What if Potash Tanks?

Regarding the NDP platform’s reliance on additional potash revenue, columnist Murray Mandryk asks, “What if potash tanks as it did in 2009?” Of course, budgets are necessarily based on assumptions about future commodity prices. Saskatchewan Finance estimates that each dollar of change in the price of oil alters provincial revenues by $20 million (page 35). So, if a barrel of […]

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C. D. Howe Shills for Oil Companies

The C. D. Howe Institute is out this morning with a press release entitled, “Raising Oil and Gas Royalties Does Not Benefit Provincial Coffers.” A complete analysis of the accompanying 30-page paper – featuring many graphs, tables and regressions – will take time. But here is my initial take. Background The Institute correctly notes that provincial oil and gas revenues […]

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Decarbonizing homes and the price of gas

Our climate justice framework for BC is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and knowledge, but because natural gas is much cheaper than electricity per unit of energy. Even though BC has among the lowest prices in North America, and for relatively clean electricity […]

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Is BC about to drop a new carbon bomb?

Any day now the BC government should be releasing the latest greenhouse gas data for the province, and we will see if any progress is being made towards a legislated 33% reduction in emissions by 2020 (relative to 2007 levels; data will be for 2009 and we know that emissions rose in 2008). Below the radar, however, and not counted […]

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A billion dollars of bogus carbon credits

A story in today’s Vancouver Sun is disturbing, arguing that BC could make $1 billion from selling carbon offsets once the Western Climate Initiative gets underway. The projects are mostly in forest management and conservation, meaning less cutting and more sequestration of carbon in the forests themselves. The conservation part is undoubtedly a good thing — we need to manage […]

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Is Oil Driving Our Economy?

It is, according to a major story by Barrie McKenna in today’s ROB. The story is full of telling anecdotes which ring more or less true. But I doubt that higher oil prices are, on net, a plus for the total Canadian economy in terms of either GDP or employment. True, high and rising oil prices will (often with a […]

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Another pipe dream

The Weyburn, Saskatchewan carbon capture and storage (CCS) project has sprung big leaks, and with it the argument that CCS can make dirty fossil fuels clean. The core idea behind CCS is taking CO2 emissions and piping them back underground where they are supposed to stay, forever. In the case of Weyburn, the CO2 comes from a coal plant across […]

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Memo to the new Environment Minister

With a government as centrally controlled as our federal government, one has to wonder why the media make such a fuss covering cabinet shuffles. Peter Kent may be the new Environment Minister, but the message box is still from the Prime Minister’s Office. So it was not much surprise to  see our new Environment Minister touting the same old lines […]

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Past peak oil, no emission reductions in sight

The International Energy Agency released its World Energy Outlook the other day, and made some headlines by calling 2006 the year of peak oil production. People have different perspectives on the topic of peak oil – many see it as the point upon which civilization as we know it will collapse; with my climate change hat on, I’ve generally thought […]

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Alberta’s Revenue Problem

I recently had the pleasure of making a couple of presentations on public finances in Alberta. In February, I spoke at the “Remaking Alberta” conference in Edmonton. This past week, I served on an Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) panel in Calgary with Todd Hirsch from ATB Financial and Roger Gibbins from the Canada West Foundation. Like other provinces, Alberta […]

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Western Canada’s Royalty Giveaway

Growing up in Saskatchewan, the oil and gas industry’s line was always that we had to charge lower royalties to compete with Alberta for investment. The provincial NDP government bought into that mantra and repeatedly slashed royalty rates, even as commodity prices took off during the past decade. When Alberta’s Conservative government announced in late 2007 that it would raise […]

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Peddling GHGs

My colleague Bill Rees likes to say that fossil fuels are a powerful hallucinogenic drug. We are all addicted to cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and so have reshaped our economy and society in fundamentally unsustainable ways. In a recent post, I highlighted some research that breaks out of the box of counting emissions only where they occur (the standard […]

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Goofy Oil-Industry Advocacy

The Alberta government is reversing its modest increase in conventional oil and gas royalties. Albertans will now receive an even smaller fraction of the value of their resources. The saving grace is that the provincial government did not cut royalties on the oil sands, which are projected to provide more revenue than conventional reserves going forward. Corporate executives welcomed Thursday’s […]

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Different perspectives on GHG emissions

When emissions are reported for the US or Canada, there is an accounting convention that restricts the total to emissions released within the borders of that jurisdiction. This means that Canada’s exports of tar sands oil are counted only to the extent that fossil fuels are used in the extraction and processing, not the combustion of the final product in […]

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About that Copenhagen award

Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there are some glaring contradictions between […]

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BC’s GHG emissions shell game

The BC government recently announced a new climate action of some consequence: the phasing out of the Burrard Thermal plant in Metro Vancouver. The unit was used largely for back-up purposes, producing electricity for BC Hydro to supplement hydropower during times of high demand. But at a large GHG cost per unit of energy — about 351 kilotonnes of CO2 […]

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Globe Economics

Columnist Doug Saunders writes (from his Mediterranean cruise) in today’s Globe: “It’s a little like the decision being faced by the Bank of Canada, which can print money and ease the dollar’s value downward to please Ontario’s manufacturers, or let it rise to please Alberta’s petroleum exporters – but not both.” Huh?  Petro exporters get more Canadian dollars and higher […]

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How green are BC’s climate policies?

One of the most striking contradictions in BC’s climate action plan is the oil and gas industry. Greg Amos in The Hook, quotes our “green” premier out on the campaign trail in the northeast: “Let me tell you what’s happened in the energy industry in British Columbia in the last eight years: thirteen billion dollars of investment,” Campbell told a […]

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The wrong kind of stimulus

I am a big fan of stimulus packages for our ailing economy. But my pitch has been that we need to use the occasion to retrofit our economy to be on a more sustainable footing. So it matters a great deal on what we spend those stimulus dollars. If we launch projects that take us even further away from a […]

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Resource Royalties vs. Structural Deficits

Briarpatch printed my article, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Saskatchewan’s Multi-billion Dollar Resource Giveaway,” in its December 2008 edition. The magazine’s editor has a knack for excellent rock-themed titles: my previous contribution on Saskatchewan’s business tax cuts was entitled “Money for Nothing, and the Sultans of Spin Get Their Tax Cuts for Free.” When I submitted the article and spoke […]

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Blakeney on Royalties, the Charter and NAFTA

Allan Blakeney, Saskatchewan’s Premier from 1971 until 1982, just published his memoirs, An Honourable Calling. Book launches are scheduled in Regina (Nov. 25), Saskatoon (Nov. 27), Moose Jaw (Dec. 2) and Ottawa (Dec. 9). A few years ago, Blakeney had me pull together some facts and figures for his chapter on oil, so I was quite interested to read the […]

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Leader-Post Debate on Oil Royalties

The Regina Leader-Post recently ran an editorial opposing my proposal for higher resource royalties. My response is printed in today’s edition: The Leader-Post’s October 28 editorial critiqued my suggestion that the government of Saskatchewan increase oil royalties. It emphasized volatile oil prices, the volume of oil production in Saskatchewan and competition with Alberta. In fact, all three issues strengthen the […]

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Saskatchewan’s Resource Royalties

Yesterday’s Leader-Post included the following report on my speech to the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour’s annual convention. My topic, “Is Saskatchewan getting a Fair Return on its Resources?,” may have been poorly timed given the recent crash in resource prices. However, it is important to put this crash in perspective. The current world oil price of around $70/barrel is still far […]

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Harper’s Financial Advice

In Tuesday’s CBC interview, Harper told Canadians that “there are probably some great buying opportunities out there” and specifically pointed to “oil stocks.” Since then, the Toronto Stock Exchange declined by 8% and its Energy Index fell by 14%. S&P/TSX Composite Index Tuesday’s Close = 9,829.55 Friday’s Close = 9,065.16 S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index Tuesday’s Close = 234.16 Friday’s Close […]

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Balancing on a Barrel: Canada’s Second-Quarter Current Account

In the second quarter of 2008, record oil prices outweighed the continuing manufacturing crisis, the worst services deficit ever recorded, and widening deficits in investment income and current transfers. The Surplus in Perspective The rise of Canada’s current-account surplus to $6.8 billion in the second quarter is positive news for the Canadian economy.  However, this surplus is still less than last year’s […]

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Profits vs. Wages in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland

Jim’s recent mini-study emphasized that profits now occupy gargantuan shares of GDP in the oil-rich provinces. He and The Jurist have noted the total disconnect between corporate profits and personal income in two of those provinces: Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. To explore this issue further, I have pulled some figures out of the recently-released 2007 Provincial and Territorial Economic Accounts (in […]

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Investment in manufacturing vs oil sands

 A fascinating tidbit from today’s Statistics Canada release on human activity and the environment (climate change): In 2008, oilsands producers intend to invest $19.7 billion, up 23% after a 31% hike in 2007. This exceeds the total investment plans of $19.6 billion by all manufacturing industries [Chart 1.6 on page 25]. Oilsands investment has surpassed manufacturing because of its rapid […]

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