'We should see this power play for what it is: the act of an increasingly desperate industry that fears its days are numbered. They seek to delay climate action long enough to wring out a few more dollars for themselves, while imposing enormous costs on the rest of us.'

There has been a lot of ink spilled over potential interference in Canadian elections, but sometimes it hides in plain sight.

In what is almost certainly a trial run for the federal election later this year, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) released an election platform for the upcoming Alberta election. CAPP’s members are a who’s who of global heavy-hitters like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP, Koch Oil Sands and PetroChina, as well as Canadian-based companies like Suncor, Husky, CNRL and Cenovus.

The press release announcing CAPP’s Alberta Energy Platform claimed that it is intended to be non-partisan, yet it was immediately welcomed by the United Conservative Party, which stated that “today’s report reinforces what we’ve been saying.” Interestingly, the press release also claimed the platform “is not advertising,” which might indicate a new strategy to skirt the increasingly strict rules on third-party advertising during elections.

The oil lobby’s wish list includes six new export pipelines by 2025 (only three are currently under consideration), multiple tax cuts, speedier approvals and a provincial challenge of the federal government’s role in regulating their industry.

The goal of their VoteEnergy.ca platform is to double the growth rate of oil production in Canada. They claim that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says the world is going to need a lot more oil, so Canada should be the one to supply it.

What they conveniently omit is that the IEA publishes a number of scenarios with very different consequences for climate change, ranging from bad to something that makes a Netflix dystopia look tame.

In their election platform, the oil companies have chosen to cite the scenario that comes with a catastrophic level of global warming (over 3 degree Celsius). In that possible future, the demand for oil is growing because the world has failed to make a transition to renewable energy.

The IEA also publishes a scenario where oil demand drops by over 25 per cent in the next 20 years as climate policies take hold and vehicles are powered increasingly by electricity from renewable sources like the wind or sun.

This will not come as a surprise to the industry. Two years ago, Suncor shareholders forced company management to look at the future of oil demand and the oil sands in a low carbon world. Suncor reported back to shareholders that in a low-carbon world “new oil sands growth projects are challenged and unlikely to proceed” and “no new export pipelines are built out of the Athabasca Oil Sands region.”

So which possible future does Big Oil want you to vote for? When you look at the details of the VoteEnergy.ca package, it is clear that they are backing the 3 degrees of warming world. Not only are they using those oil demand projections, but the climate policy section in it is practically non-existent.

The key phrase is that they “support a made-in-Alberta climate plan that is applied in parallel to other competing jurisdictional climate policies.” Phrased another way: when it comes to climate change, they want to move in lock-step with Donald Trump.

I would have more sympathy for this position if the companies who control CAPP weren’t also running the American Petroleum Institute, which has been guiding Trump’s hand on climate policy. For instance, the New York Times has revealed that it was oil companies – not car companies – that were behind Trump’s attack on the Obama-era vehicle fuel efficiency rules that would have reduced oil consumption.

In a brilliant but evil twist, the oil lobbyists are now saying that Canadian governments should roll back climate policies to match the ones they wrote for Trump — even if this strategy can only succeed if we stop fighting climate change.

We should see this power play for what it is: the act of an increasingly desperate industry that fears its days are numbered. They seek to delay climate action long enough to wring out a few more dollars for themselves, while imposing enormous costs on the rest of us.

That is not a future we should vote for.

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