Petro-Capitalism and the Tar Sands

* * *

ANGELA V. CARTER

* * *

How do we make sense of the overwhelming complexity, contradictions, and magnitude of Alberta's tar sands? Daily media stories track stunning private investment and looming public deficits, vast profits and shocking environmental and health problems, technological feats and labour shortfalls, all involving some of the world's largest transnational corporations (TNCs), powerful governments, First Nations and other affected frontline communities, international non-governmental organizations, and a growing social movement in resistance. The enormity of this industry was encapsulated in very clear terms by Prime Minister Harper early in his administration:

Digging the bitumen out of the ground, squeezing out the oil and converting it into synthetic crude is a monumental challenge. It requires vast amounts of capital, Brobdingnagian technology, and an army of skilled workers. In short, it is an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China's Great Wall. Only bigger.

The impact of this epic endeavour extends to nearly every corner of Canada as the industry draws precarious labour from across the country; attempts to extend pipelines south, west, and east; spreads pollution into neighbouring communities, provinces, and territories; and drives up national CO emissions. At the same time, the industry is contingent on volatile global price fluctuations in response to the vagaries of international reserves and far-off geopolitics. In short, what happens in Alberta doesn't stay in Alberta — and the fate of Alberta is entangled in a far broader global context.

This chapter uses petro-capitalism as a lens to capture the scale and complexity of the tar sands industry. Petro-capitalism places oil centre stage in understanding political economic systems, as well as foregrounding the economic, political, and environmental costs of fossil fuel dependence. In this, it helps to focus our attention on:

• the dizzying rates of capitalist growth made possible by oil;

• the ensuing political transformations that reinforce the oil-dependent economy and block transitions to a safer and fairer way of organizing economic life; and

• the perpetual state of crisis that is induced by the imperative of expansion, one that simultaneously undermines the supply of non-renewable fuel and — more importantly — the earth's lifesupport systems.

Ultimately, this conceptual framework helps us understand not only how Alberta is intimately connected to global oil crises, and the United States energy market in particular, but also how Canada and especially Alberta are riven with political, economic, and environmental problems in attempts to expand tar sands extraction.

Petro-Capitalism

At the centre of the analysis of capitalism's relation to nature is its inherent and unavoidable dependence on fossil fuels, and particularly on oil.

— Elmar Altvater

From the nineteenth century onwards, fossil fuels (starting with coal) have increasingly come to power capitalist expansion. The transportability and energy density of fossil fuels brought a great shift, from the waxing and waning rhythms of biotic energy from the sun, wind, or muscles, to around-the-clock and around-the-globe production and distribution. Fossil fuels allowed the continuous expansion of manufacturing, as their great energy density was both abundant and relatively cheap in relation to the productivity it stoked. This served to expand the geographic scope of production, permitting the long-distance transportation of raw materials and goods throughout the global economy.

Current critical scholarship on energy has begun to explore how capitalism could only grow and flourish with fossil energy and steep environmental costs. From research in critical geography and radical political economy to more popular publications on environmental problems, an increasing number of writers are now highlighting how capitalism is not only about the growth and expansion of enterprise, private property, profits, and capital accumulation, but that this is also fundamentally premised upon the rapid growth and development of hydrocarbon consumption. The concept of "petro-capitalism" helps to indicate just how dependent this political economic system is on fossil energy, particularly oil.

The economic logic of petro-capitalism is grounded in the proposition that efforts to expand profit growth through mass production and mass consumption have hinged on the mass extraction of fossil fuels. With the development of fossil fuels, annualized economic growth rates on a world scale jumped from 0.2 per cent in the early 1800s to more than 2 per cent at the end of the twentieth century. Similarly, the globalization of production and consumption patterns over the past four decades has only come about with the development of extremely energy-intensive systems of production and transportation. Newly industrializing countries have recently crowded into markets and added to the already insatiable demand of the industrialized countries, and now consume nearly one-fourth of global oil production.

But petro-capitalism has not just evolved economically: it has required a great deal of political intervention at every turn. From the beginning, oil production has been a highly centralized process, controlled by major corporations and powerful governments, with access dependent upon intrigue, corruption, innumerable episodes of imperial intervention, and military might alongside economic power. As Altvater notes, fossil fuels have never been "distributed through a democratic, solidaristic rationing."

Indeed, in examining the scope of long-run political problems associated with oil development, some scholars have claimed that countries tied to oil commonly suffer from a "resource curse," another key aspect of petro-capitalism. This essentially implies that oil-dependent governments are frequently vulnerable to long-term economic volatility and decline, as well as democratic stagnation or deterioration due to growing political conservatism and authoritarianism, with the costs and benefits of extraction often distributed unfairly, leading to increased class, regional, sectoral, ethnic, and gender inequalities. Countries suffering under the resource curse may also experience policy deterioration due to the institutional "molding" effect of oil revenue dependence, as governments tend to become rentier states where oil rent collection comes to dominate government financing and planning, "thereby weakening state capacity." Under such conditions, petro-states lose the broader notion of public good and come to act ever more strategically to maintain power and protect the oil industry. This leads to long-term institutional inertia, which keeps ruling governments focused on privileging and expanding the oil industry above all else.

A final fundamental aspect of petro-capitalism is the inevitable environmental damage, in particular through its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Since capitalism needs infinite economic growth and ever-expanding consumption, its logic essentially compels increasing CO emissions that threaten the global ecological system — and indeed life itself. The growth imperative drives the continual global search for new (though ultimately finite) oil supplies in ways that often have high energy and resource demands (as in the tar sands, and in hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas) and carry a large ecological burden.

In sum, the conceptual framework of petro-capitalism centres oil as the lifeblood of global capitalism, with the power to fundamentally reshape political institutions from global to national to provincial levels. Yet it is also a system in permanent crisis due to its intractable role in climate change and environmental degradation, alongside inevitable challenges to oil supplies.

Global Petro-Capitalist Crises

The contradictory nature of petro-capitalism, which depends upon incessant expansion at ever-higher economic and environmental costs, is coming into sharper focus with the global access to a steady supply of conventional crude oil now in question, and threatening to create a global energy crisis. From 1971 to 2010, world oil consumption nearly doubled, driven in great part by the need for transportation fuels in rich-world economies. Roughly one-fifth of the world's population consumes two-thirds of global oil. Within the OECD, the US clearly dominates oil demand, consuming over 20 per cent of total global oil production with less than 5 per cent of the world's population. Yet fast-growing demand is coming from non-OECD countries — nearly half from China, which now surpasses total American oil consumption (albeit with much lower levels of per capita consumption due to its very large population).

Global oil supply is just barely meeting this rising global demand. Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed that the world's supply of oil in 2012 was 91.1 million barrels per day (bpd), slightly above world demand at 89.8 million bpd, which is forecasted to keep increasing. The uncertainty over whether oil supply can keep up with this rising demand is contributing to a range of dynamics, including:

• the intensifying race by governments and TNCs alike to control and militarize oil reserves in the Middle East, the former USSR, South America, and Western Africa;

• the surge in the exploration of secondary fields at the margins of major "mature" fields; and

• attempts to squeeze the last drops out of old fields using enhanced oil recovery technologies.

However, the greatest hope for petro-capitalism lies in finding new supplies from "frontier" regions, including ultra-deep offshore wells and high latitudes, and even more so by exploiting so-called "unconventional" reserves, such as those found in the tar sands and in shale formations.

Yet even as TNCs pour billions of dollars into attempts to discover new sources of fossil fuels, the reality is that global climate stability cannot withstand the CO emissions this would entail. Just as capitalist economic growth has mirrored fossil fuel consumption, so too have world CO emissions mirrored world GDP growth. However, climate scientists are warning in ever-stronger terms that the window to radically reduce annual CO emissions to a level that might mitigate dangerous levels of climate instability is fast closing. The result is that petro-capitalism on a world scale is currently running out of cheap and easy oil supplies at the same time that it is running up against its climatic limits.

Petro-Capitalism at the National Scale

Canada is the world's only growing producer of this strategic commodity with a secure, stable government. Canada is, as I have said, an emerging energy superpower. It is one reason why Canada will increasingly be a leader and why Alberta is a leader within it.

–Stephen Harper in 2006

Since coming to power in 2006, arguably the most important pillar of Stephen Harper's economic plan for Canada has been to take advantage of the global decline in conventional oil reserves and the ensuing increase in demand for "unconventional" fossil fuels, aspiring to make Canada a global (fossil) "energy superpower." Such aspirations are not mere political swagger, as Canada has sizable conventional reserves and even larger unconventional ones, centred on the tar sands. According to the National Energy Board, Canada produced over 3.3 million bpd in 2012, which, based on IEA data, placed Canada as the world's sixth-largest global oil producer. However, this is poised to grow, as a recent OECD report noted that "Canada has the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world, most of which are in oil sands." Along with this large volume, the IEA has also flagged the important fact that Canada is the leading global non-OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil supplier.

Fossil energy has become Canada's most valuable export, driven by the tar sands. In the space of a mere decade, from 1999 to 2008, Canada's energy exports grew in value more than fourfold: from $28 billion to $128 billion. According to Statistics Canada, energy exports as a percentage of total exports grew from 10 per cent in 1990, to 13 per cent in 2000, to over 25 per cent in 2011. Canada's economic reliance on fossil fuel exports is now to an extent that oil prices are widely recognized to be linked to the strength of the Canadian dollar, and in particular the exchange rate with the US dollar, giving rise to the "petro-loonie" neologism. The value of traded energy and metal shares account for approximately half of the total shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

This dramatic growth has been fostered by the policy framework established by the Canadian federal government geared to ramping up oil development. While this has centred on promoting tar sands extraction and its associated pipeline projects, it has also sought to promote offshore exploration and drilling in other frontiers, like the Arctic and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Meanwhile, the Harper government has weakened environmental policies and monitoring capacities in order to facilitate oil and gas development and other resource extraction, most notably through amendments to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act contained in Bill C-38, the 2012 omnibus budget bill (the latter acting as an important trigger in the Idle No More insurgence). Further, the Harper government has demonstrated a paltry commitment to developing clean energy technologies and facilitating energy efficiency and conservation, and reneged on the country's international commitment to reduce GHG emissions, making Canada the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in late 2011.

Another glaring aspect of the federal government's scramble to expand oil production is its utter failure to manage this growth for the national long-term interest, a problem reflected most notably in the lack of a national energy policy. In contrast to other developed industrial states, including the US, Canada has no strategic petroleum reserves, nor is there a policy to save the revenue of this one-time resource or invest it in renewable forms of energy. A 2009 report on international oil wealth funds starkly contrasted the mega-funds of Norway ($512 billion) and the UAE ($875 billion) with the meagre Canadian oil savings, with just $14.4 billion in Alberta's Heritage Fund. Nor does Canada have a plan to wisely invest this revenue in long-term public goods, instead focusing this windfall largely on tax cuts to corporations and individuals.

Another distinguishing feature of the policy framework facilitating the expansion of oil extraction is that instead of being managed for the national public interest, resources are made extremely accessible to international players. While 80 per cent of the world's remaining oil reserves are formally held by national governments, Canadian policy has facilitated a private and often foreign-led industry, forgoing national ownership and development since the privatization and free-trade frenzy of the early 1990s. Canada's "more accommodating attitude towards foreign investment" than many oil-rich countries has resulted in about half of the Canadian oil industry's capital and oil production today being foreign-owned, with foreign direct investment having risen particularly sharply since 2006.

To date, the only state-owned development of Canada's oil reserves is being undertaken by other countries, such as through Norway's Statoil and China's CNOOC. Canadian government investments have mainly focused on indirect and direct public subsidies (e.g., infrastructure, research support, tax breaks) to the benefit of private corporations. In recent years, this has been augmented by government assistance lobbying and marketing the tar sands abroad, promoting Canada as a secure, reliable, and geographically proximate supplier of oil resources to other countries, especially the US. Gary Doer, the Canadian ambassador to the US, summarizes the essential pitch in the context of the Keystone XL pipeline debate:

We don't think it's that complicated to have oil from Canada flow to the United States to replace oil from Venezuela [or] the Middle East — we actually don't think this is a complicated decision. ... It's actually not just jobs versus the environment. It's also the whole issue of whether the United States grabs this opportunity to establish energy independence in North America through oil from Canada.

Canada's combination of large reserves, rapid growth, and openness to transnational investment has not been lost on the US, Canada's number-one export partner. American oil analysts have long identified Canadian oil as a key part of the solution to US energy security. Over a decade ago, the US National Energy Policy Development Group stressed the importance of securing geographically closer oil reserves from more politically stable supplies in North America, with Canada's tar sands specifically identified. US-based TNCs have been prominent players in the expansion of tar sands extraction, as American foreign investment now accounts for roughly one-third of all tar sands production, while fast-rising Chinese investment has recently risen to a comparable share. Canadian oil exports to the US have more than tripled since the 1990s, and in 2004 Canada surpassed Saudi Arabia as the leading foreign supplier of oil to the US. In 2010, Canada supplied over 20 per cent of the US's total oil imports. While foreign investment in the tar sands has become increasingly diversified between US, Chinese, and European interests, the US remains the primary export market: in 2011, 98.5 per cent of Canada's oil and gas exports went to the US. NAFTA's "proportionality" clause ensures this dramatic southbound oil flow, although (as discussed elsewhere in this book) the Harper administration is actively seeking the diversification of export markets through west or eastbound pipeline projects.