begin with a roundup of the latest developments in Canadian energy. They start by discussing Prime Minister Carney’s remarks at the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia, where he suggested that Canada could export up to 50 million tonnes of LNG per year (about 6.5 Bcf/d) by 2030, with the potential to double that by 2040.

They then turn to the upcoming federal budget, which is expected to include details about Canada’s Climate Competitiveness Plan. Another key topic is President Trump’s decision to suspend trade talks with Canada following controversy over Ontario’s free-trade advertisement.

Next, the hosts reflect on Peter’s recent commentary in The Hub, titled “Even if Alberta gets a new pipeline, what’s next for the oilsands?”

Finally, Jackie talks about her recent appearance on a CBC podcast that explored whether Canada can build pipelines while fighting climate change. She explains why she felt the show’s coverage was not balanced and shares her broader concerns about how climate and energy topics are often framed in mainstream Canadian media.

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Episode 300 transcript

Disclosure:

The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.

Announcer:

This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, exploring trends that influence the energy business.

Jackie Forrest:

Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.

Peter Tertzakian:

And I’m Peter Tertzakian, welcome back. Well, time stamp. It is Monday morning, October 27th as we record in studio, and over the weekend our Prime Minister is off to Asia at the ASEAN Conference and he’s our world’s greatest LNG salesman.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, he’s at the conference and it was pretty exciting to see some of the quotes over the weekend. He talked about Canada sending 50 million tons per year by the end of this decade. Just to put that in perspective, if we have all our projects that are under construction plus LNG Canada Phase Two plus the Ksi Lisims project, that would be 50 million tons. So he’s basically implying that all that will get done by the end of the decade, which would be amazing. And not only that, he wants us to double that amount, become 100 million tons by 2040, and he said, “Well, why not? We have the fourth-largest reserves of LNG in the world.”

So I was like, “Hallelujah. We finally have a Prime Minister going to Asia and selling us as an LNG superpower,” and it’s interesting that he’s in Malaysia. A lot of Asian countries, including the Malaysians, have spent a lot of money in Canada and it hasn’t gone all that well for them.

Peter Tertzakian:

Petronas is a Malaysian company.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, and they tried to do a large LNG project here, the Pacific Northwest, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that and abandoned it. So I hope that we go out there a lot, continue to repeat this message because I think we have to build some trust with the Asian buyers.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, 50 to 60 million tons per year is a key number because it actually allows us to have some influence in those markets and more on that later in a future podcast because doing quite a bit of research on that, but also for perspective for that 50 million tons, LNG Canada, phase one is 14, so we’re part way there already, but it’s just a toehold. You really need 50, 60 and certainly 100 would put you in that category of serious negotiator and for the podcast we had a few weeks ago gets you into that position where you actually have market power, serious market power, which is what you need in this day and age of economic coercion.

Jackie Forrest:

Well, and also we’re going to talk about the budget and the economy next, but I don’t think there is another project in this country that isn’t backed by a Crown Corp that can get anything close to the level of investment needed. To put it in perspective, LNG Canada was about $40 billion. They’re talking about $20 billion. So we’re talking if we wanted to double by 2040 and get to 50 million tons by 2030, I would say in the range of a hundred billion of investment, most of it not from government, but from private capital, think of the jobs and economic benefits to the country.

Peter Tertzakian:

Yeah, well, you mentioned budget, the Prime Minister’s coming out with the federal budget, oh, what is it? November 4th, but he gave a pre-budget speech last week and that budget will include some generational investments, so we’ll be anxious to hear about that. But we’re hearing he’s also going to have a climate competitiveness strategy come out either before or on the day of the budget.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, actually the speech did say it would be included in the upcoming budget. There’s been a big question about what they’re going to do around these greenhouse gas emission targets and these policies that really don’t encourage investment in LNG. For instance, a lot of policies we have in place would imply that we can’t grow our upstream oil and gas, therefore it’s going to be hard to fill all those LNG terminals.

There was an article in The Globe and Mail in October 14th, I will put a link in the show notes speculating on what’s coming, and it had a bunch of anonymous sources. There really wasn’t much there actually in the article. I think everyone’s being quite tight-lipped about what they’re going to do, but it talked about the obvious problem. They need to balance appeasing Alberta and other oil and gas provinces said. I would say they also need to balance the expectations they’re setting here that we’re going to grow our gas production for sure with reassuring people, including in the Liberal caucus that are maybe concerned by not having climate policy and taking your foot off the gas in terms of advancing climate agenda.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, we’re going to talk more about climate considerations in the second half of this podcast. We’re also going to talk a bit about filling an oil pipeline, but before we do that, I think we would be remiss in not talking about the Doug Ford, Ronald Reagan saga, and the imposition of a yet another 10% tariffs on Canada by Donald Trump also over the weekend.

Jackie Forrest:

It really feels like our trade negotiations are not going, they’re almost going backwards at this point, but of course, Ontario government was running this ad that used a quote by Ronald Reagan in a speech, and it really talked about the ill effects of tariffs on the American people. At first, they look good, but they result in job losses and high costs, and it has pictures of people packing up their assembly plants and things like that. And of course, Donald Trump didn’t like this ad, and it looks like all things have come to a halt here. In fact, we just saw breaking news that Donald Trump didn’t want to meet with Mark Carney. They’re both in Asia right now, so it doesn’t seem like we’re doing very well.

Peter Tertzakian:

No.

Jackie Forrest:

And this comes after a week of news about our auto sector where it seemed the tariffs on the auto sector are becoming apparent. We had this Stellantis shutting down Brampton auto plant, but there was also smaller things like a Quebec truck manufacturer laid off 300 people last week, GM shut down electric van plants. We’re starting to see these big companies say, “Well, you know what, if we have to pay these tariffs, we’ll just assemble these products on the other side of the border.”

Peter Tertzakian:

Yeah. Well, I would argue too, it’s much more than tariffs. There’s a broad problem across the country here with the whole attitude towards competitiveness, but maybe we’ll leave that for another podcast. I just want to say that whatever you think the Doug Ford ads that were run in, or maybe I’ll call it more broadly, the Ontario ads that were run in the United States, that it really signals again, the misalignment between federal government, provincial government, and potentially even industry, that this kind of misalignment cannot happen in a world where we have increasing alignment between state and strategic industries. If you look at China, even now the United States, it’s an absolute essential that everybody is singing from the same proverbial songbook, paddling in the same direction, whatever metaphor you want to use.

Jackie Forrest:

And I think we need to start planning more for the potential that these tariffs do stick around, and what are we going to do to grow our economy in that scenario? And that gets us to filling this big oil pipeline because I do think we need to start thinking about our natural resources. They’re the one thing that you can’t just pack up the plant and go across the border. The resources are here and you have to develop the assets here in the mines and whatever, and the roads and all of the infrastructure. You can’t move those jobs. And so I think that’s something we have to think about because if we have to compete with the Americans on manufacturing, it’s going to be difficult. If our main goal is to sell things to the Americans, it’d be much cheaper if there’s going to be tariffs to do it on the other side of the border.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, we have competed on manufacturing a long time ago, and even in Ronald Reagan’s era, but that era seems to be over for now. We can get it back. But the one thing we certainly can compete on and we know we’re good at is our natural resources of which we have tremendous abundance. And that’s not just oil and gas, it’s everything from agriculture, forestry, critical minerals, and the list goes on and on. We can effectively compete and we have scale. We particularly have scale in oil and gas because we’re the fourth-largest producer in the world. It is the number one resource economy by far in this country. We have the ability to export off of our coastlines, particularly the West Coast, and it does provide us with geopolitical, geoeconomic leverage if we choose to use it. You talked about the LNG, and that’s great, but the economic returns and prosperity generated by oil is actually even greater than natural gas.

Jackie Forrest:

Right, and that’s because oil has been a more high-valued product. Our gas has been just terribly weakly priced, and so even though we produce a lot of gas, we don’t actually make much money from it. And that can change if we start to see North American natural gas markets tighten. But even then, when you look at the volume of oil we produce, I think oil will continue to be the dominant revenue generator.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, it’s just that oil has a lot more utility in a lot more different markets. People make the mistake of just thinking about oil as a singular commodity that gets burned in an internal combustion engine. Oil actually is a multifaceted commodity from the very light oils all the way to the very heavy, each one has its uses. Each one is able to reassemble the hydrocarbon chains into different petroleum products all the way from going from asphalt to jet fuel. And so if you look in Asia, the market potential for actually non-combustion purposes is really big. It’s a growth market. And we should think about now not just oil as a homogeneous global economy thing, it’s actually start thinking about this as a regional business where there’s actually tremendous growth potential.

Jackie Forrest:

Okay. Well, and you wrote an article in the Hub. We talked about it briefly a few podcasts ago. Even if Alberta gets a new pipeline, what is next for the oil sands? And we will put a link to that in the show notes, but you talked about the fact that top line revenue is going to be something like 170 billion from the oil and gas industry in Canada, of which 90% comes from crude oil sales. And so it is really important. So yes, we should be promoting and growing our gas, but we can’t forget about the oil because it is such a consequential part of our economy.

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the size of the oil and gas industry in Canada, and I will put a link to this in the show notes. It’s from the CAPP Data Centre, and it looks at Canada’s 15 largest good producing sub industries, and it ranks them in terms of their GDP impact based on 2024 data. And the oil and gas industry is about two and a half times larger than the auto and transport manufacturing sector. I’m not saying that auto isn’t important, every part of our economy is important and substantial, but when you think about our oil and gas industry, if we could grow at 10% or 15% the impact that could have to the Canadian economy because it’s already so large. So I do really think that Mark Carney’s plan to grow our gas is a good one, but I also think we should be investing in new oil pipelines so that we can grow our oil production as well.

Peter Tertzakian:

Yeah, well, the LNG is so important because particularly if you get up to that 50 million tons per annum, you have even more pricing leverage, less dependency upon North American markets, and the gas revenues will certainly be more than 10% of the total upstream oil and gas sales. So I mean already the forward curves are indicating some positive numbers. I mean, where were we at? We were almost at negative pricing here, not in the last couple months. A dollar per gigajoule Canadian, not unheard of and forward indications into next year if they pan out are in the $3 range.

Jackie Forrest:

Yes, that’s right. And I think generally in North America, we’ll see gas prices go up, but in Canada, we’ve always even lagged North American pricing because of our lack of take away capacity. So by having LNG Canada start up potentially phase two, potentially the Ksi Lisims, it’s going to enable us to get higher prices. It’s back to that same thing we talked about with oil. If we sell everything to the Americans and they know that we have no alternative for our product, you tend to get a lower price when you have alternative markets, it lifts the price for every molecule sold.

Peter Tertzakian:

And if you think about gas while oil too, the gas, let’s just focus on that for a second, that this being bottled up in North America is really a two-customer market, the domestic Canadian, dominantly Western Canadian market and the American market. So the ability to get away from that two-customer problem, which is influenced by everything from weather, creates a lot of volatility to take away capacity to policy regulation on both sides of the border to be able to diversify away from that and get into the much larger Asia-Pacific market, which actually has five big participants, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan. This is big news because it allows us to break the dependency in North America and move into a market that is far less concentrated, more competitive. And if you get scale, then you can actually dictate commercial terms much easier and get the price that we should be getting. Well, what is the price that we should be getting for a gas?

Jackie Forrest:

I mean, I think the strip getting into that $3 to $4, three or four times higher than what we’ve seen over the last year or so is reasonable. And I still think that would give us a very advantaged price for gas to sell to the international markets, because of course, as our price goes up and up and up, the price to the end consumer goes up as well. But I still think that’s very reasonable and we can deliver our gas at a competitive price to the Americans into Asia.

Let’s talk a little bit, we talked at the beginning about the budget coming and that there’ll be a new climate competitiveness strategy introduced. Your article talked about what’s being called the Grand Bargain, where Mark Carney said in May it’s time to build framing any major oil projects around carbon reduction and the need for industry sponsorship. So in other words saying that the upstream producers, this is directly from your article, and their pipeline, peers must bring forward projects that check multiple boxes from economic viability to decarbonization plans to Indigenous participation before Ottawa steps in. Do you think this is putting too high of a bar? Man, remember we’re competing against the Qataris. If we’re talking about Asian gas, the Americans, they don’t have those requirements on their business, and that hurts potentially the economics of our projects.

Peter Tertzakian:

The grand bargain is actually getting back to my comments on alignment in many ways. We need alignment a bargain between federal government, provincial governments, and plural, because Alberta and BC are the dominant western producers of oil and gas. Saskatchewan is also in that mix, but we need a grand bargain in terms of the way we’re going to deal with carbon capture and storage for carbon mitigation. We need the grand bargain with Indigenous engagement and put all those things together so that, again, I hate to use that metaphor again. We’re paddling in the same direction as we try and deal with this new world paradigm where economic power is essential in terms of defending our future prosperity.

Jackie Forrest:

And if we are paddling in the same direction, then we are going to have to be okay with increasing our emissions If we’re going to go to 50 million tons per year of gas to Asia, going to a hundred by the 2040s.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, maybe I’ll reframe that to be more realistic about what’s doable and also the dilemmas we face as Canadians right now. So if we rewind back to pre Russia, Ukraine, if we rewind back to certainly pre-Trump, that the climate situation was one that there’s a problem and that problem can be solved, at least a lot of people thought that it can be solved with greater build out of renewables, burdening fossil fuels with carbon taxes and therefore problem and solution. But we are not in a world where it’s problem and solution. We’re in a world now where we have dilemmas, and dilemmas are different from problems because problems are perceived to have solutions, whereas dilemmas are choosing between difficult options. And that’s where we’re at today. And so you get these polls that say things like, “Well, do you believe in working hard towards reducing emissions?”

And most people, I think, what is it, 80% of Canadians will say yes, but now pose the question we have multiple crises of which are the climate crisis and there’s the economic crisis as we get bullied around yet again, even this past weekend by the Americans, and it’s not just Americans. This is a global issue. So now put it in context. You have choice, difficult choice, what are you going to tackle first? So understanding that problem and solution go hand in hand, but it’s now dilemma and option. We have dilemmas and it’s a difficult dilemma as to where we allocate our resources. Our prime minister, and our new federal government has clearly said, we got to get going on economic issues and return prosperity, and I fully support that. I think that is the option. It doesn’t mean we forget about all the other things that we have to deal with, it just means that it’s now much more of an optimization situation than it is in dealing with a singular problem for which even that the solution was very difficult.

Jackie Forrest:

I’ll put a link to this, the Canadian government poll in March of 2025 said that 84% of Canadians consider climate change an important issue. But of course, we also know from a polling done by Angus Reed in the last month that something like 59% of Canadians want to see an oil pipeline to the West Coast. So these seem in contradiction. How can you want to do both?

Peter Tertzakian:

But I think that the pollsters are not posing the dilemma. They’re just posing singular question: do you believe that climate change is a problem? Okay. Lots of people would say, “Okay, yeah, I do.”

Then the next question is, well, do you think our economic prosperity and where we’re at in terms of being pushed around and our sovereignty being challenged as a problem. Probably 95% of the people are going to say, “Yeah.”

Now say, “Which one would you solve first as a dilemma?”

Jackie Forrest:

Right.

Peter Tertzakian:

And how do you put the two together? And that’s not even acknowledging a multitude of other issues that we have to deal with. So we’re not in a world today where we have problem and perceived simple solution. We’re in a world today where we have dilemma, and a set of difficult choices that we have to prioritize and deal with.

Jackie Forrest:

Okay, well, we’re going to come back to this pipeline or climate because how Jason Kenney was talking about the mainstream media creating problems, and I want to talk about that because I think they’re part of maybe sometimes people’s misunderstanding of some of these issues. But let’s go on to this chicken and egg issue with oil pipelines. And you talk about that. We’ve seen this movie before because in the early 2010s, there was all this investment made in the oil sands with multiple facilities built at once, but then when these projects started producing mid-decade, the pipes to move the oil wasn’t there, and we suffered from these massive discounts for our crude oil because there was more crude oil than there was pipeline.

Do you think that the government’s going to invest? Alberta government has said they’re going to invest about 14 million to advance this oil pipeline, do you think they’re going to have to invest more? I don’t know that we’re going to see private capital back these pipelines anytime soon. I think the government may have to invest more time, more money to advance these projects before they ever get in the position that we could have more private capitals jump in.

Peter Tertzakian:

Right. Well, let’s start with the chicken and egg, or as I call it, which comes first, the pipeline or the wells that need to be drilled in the facilities that need to be built to fill the pipeline. Because a lot of the discussion is around building pipelines, but the secondary question is, well, okay, what do you need to do to fill the pipeline because that requires massive investment? And by my estimation, it’s at least $100 billion. The money is actually there can be demonstrated. So I actually don’t think the government needs to actually, and when we say government, it’s really the people in this case of Alberta, need to make the decision about whether or not they want to invest alongside others that are willing to come here.

Because historically, if you look historically where the money has come to fill the pipelines in the last 20 years, the 250 to up to 300 billion dollars of investment, that it came from multinationals that made capital allocation decisions into Canada at the expense of investing in other jurisdictions at that time like in the 2010s or actually 2008 to about circa 2015. And so we have the ability to do that again, but I don’t debate that the Alberta government would probably have to rebuild the trust in the investment, the federal government as well, so that those monies come back. And in doing so, they may have to seed the effort as a first mover.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah. So what comes first, the pipeline or the supply? I think you’re arguing because of the past experience, the pipeline needs to come first before those companies will feel that there’s an opportunity to grow supply.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, there has to be a synchronization because if you look at what happened in the 2010s, the supply investment came on simultaneous with the proposals to build the pipes. But by the latter half of the 2010s, all of a sudden it was the tanker ban and this regulation, that regulation and C-69 and blah, blah, blah. And then, I mean, it just created a situation where the pipes were not built in time and the supplies surged up. And we had the wide differentials, which we’ve discussed and talked about that created 49 billion US dollars in forfeited revenue. And so when you see those kind of numbers, you say, “Well, who’s going to come back and invest unless we can build the confidence?”

And by the way, this isn’t just an oil story. It’s certainly with natural gas. I mean, the people who invest in natural gas or largely the same people that invest in oil, they know that movie, they’ve seen the oil movie, so it’s in part going to be an effort to convince them to come back. And by the way, I think it’s not just even oil and gas, it’s just more broadly speaking, is Canada going to create the environment for big dollar investment to come into helping us build these infrastructure projects that are so necessary for us to be able to compete globally?

Jackie Forrest:

And we had that podcast on critical minerals, and they need infrastructure too. But I would say oil is unique in that the risk, the political risk associated with it is higher than some of these other projects. And so I do think that the government has to play a role to facilitate this pipeline if we’re going to see supply grow. And this isn’t unique. I was looking at some of the press at the time that the premier announced the support of advancing the pipeline for just a small amount, 14 million doesn’t go very far. I would argue they’ll need to spend more, but this is not new.

We have Keystone XL advanced by the government because it became too risky. Trans Mountain, of course, the government had to buy it. So this is the situation. We are in Canada, we created our own bed here, and I think we are going to have to have public capital advance these projects because it is too risky. The other question I have is you say the 100 billion is doable. It’s possible, but that isn’t the situation today. Today most of the capital, for example, for the oil sands goes to CapEx, just sustaining capital.

Peter Tertzakian:

Just sustaining, yeah.

Jackie Forrest:

And very little goes to growth. I think this year we’re expecting about 13 billion a year to CapEx, and only two of that would be for growth. So now of course, they do make a lot more money. A lot of that goes to their shareholders who are not prioritizing growth today. And so people say, “You know what? Well, the companies aren’t growing, so even if we build the pipeline, they won’t grow.” What do you say to that?

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, it’s not what I say. It’s what Eric Nuttall and Brian Schmidt said a couple few podcasts ago, is that investors expect a return. And until such time that investors are convinced that the pipeline capacity is going to be there and that the resource is going to find a market undiscounted so that the full potential of the resources realized and returned to all those who take risks in investing, including the people of Alberta who risk the asset as partners in this equation, that everybody from investor to others have to be convinced that they want to risk their money. So yes, the money is flowing out to investors. They are willing to put it back in, but they need some confidence that we’re going to have synchronization in this chicken and egg or pipeline versus well problem before anybody puts their money back.

Jackie Forrest:

In the past, like the last 10 years, we’ve had weak oil prices. Companies haven’t been growing because there’s been so much supply coming from the US that you really haven’t needed to grow. Maybe the next 10 years looks different and that investors want companies to grow. And I think Eric Nettle talked about this, right? It’s possible that with OPEC, spare capacity getting smaller, US shale oil starting to flatten, if not decline, possibly even OPEC not having much spare capacity altogether anymore, that we could have a very different oil market five, 10 years from now that would cause investors to want to see supply growth.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, I don’t think it’s five, 10 years from now. I think we’re going to start to see the issues manifest themselves earlier than five years. We can have a separate podcast on that, but the poll for more energy has to come from somewhere. And even the poll for data centers, which we’re going to talk about more even on our next podcast, has to come from somewhere. And it has to come from all of the sources, including what we’re seeing is reciprocating engines, in other words, big diesel engines, big reciprocating natural gas engines, all of a sudden they’re in huge demand because the energy from hydro, from nuclear, from renewables is just insufficient to fulfill the demand that is coming.

Jackie Forrest:

So there’ll be a poll on all types of energy and oil will be part of that.

Peter Tertzakian:

And I want to repeat again that oil is often misconstrued as a singular homogenous commodity, and that all of it goes to combustion vehicles. No, we have to start thinking about where the types of oils that we have, like the heavy oils that are produced in the oil sands regions have markets in the Asian petrochemical market where there are brand new big refineries that can take all sorts of oils, very efficient to process for the purposes of making feedstocks for all the things that we enjoy, whether it’s our clothes or our cell phone cases or shoes. These are the other uses of oil that are rarely talked about.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, and Canadian heavy oil is actually quite well suited for some of those petrochemical uses too. And it’s also well suited for creating diesel and some of the things that are less a threat from electrification because we don’t all have alternatives.

Peter Tertzakian:

And it’s cheaper than light oils.

Jackie Forrest:

That’s true, and it’s also a cheaper source of crude. You’re right up finished with the last time this movie played, the opening scenes were full of excitement. Canada was seen as a desirable place to invest, a place where vital commodities could supply the world in greater quantity. Today’s geopolitical environment, that part of the old movie is emerging as the easy one. In Asia Pacific, Canada’s heavy oil is increasingly in demand, and the rest of the script is ours to write.

Peter Tertzakian:

That’s right. It is ours to write. Speaking of scripts, you’ve been on some podcasts.

Jackie Forrest:

So I wanted to finish off this podcast with a little bit of a rant about the CBC because I agreed to be on a radio show this fall called the CBC Ideas Radio Show. And they explored the question of can we have pipelines and curb climate change too? And they actually started with some of the stats that we talked about. Something like 80% of Canadians say that climate change is important, but 59% of them also want to build oil pipelines to the West coast. So how can we build oil pipelines if we care about climate change?

First of all, the show interviewed myself and three others about this question. One was a political science professor from McGill. She actually wrote a book, book was called Mega Pipelines and Mega Resistance, so I think you know where she’s standing. They had a climatologist from France who’s made a graphic novel of the IPCC study, that Intergovernment Climate Change study so that the average person could understand it. And then Tzeporah Berman, Canadian environmental activists that I think many people who listen to our podcast may know of Tzeporah.

So the host asked, basically, keep in mind of these different IPCC scenarios, would you rather live in a 1.5 degree C world, or a higher one like four degrees C? And then after you ask that question, how can oil pipelines from Canada be consistent with what the world you want to live in? So of course, the others generally argued that Canada must meet our climate targets, that there is only one option to meet the 1.5 degrees C, and therefore we cannot build oil pipelines. And I of course, was the lone dissenter in the group arguing that we can build pipelines, and it’s consistent with caring about climate change because I argued that we’re not going to reach 1.5 degrees C. It’s impossible to meet that because you can’t reduce oil demand at that rate, and we’ve talked about that plenty on the podcast.

Peter Tertzakian:

How did your arguments resonate?

Jackie Forrest:

Well, first of all, it was all recorded. The host, which actually was biased to the 1.5 degree scenario and not building pipelines, interviewed me separately from the others. But my arguments were around, and I won’t go into a great detail, but I explained how let’s look at combustion engine vehicles and that there’s a billion of them in the world and they can’t be replaced overnight. So when you actually model out a realistic timeframe, even accelerated timeframe for replacing all that equipment, you can’t see oil demand drop 75% in 25 years, which is what the 1.5 degrees C scenario would require. I didn’t add this, but it’s important to even think I thought about it after because they kept coming back to, in the show, why not just people make better choices? People can just make better choices and we can meet the 1.5 degree. But if you look at COVID where we pretty much did nothing in April, May of 2020 and oil demand was down about 30% on that time period, that even lifestyle choices in themselves are not enough to achieve that 1.5 degrees.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, we had a complete global lockdown in transportation effectively. And would a demand go down on an instantaneous basis? What was it in the march to May of 2020? I think the-

Jackie Forrest:

It was 30%.

Peter Tertzakian:

The demand was on. But that means, take the flip side, 70% of oil demand still endured, and it took a complete lockdown of the world.

Jackie Forrest:

Because guess what? People still ate. So yeah, we didn’t get in planes for holidays or business trips, and we didn’t travel to work, but there’s still a ton of oil, so that in itself tells you that lifestyle choices alone aren’t going to solve the problem. And then I argued, okay, so oil demand will be higher than those 1.5 degrees scenarios. It might be closer to two and a half degrees scenario.

In that world, there will be a demand for oil and gas, and therefore Canada should not forfeit our economic benefits of supplying that. Our oil is better on many dimensions compared to oil from, let’s just name the list, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia. Would you rather get oil from Canada? So if the world’s going to use oil, and if the scenarios to get to the 1.5 degrees are in my, I use this term imaginary because it’s impossible, then we should continue to supply oil to the world as long as they need it.

Peter Tertzakian:

But you want my opinion on this, Jackie? Which I feel like you in this program, which seemed to be what you’re describing, it weighted three against to one, and that the dilemma that was posed in the show was would you rather live in 1.5 degree world or a four degree world is not the right question anymore. And it gets back to what I said earlier is the dilemma is not just about climate change that we have in this country. The dilemma has to be posed differently because it’s actually a dilemma of if you have X dollars to spend, where are you going to spend it? Because we have multiple crises going on, including an economic crisis. Would you rather be unemployed and have a massive youth unemployment problem in this country, or would you rather live in a 1.5 degree plus world?

And I don’t have the answer other than I can tell you living in a world, in a country where we have massive unemployment leads to massive immediate crises and problems. So to me, the CBC shows, and I don’t want to single out just CBC because it’s somewhat pervasive, is that the questions that are being posed do not acknowledge the realities of the world that we are in today. There’s some serious crap going on in the world now, and the dilemmas in front of us are way different than the problems that we perceived even 18 months ago.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah. Well, and I would just add the four to one. It was actually four to one because the host was against me as well.

Peter Tertzakian:

And by the way, the host should not be taking positions because the role of the CBC on behalf of the people or Canada is to represent all Canadians. And by taking positions, you are not representing all Canadians. I certainly respect the people that have been invited. I presume them to be experts in their fields, including yourself, and I want to hear about that. And I don’t want some announcer basically interpreting things for me, assuming I’m stupid, and I have not thought about climate change, which is what a lot of these people do is there’s a massive amount of selection bias, confirmation bias, and personal bias that enters into these conversations. And that is not the role of the CBC. And as a taxpayer, I want them to be more independent and just bring qualified speakers as much as they have to the programs, and I’ll make my own decision as a Canadian thank you very much, because actually, most Canadians are pretty smart.

Jackie Forrest:

Well, I’m going to challenge one of your points that you bring informed opinions. You’re asking a social scientists, a environmentalist and a political scientist if they think my view on how fast oil demand can go down is right. Why don’t you ask Dan Yergin or Peter Tertzakian or someone who spent their life studying oil-

Peter Tertzakian:

Or Jackie Forrest.

Jackie Forrest:

It’s like they don’t give me any, they’re asking people to opine on something they’re not experts on-

Peter Tertzakian:

Didn’t listen to the program, but I think it’s being an effective moderator in an unbiased way to give people, everyone the opportunity to think, which is what I believe people really want to do today. They don’t want to be told an opinion. They want to think and create their own opinions based on what they hear is not in the mandate of a public broadcasting corporation. I mean, in fact, if you look at the mission statement of the CBC, and anybody can pull this up, of course, it’s our public broadcasting corporation. It’s to inform, enlighten, entertain us. It does that. It celebrates Canadian culture. It does that too, supports democratic life, informs Canadians on issues of public interest. And so here’s where we start to deviate. It informs, that’s the role. It’s not to take bias sides and being an echo chamber and then serves all Canadians, and by taking the echo chamber approach and basically having a bunch of cognitive biases like selection bias and confirmation biases, it does not serve all Canadians.

Jackie Forrest:

And that democratic principle too, right? We need more informed discussion on these issues In Canada. I really feel like, we talked about this with Jason last week. They didn’t mention that Canada is one and a half percent of global emissions. So all these experts, including this person from France who’s like, “No oil pipeline should be built in Canada,” didn’t put it in context that that pipeline wouldn’t change anything. We didn’t have that global context. We didn’t have experts in my opinion, it wasn’t balanced. We come back to the very start, Mark Carney’s going to unveil his climate competitiveness strategy. I wish that the discussion was more informed in mainstream media so that people would have more fair information. That’s why I volunteer for these things.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, good. Or can I nominate you for a medal for doing that? Because it’s just participating, as I said, in these echo chambers, serves no useful purpose, especially when there is so much at stake here in this country going forward that we have to think about is, yes, I want to hear from the fellow from France. I want to hear from the other experts. I want to hear from you, but don’t layer on a moderator that leads us to believe that one of the experts in their field or multiple of them are right or wrong. I will make that call myself, thank you very much.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, and also, ask experts questions that they’re actually experts on. If you’re asking, can oil demand go down at a certain pace? Then ask the energy expert, not the climate scientist. Okay. Well, I think that’s our time for today. Thanks to our listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, please write us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.

Announcer:

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LNG Ambition, Pipelines, and the Climate Debate in Canada

Episode 300 transcript

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