Amidst the furor surrounding the upcoming U.S. presidential election, debate is heating up over whether it’s high time Canada renegotiated NAFTA and repudiated, altogether, the proportionality clause. With demand for conventional oil and gas outstripping supply, Canada appears to be in a strong bargaining position to renege on its obligation to maintain proportional levels of energy exports to the U.S. The likelihood of Canada charting its own energy course, however, is remote.
The debate, perplexingly, has myopically overlooked NAFTA’s strategic counterpart — the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) to which Canada, the U.S. and Mexico have been signatories since March of 2005. Referred to by critics and political watchdog organizations, like the Council of Canadians, as “deep integration” or the Americanization of Canadian public policy, the SPP’s mandate is to increase reliable energy supplies and improve safety and efficiency of transportation systems. By assimilating regulations and standards for the movement of goods, services and human resources, the vision of the SPP is to develop a north-south NAFTA Superhighway of freeways, rail lines, pipelines and power lines.
To gain a clearer picture of where Canada’s energy policy is headed we need to look south — to California, the sixth largest economy on the planet. For California’s 38 million residents, energy is no longer analogous to gas being pumped into a gas tank, but rather electrical power — indispensable for running computers and air conditioners and keeping hybrid electric cars on the road. More importantly, the state is rapidly running out of water and is projected to develop several desalination plants, also dependant upon copious kilowatts of electricity.
The Alberta government, not coincidentally, has avoided wading into the NAFTA debate. On a recently designed Alberta government website, Alberta quietly and diplomatically embraces and promotes increased trade with California. (see www.ir.gov.av.ca/international-relations/documents/California-2007.pdf).
For Alberta farmers and ranchers, however, California’s hunger for power doesn’t come as a surprise. For more than two years, landowners in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor and south of Lethbridge have been engaged in a battle against the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (restructured as the Alberta Utilities Commission) and power generation companies. According to the Alberta Electric Supply Operator (AESO) and Alta Link, development of a 500-kilovolt transmission line, running parallel to an existing power line in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor, and from Lethbridge to Great Falls, Montana (the MATL line), is critical to prevent rolling blackouts in Calgary and other growing urban centres. The public has also been led to believe that fortification of the power grid is necessary to accommodate projected wind farm operations. Opposing landowners, though, know the real reason behind our electrical infrastructure expansion — it’s to feed the Pacific Northwest and California’s insatiable hunger for power.
In May of 2006, the Northwest Power Pool’s Northwest Transmission Assessment Committee Canada-NW-California Study Group released the Canada Northwest-California Transmission Options Study. In order to “provide high-level information on the feasibility of potential transmission projects to transfer a variety of new resources (between 1,500 to 3,200 megawatts) out of Canada into the Northwest and California…,” the study evaluates the factors of capacity, cost and reliability (peak losses) for 18 different transmission options. Eleven of the 18 transmission options, considered by the study, identify the Athabasca tar sand region’s capacity to generate the electricity projected to meet the future needs of the Northwest Power Pool. Other options pinpoint a combination of wind and hydro power generated in British Columbia.
As the 12th heaviest emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide, California has forged a progressive green agenda by drafting Assembly Bill 32, The Global Warming Solutions Act. Part of a package of bills that would require state agencies to co-ordinate investments and programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Bill 32’s aim is to promote economic growth by encouraging deployment of emissions-reductive technologies. Projected to set the first statewide limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases, the new legislation has been the catalyst for the banking industry’s pledge of billions to finance Glendale-based Johnson Controls Inc’s $5 billion strategic plan to retrofit energy-wasting buildings, in 16 of the world’s largest cities.
In California’s Silicon Valley, Johnson Controls recently retrofitted an office building with a geothermal heat pump system. While the green office building has been extolled as one of the first net-zero carbon emission commercial buildings in the nation, some businesses worry that regulating CO2 and other greenhouse gases will drive up energy prices, as utilities build costly nuclear or next-generation coal plants.
The downside of corporate America’s green initiative is the inescapable reality that nuclear reactors and next-generation coal plants still hover on the distant horizon. Development of nuclear energy and other California-style global warming solutions, moreover, isn’t feasible without the seamless technological support of a fossil-fuel platform. With conventional oil and gas reserves becoming tapped out, the tar sands, estimated to contain 1.3 trillion barrels of oil (the equivalent of all conventional oil extracted, worldwide, to date), is capable of furnishing the platform upon which emissions reductive technology can be deployed.
But apart from fuelling deep integration with the Northwest Power Pool, tar sands expansion essentially shifts greenhouse gas emissions from south of the border to north of the border and exacerbates the global crisis of climate change. In the long run, too, sadly and ironically, the tar sands can only dampen Canada’s aspirations to renegotiate NAFTA and chart its own energy future.
Barbara Janusz is a lawyer, educator and freelance writer, residing in the Crowsnest Pass.
