He is a poor man’s Al Gore. A prophet of environmental doom but without the former U.S. vice-president’s money, fame or Nobel Prize. And he is all ours.

He is the poor man’s Al Gore.

A prophet of environmental doom, but without the former U.S. vice-president’s money, fame or Nobel Prize.

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And he is all ours.

Kevin Taft, a former Alberta Liberal leader, has written a new book every Albertan should read, although many will be uncomfortable with, if not outright hostile to, his conclusions.

Taft is not the first author to criticize Alberta for being a willing hostage to the oil industry, but he doesn’t call the province a petrostate. He calls it an “oil deep state”: “Petrostates are conceived in petroleum, while oil deep states are captured by petroleum.”

In other words, we had democracy in Alberta until we discovered oil.

Taft’s argument is exhaustively researched and presented with a confidence that will irritate his critics. And there will be plenty of those.

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Taft, who was a Liberal MLA from 2001 to 2012 and party leader for four of those years, has first-hand experience with some of the troubled history he talks about.

When the Progressive Conservatives’ Ralph Klein ran the government, Taft proved himself an energetic thorn in the side of a tired and unfocused premier. Taft was well-educated, an author of books critical of the Klein government and a former political consultant — facets the Tories tried to use against him with Klein calling Taft a communist and “the worst kind of academic.”

Taft often proved himself the best kind of critic, holding the government to account over two issues he held particularly dear: health care and education.

Now he’s holding everybody to account over climate change.

And that includes Alberta’s new, environmentally friendly NDP government.

Here is part of Taft’s not-so-friendly assessment of the Rachel Notley government one year after winning the 2015 provincial election: “They were now wholly in the corner of the petroleum industry, fighting for oil sands production and working hard to outdo Jim Prentice, Stephen Harper, and their opponents in the Alberta legislature as pipeline and oil sands champions. By the first anniversary of their surprise election victory, it seemed no one was left in the Alberta legislature to speak truth to power, to question the wisdom of adding another pipeline, or to point out the glaring fact that increasing oil sands production was not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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Perhaps Taft is engaging in hyperbole to make his point, but this will infuriate NDP supporters who are happy to finally see an Alberta government take climate change seriously.

Taft’s argument is that no government in Canada is taking climate change seriously. And he blames the influence of the oil industry.

Phase out oil by 2050

If his criticism of the Notley government will irritate NDP supporters, his list of solutions will antagonize just about everybody in Alberta not a member of Greenpeace.

The first on his list of recommendations: “We must demand governments and regulators, with the support of universities and other agencies, plan an orderly phase-out of oil sand and conventional oil and gas production, so that production is completely ended by 2050 at the latest.”

Whoa.

This is not the kind of suggestion you’d expect from someone who understands Alberta politics. Doesn’t Taft realize this would be political suicide for any political party even if it believed a total phase-out of oil was necessary?

But Taft didn’t write his book as a blueprint for politicians. He is no longer a member of the Liberal party and, during an interview for this column, he was not particularly interested in talking about the ins and outs of politics today in Alberta.

He is taking a much larger, much longer-term look at Alberta’s future beyond the four-year election cycles.

And what he sees isn’t pretty.

His conclusion is the fossil fuel industry is in crisis and we’d better take faster, bigger steps to diversify our economy. He’s not alone in that view.

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Bernstein, an investment research firm, was quoted by The Economist magazine in 2016 predicting gloom for the industry: “Whether or not you believe in climate change, an unstoppable shift away from coal and oil towards lower-carbon fuels is under way, which will ultimately bring about an end to the oil age.”

Of course, this seems to fly in the face of predictions that the demand for oil will continue to grow for another two decades and even when demand drops, it won’t suddenly disappear.

Also, when the G-7 leaders agreed in 2015 to cut greenhouses gases by phasing out fossil fuels, they were talking about the end of the century.

Photo by Ian Kucerak / Postmedia

But Taft is talking about a complete phase out 2050?

Again, he’s not the not the only one saying that.

Last April, several U.S. senators, including Bernie Sanders, introduced legislation — the “100 by ’50 Act” — to phase out fossil fuels by 2050.

Of course, that would be a non-starter in a fossil-fuel producing jurisdiction like Alberta. Taft, though, is not expecting any politician in the province to run an election campaign on the slogan along the lines of, “Oil’s not nifty, phase it out by ’50.”

He’s predicting we’ll be forced out of the oil game by external pressures. The world will come knocking on our door. Or, more to the point, it won’t come knocking on our door looking for more oil.

“That’s where change is going to come from for Alberta,” says Taft. “I’m not expecting this change to be led from the inside of Alberta.”

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Taft makes a compelling case that our democracy has been polluted by oil. He makes a less compelling case that when it comes to rolling in bed with the fossil fuel industry, the Notley government is just as guilty as the Klein government.

And you have to wonder what a pragmatic politician is to make of his insistence we have to shut down our entire oil industry in the next 30 years.

But Taft shrugs.

A decade or so ago, many Albertans, particularly our premiers, thought the U.S. had no option but to buy our oil. And other provinces had no option but to accept our energy pipelines.

Now, the U.S. is awash in oil from fracking and many of our fellow Canadians don’t want another pipeline under their backyard.

Times change.

Taft is warning us the times are changing again, at a speed and scope we ignore at our peril.

I suppose as far as he’s concerned, it’s an inconvenient truth.

Oil’s Deep State: How the petroleum industry undermines democracy and stops action on global warming — in Alberta, and in Ottawa

Kevin Taft

Lorimer

Chapter 14: The NDP in a world made for oil

The nature of deep states is to work across the broad governing system rather than to commit fully to one political party. All political parties are eventually driven from power, and that is not a risk members of a deep state want to run. Canada’s oil industry is global, and it does business with hard conservatives in Texas, social democrats in Norway, and a long list of colonels, generals, presidents, and sheiks.

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Having a grip on both the opposition party and the governing party in Alberta was just prudent, and if an unexpected twist of fate put a third party in office, there were other resources to employ. Deep states are opportunistically partisan in order to endure. It took less than twelve hours after the election for deep state Alberta to begin asserting itself with the New Democratic government of Rachel Notley.

The New Democratic Party was based on a complicated mixture of public and private sector unions, social justice advocates, intellectuals, progressives, and environmentalists. Though a respected opposition party, they had never come close to forming government in Alberta, and when the campaign began in April 2015, no one expected them to win, including their own candidates and organizers. Behind their well-spoken and appealing leader, Rachel Notley, they ran a smooth and smart campaign, and mistakes by the PCs and Wildrose added to the voter appetite for change, which had grown strong since the political nuptials of Jim Prentice and Danielle Smith. The NDP won a solid majority that made front pages across the country. The scale of the surprise and the bloody-mindedness of the voters can be judged by campaign budgets. The NDP swept every seat in Edmonton and carried several smaller cities. They won fifteen of Calgary’s twenty-five seats, and in eleven of those, their candidates spent less than $1,000. In one constituency, the NDP candidate spent $350 to defeat the PC incumbent; the record went to Brandy Payne, who overcame the $85,000 campaign of an incumbent PC cabinet minister by spending $240, the price of a cheap suit marked down for clearance.

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The NDP victor in Medicine Hat, Robert Wanner, had to be coaxed into the race three weeks before election day to replace a candidate who withdrew after facing assault charges; Wanner ended up as Speaker of the Alberta Legislature. The Notley government had to overcome its inexperience while dealing with a collapse of world oil prices and a sharply slowing Alberta economy. The provincial treasury they inherited had run deficits every year since 2008, despite record exports of oil and gas, a sign of how little the PCs were collecting from the resource. Alberta, with a population smaller than metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, was selling more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia or anyone else, yet was still sliding into debt. Despite controversies, the Notley government implemented several progressive policies the previous government would not have considered: raising minimum wages, ending the flat tax, and increasing corporate taxes. Its first bill was an important step to reduce the sway of big donors in Alberta politics by banning union and corporate donations to political parties.

It even appointed a prominent environmental activist and former co-director of Greenpeace to co-chair the government’s Oil Sands Advisory Group. Did that mean the oil deep state was defeated in Alberta? Not for a moment. In her speech on election night and again in her news conference the next morning, Notley emphasized her government’s openness to its “partners in the energy industry.” She told reporters, “I’m going to be reaching out to industry and they can count on us to work collaboratively with them.” In response to a reporter’s question, she reiterated her message to the energy industry: “things are going to be just A-OK over here in Alberta.” She promised many phone calls and conversations with corporate leaders, and in her first Question Period as premier said, “Just to be clear, I’m very committed to ensuring that our energy industry is supported.”

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These were understandable messages from a new government in an economy dominated by one industry, but as the NDP’s first year in office passed, the partnership began to look like a merger. In late November 2015, Premier Notley presented the work of her Climate Leadership Panel, which formed the basis of her government’s plan to help address global warming. “Our goal,” explained the premier, “is to become one of the world’s most progressive and forwardlooking energy producers.”

Two of the plan’s biggest components were bold and really could reduce emissions: a carbon tax and an accelerated phase-out of coal-fired power plants. But any gains from these were going to be lost to the staggering increase the plan allowed for oil sands and other oil and gas expansion; emissions would be 55 per cent higher in 2030 than they were in 2005. The premier was joined on stage by the heads of some of the biggest oil sands producers, including Steve Williams, CEO of Suncor, who said, “This plan will make one of the world’s largest oil-producing regions a leader in addressing the climate change challenge.” This statement was a blatant contradiction. It is not possible to address climate change with such a big jump in CO2 emissions.