This week Alberta premier Rachel Notley will know exactly how it feels to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

She will be announcing her government’s plans for climate change policies designed to curb Alberta’s surging greenhouse gas emissions spewing from coal-fired electricity generators, oilsands plants, and the thousands of cars and trucks on the road.

But at the same time Notley must ensure that she doesn’t imperil the province’s economic engine which is mainly fuelled by the petroleum industry. It is already dealing with low oil prices and stalled pipelines. Major oilsands projects have been cancelled and thousands of employees have been laid off.

Industry associations such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers warn that added costs such as a carbon tax will only make things worse. Electricity generators such as TransAlta say they expect the government to compensate them if coal-fired plants are to be phased out.

But environmentalists such as the Pembina Institute point out that a broad-based tax on all carbon emissions, including those from the family minivan, could bring in $9 billion in revenue. Money that could be used to reduce income taxes, spur development of renewable energy technology, or go into government coffers.

A few petroleum companies such as oilsands giant Suncor also support a carbon tax although they haven’t said exactly how high a tax. But in general, Alberta’s oil giants have not stepped up to seriously address the climate change dilemma.

And yet just last month, 10 of the world’s biggest oil companies, including BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Aramco, Repsol of Spain, Eni of Italy and Total made a public declaration acknowledging that their industry must help address global climate change.

Since U. S-based companies were noticeable by their absence, Canadian-based companies appear to be following their lead.

Effective climate change policies were not high on the agenda of the previous Progressive Conservative governments. They preferred to let the coal industry, power plants, and the petroleum sector expand without the added expense of significantly reducing their carbon emissions.

It’s telling that Robin Campbell who was once Alberta’s environment minister and later went on to head up the finance portfolio in Jim Prentice’s government, is now the president of the Coal Association of Canada.

But now there is so much international pressure on governments at all levels to get serious about reducing carbon emissions in order to avoid catastrophic global warming that even Alberta can no longer ignore the obvious.

The Trudeau government also has some catch-up work to do on this file and needs Alberta to be on board if any serious headway is to be made by the country as a whole.

Notley’s new policies will receive national and international attention simply because the Alberta PCs with the encouragement of the Harper government waited so long to do anything substantial about reducing Alberta’s surging carbon emissions. Those emissions have grown by 14 per cent since 2005 and now account for a third of Canada’s total.

By not imposing profit-eating taxes and regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions, both governments were betting that the industrial sector would roar ahead creating jobs and government revenue that would dampen public angst about climate change.

But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, environmental activists jumped on the oilsands’ rising carbon emissions as proof that oilsands bitumen was indeed “dirty” and should not be transported through the U.S. in pipelines such as Keystone XL.

That view also happened to coincide with President Barack Obama’s agenda for tackling climate change and he nixed the pipeline recently much to the dismay of Alberta’s oilpatch.

Notley’s new policies will likely include a carbon tax, an energy efficiency strategy, incentives for development of renewable energy, and a transition plan for a lower-carbon future.

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It’s a tall order for a province that has grown rich on fossil fuels and isn’t eager to kick the habit.

But if Notley and her NDP government get it right, it could become her most important legacy.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary writer and journalist, and former managing editor of the Calgary Herald. Her column appears every other week. gsteward@telus.net

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