Especially when it's crumbling for no reason other than an extremely misplaced desire to "do our part". The amount of comments I've read that essential boil down to people saying "Alberta should come join us in the 21st Century and divest from oil" is insane and just an anti-vaxxer level of cognitive dissonance. I care about carbon emissions and climate change too but I'm not about to close my eyes, plug my ears, chant about shutting down the Oil Sands, and then expect a GLOBAL problem to be solved by local shuttering of industry. It seems to me that building export terminals to the coast and displacing coal and animal dung in poorer countries with Canadian oil and natural gas would be beneficial, along with building a pipeline to the East and eliminating the need for their very busy refineries to charter tankers from halfway across the world. With the added windfall in the tens of billions that other countries like Qatar and the USA are enjoying we could invest more in clean tech and further subsidize solar and wind here to reduce or emissions. It's a two birds with one stone solution that is practical, and it reduces global emissions while allowing industry to actually compete and generate value for Canadians.
Our local companies have made tremendous strides in reducing emissions, as well as investing in Carbon capture and storage to take carbon out of the air. CNRL, one company, has the 3rd largest Carbon sequestration capacity in the O&G sector in the world, and removes the equivalent of 576,000 cars off the road. Do you think the other countries we're competing with give two craps about removing carbon? Most of them can't even be bothered to not fully vent the natural gas they produce. Murray Edwards is also working with Bill Gates on further carbon sequestration technology. I'd rather have CNRL and other companies producing oil and gas and generating value for Canadians than allowing them to be strangled off by obstructionists and ceding market share to all the bad actors out there, call me crazy. Displacing coal, sequestering carbon, reducing shipping needs to our east coast; these are called actually doing something about climate change. The people who want our O&G to shut down are ironically not doing anything at all to stop climate change, instead they take the position of what they believe to be a moral high ground without expending thought on what they're fighting for. They're wrong, not helping a serious problem, and also have the bonus of destroying 10's of Billions of value to our economy.
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