When I was in South Korea a few years ago, interviewing business executives from the energy and auto sectors, one of the country's main English-language newspapers ran a special 16-page section on the global oil industry.

With Alberta’s energy industry booming back then, I flipped through the pages, looking for stories on the oilsands. But while Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and other big energy producers were well covered, Alberta didn’t get a single mention.

I asked the kindly professor who then headed the University of Alberta’s alumni association in Seoul about the omission. His response? Alberta has no profile in that part of the world, he told me. It’s basically invisible.

Alberta government officials later rapped him on the knuckles for being so blunt, I learned, but I was hardly surprised by his views. Anyone who travels abroad has encountered the same blank stares when Alberta comes up in conversation.

Don’t get me wrong. Alberta is a great place to live. And yes, our energy industry is a big deal here, where it drives the provincial economy. But globally, Alberta is a middling, high-cost oil producer in a low-price world where more suppliers are battling for market share every day.

In terms of carbon emissions, Alberta accounts for maybe 0.6 per cent of the global total, with the oilsands generating a quarter of that. It’s a fraction of a fraction, in other words. Is that an argument for inaction on emissions? Of course not.

The politics are clear. Inaction merely guarantees that most of Alberta’s bitumen will remain landlocked. To win market access for its crude, Alberta has to be at the table as global talks on a possible climate change pact at the upcoming Paris summit proceed. But a little perspective, and less overheated rhetoric, would be helpful from Alberta’s new NDP government.

Instead, it seems far more focused on ramping up the tough talk on environmental issues than dealing with the province’s stumbling economy.

When Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips talked this week about the need to “refurbish our global reputation” and establish Alberta as a “global leader” on environmental issues, I had to wonder what planet she was referring to.

If Alberta does have a “global reputation,” it seems to be a mystery to most of the planet’s seven billion residents. The Chinese metropolis where my son lives boasts nearly three times Alberta’s population, and the emissions from its nearby coal-fired power plants would easily outstrip those from the oilsands. But I’m guessing few Albertans have ever heard of the place.

When I searched for the term “Alberta oilsands” on the China Daily’s english-language website, it yielded just seven hits over the past decade. Wow, that’s some global reputation.

Yes, our oilsands reserves are big. But few still believe those fanciful charts that once showed oilsands production approaching five million barrels a day by 2030. The anti-oilsands blowback is just too great. Even former Alberta Premier Jim Prentice admitted as much before he met his political demise.

In Mexico, where the energy industry is aggressively courting foreign investment in a bid to boost production and increase supplies to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, energy officials see Alberta’s oilsands as a key rival. China, not Alberta, is seen as the environmental outlier, a U.S. journalist based in Mexico City tells me.

To be fair, the Chinese government is doing its best to clean up the country’s dirty air by slowly phasing out coal plants, but carbon emissions in China aren’t expected to peak for another 10 or 15 years. Ditto for other big emitters like India.