Sanction of the victim: Canada’s oil sands producers join the climate change fight

Sanction of the victim: Canada’s oil sands producers join the climate change fight

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This week, my home province Alberta’s recently elected socialist NDP government announced a 3 billion dollar carbon tax—euphemistically called “a climate leadership plan”—across all carbon production in the province. The oil sands produces, such as Cenovus Energy, Suncor Energy, Canadian Natural Resources, and Shell Canada were all present at the ‘unveiling,’ as a gesture of support of the plan. (Read more in Claudia Cattaneo’s informative article in the Financial Post here). Why would the oil sands producers support such a plan, and why is it immoral of them to do so?

It is widely recognized that Alberta’s carbon tax is Canada’s sacrifice on the altar of fighting climate change, conveniently announced just in time for the UN climate summit in Paris. As I reported in last week’s post, Canada’s contribution to the world’s greenhouse emissions is very small, about 1.6% (see the figure in Cattaneo’s article). Shutting down the entire Canadian economy would have virtually no impact on greenhouse gases, and zero impact on the average temperature of the planet (a metric the significance of which is debatable). The Canadian oil sands’ share of world’s greenhouse gas emissions is negligible: 0.17%, and is likely to go down due to canceled investments, triggered by depressed oil prices, the 20% increase in corporate income taxes introduced by the new Alberta government, the new carbon tax, and the promised oil royalty hike by the end of the year.

We don’t need to second-guess the government’s motives for squeezing the oil companies and the rest of us—as I wrote in a previous post, the statist government wants to control the citizens’ lives, including controlling business. But why would the leaders of the oil companies, who are asked to sacrifice (for no other obvious benefit than Canada to look good at the Paris summit), agree to do so? Why are they not just complying with government coercion (because they do not have a choice), but doing it willingly and agreeing that such coercion is good?

The fight against climate change has reached the level of fanatic fervor. The other day, a news announcer at the CBC Radio, Canada’s public broadcaster said that the UN climate summit has been organized to address the “climate emergency” we are facing. (She apparently meant the 0.8 degrees Celsius increase in the average global temperature in the last 100 years). David Suzuki, Canada’s arch-environmentalist and the chief climate change fighter, recently equivocated the oil sands workers with slave owners (by what logic, I don’t know).

The fight against climate change has become a popular movement that just about everybody seems to be willing to join, like the crowd in the parable admiring the new clothes of the emperor—who was parading around naked. But the oil sands producers and other oil companies are not just part of the crowd. They are the victims of the movement. They may want to join in, appeasing the public and the government to gain acceptance for their product, a significant value that improves our lives. But their appeasement will not give them what they want—and is immoral.

As Claudia Cattaneo writes in her article, some oil companies may be willing to renounce the value they are creating (fossil fuels) by going along with the climate change fight, with the hope that their compromise will purify them with a label “clean oil” and get government approvals for new oil pipelines to transport their product. But such hopes evade reality, and are therefore irrational and immoral. The oil companies have been continually innovating and improved their efficiency and decreased emissions, including actual pollution, not just CO2. This has done nothing to placate their critics, who according the analysts at FirstEnergy Capital Corp. “constantly demonize” the industry, no matter what they do. Praising Alberta’s carbon tax will not stop that demonization and miraculously scrub the industry “clean.” To think otherwise, is an evasion of reality—a violation of the virtue of rationality, on which the oil companies’ survival and success depends.

In appeasing the government and compromising, the oil companies may have been motivated by a misguided hope to achieve values. However, they are undermining their values (that benefit us also) by providing the government and the climate change movement what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim: … accept[ing] the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.” And that is truly immoral—if the achievement of values, not their destruction, is their goal.

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3 Responses

  1. You should have put “fighting” in quotes. The enviro-altruists are “fighting” climate change, since neither their activities, nor their goals have anything to do with eliminating it. Climate change has existed since way before there were ever fossil fuel emissions, and there has never been a period in history without climate change. So we are being lied to when we are told that the elimination of Climate Change is possible and necessary. We cannot survive long without Industrial Production and this means that Environmentalism is an attack on man’s fundamental material means of survival. The term “destroying the Planet” is deliberately ambiguous. There is not a single human activity that Environmentalists don’t classify in some way as “destroying the Planet”(many of them even regard breathing as destructive). The planet is not a human being. Oil, factories and smoke stacks are also part of our environment, and as Alex Epstein points out, they make the human environment much better.

  2. Logic? You want logic from the person who revealed in a TV interview in Australia that he did not know what the temperature databases his beliefs are based are? He who muses about jailing politicians for not following his whims, yet after musing publicly for years admitted in that interview that he hadn’t thought his scheme through? From the person who resides, with wife, on two expensive properties and jets around the world trying to take energy from poor people? The person who preaches population control after fathering five children who are multiplying themselves? /rant /sarc

    David Suzuki is like a high priest, he believes on faith and people believe him on faith. (Persons commenting on the AU TV interview suggested he is only listening to activists instead of digging into the subject like a scientist that he once was (at least in title and paycheque).

    Unfortunately voters are falling for the underlying ideology that promotes AGW, by electing the new federal “Liberal” government and the new NDP government in AB (not that the defeated conservative government in AB was worth much).

    What’s odd is that polls around the world show that matters like economics rank far above climate. Media are part of the problem as you’ve noted, owners need to wise up to the anti-business anti-freedom. They should note that despite their anti-human content neo-Marxist activists attack them, claiming they are biased against activists.

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Jaana Woiceshyn teaches business ethics and competitive strategy at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada.

She has lectured and conducted seminars on business ethics to undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA students, and to various corporate audiences for over 20 years both in Canada and abroad. Before earning her Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, she helped turn around a small business in Finland and worked for a consulting firm in Canada.

Jaana’s research on technological change and innovation, value creation by business, executive decision-making, and business ethics has been published in various academic and professional journals and books. “How to Be Profitable and Moral” is her first solo-authored book.

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