But there’s growing recognition, too, that employment in the oil and gas sector is going to become less secure as the climate crisis intensifies and the planet moves towards renewable energy consumption at the expense of fossil fuels.
“Renewables are set to penetrate the global energy system more quickly than any fuel in history,” a report by the oil giant BP acknowledged in 2019.
“It took 45 years for oil to increase from 1 percent of world energy to 10 percent … renewables (will go) from 1 percent to 10 ten percent in 25 years.”
Catherine Abreu is the executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of more than 100 environmental groups across the country. She thinks job instability is hardwired into the oil and gas sector because extractive industries are prone to aggressive cycles of boom and bust.
“One of Canada’s major vulnerabilities is not only our runaway addiction to consuming fossil fuels but also our economic reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets,” she told VICE.
An expansion in green energy production could help “build resilience” into the Canadian economy, Abreu said.
“We need to be clear that when (environmentalists) criticize oil and gas, we’re not criticizing the people who work in it; we’re criticizing the profit model it operates on, which tends to privatize all the benefits of the industry and socialize all the costs.”
“Now, with the economy in free fall and millions of people out of work, including in extractive industries, it's more urgent than ever.”
According to Karasek, an extensive program of state-led investment in green energy wouldn’t just help slash carbon emissions in the face of rising global temperatures.
It would also deliver vital financial support to oil and gas workers in the midst of a severe economic downturn, not least by creating thousands of new green jobs.
Governments face a choice, she said: They can “respond the way (they) did in 2008, by bailing out executives and leaving everyday people behind, or enact policies rooted in values of compassion and respect. The Green New Deal is the only economic stimulus plan that meets this moment.”
Hassan Yussuff is the president of the Canadian Labour Congress and co-chaired the federal government’s Just Transition Task Force for Canadian Coal-Power Workers.
Like Karasek, he believes a Green New Deal would be the best way to confront the climate crisis and alleviate job insecurity in the energy sector.
But it’s equally vital, he says, for fossil fuel workers to be included in the decision-making process—and for governments and campaigners to avoid imposing solutions technocratically, from the top down....
