Pipeline Politics

Methane leaking from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines is likely the biggest burst of the climate super-pollutant on record by far, and countries in the region suspect this week’s undersea explosions were a case of sabotage.

Even as a growing number of activists urge financial institutions to take action against climate change by reducing funding to the fossil fuel sector, executives with Canada’s largest bank say the country won’t reach its net-zero goals without the oil and gas sector.

The CEO of Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) says divesting from fossil fuels is the opposite of what pension funds should be doing if they want to help solve the climate crisis.

With a new report expected to reveal a massive increase in global oil pipeline construction, an analyst says Canada is running counter to public opinion and wider international trends by adding to the problem.

Canadian fossils are steadfastly refusing to invest significantly in new decarbonization projects, even though they’re flush with record amounts of cash, the Pembina Institute reports in a scathing analysis released last week.

The TC Energy subsidiary building the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline has received more than 50 warnings about environmental violations, CBC reports, citing the British Columbia government.

Chris Severson-Baker is the newly-appointed executive director of the Pembina Institute. In this feature interview, he talks about what it will take to turn climate plans and promises into real investments in faster, deeper carbon cuts.

The Line 5 pipeline has won a stay of execution in Wisconsin, where a federal judge sided with an Indigenous group’s complaint but stopped short of ordering the controversial cross-border energy link shut down entirely.

June 28, 2020: Coutts, the private banker to Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the British royal family, has promised to drop its investments in the tar sands/oil sands, Arctic oil and gas exploration, and thermal coal extraction and generation, and to reduce the carbon intensity of its holdings 25% by the end of next year.

The Kremlin has declared it will stop shipping gas to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, prompting European leaders to propose price caps to cut into Russia’s financing for its war in Ukraine.

A northern Alberta First Nation has filed what experts say is the province’s first lawsuit claiming cumulative effects from industry, agriculture, and settlements are so pervasive that they violate the band’s treaty rights.

A new case study from Alberta shows that when regulators force the issue and producers of fossil fuels get serious, the companies can drastically reduce their methane emissions without any immediate reduction in their oil and gas extraction.

For redlined communities like one in South Memphis, Tennessee, a win for grassroots advocates against environmental racism can be quickly followed by new threats and greater losses.

Environmental advocates celebrated when U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law earlier this month. But the joy is tempered by lingering caution about a murky side bargain purported to streamline oil and gas projects, Energy News Network reports.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is visiting Canada this week while his country faces a level of energy supply risk that many Canadians would have trouble imagining.

An NDP Member of Parliament is hinting that his party’s continuing support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government might hinge on a “big financial commitment” to a just transition for fossil fuel workers and communities.

The international dispute over Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline belongs in federal court, a Michigan judge declared Thursday, dealing a critical blow to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s bid to shut down the controversial cross-border oil and gas line.

With the European Union striving to slash its demand for Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of this year and end all its dependence on Russian fossil fuels by 2027, there’s no path for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Canada to help the continent meet its short-term energy needs, the International Institute for Sustainable Development concludes in a policy brief released Tuesday.

Releasing treated tar sands/oil sands tailings into the environment isn’t the only solution being considered to clean up the massive toxic ponds in northern Alberta, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says.

Canada’s four biggest fossil companies took home more than C$12.3 billion in profit between April and June of this year, thanks to an oil price surge driven largely by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Campaigners and local residents are using photos, video, and drone footage to document a Trans Mountain pipeline work site they say is impeding an early salmon run and leaving dead fish along the Coquihalla River in British Columbia.

This month’s EcoA Tip highlights some useful data showing who Canadians tend to blame for climate change. The research comes from a national survey conducted by EcoAnalytics, a non-profit initiative that provides data, analysis, and guidance to strengthen Canada’s environmental movement.

As the burning of fossil fuels presents us with yet another summer of catastrophic impacts, the pressure is growing for pension funds to either phase out their oil, gas, coal, and pipeline assets or explain how they’re aligned with a safe retirement future for their beneficiaries. And Canada’s seventh-largest fund, the C$121-billion Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS), may be getting the memo, three of its members write for Corporate Knights.

After a marathon series of votes that began just before midnight Saturday, the United States Senate adopted a US$369-billion climate and clean energy plan Sunday afternoon, the country’s biggest-ever investment in climate action.

Canada’s biggest fossil companies are lining up to dismiss the federal government’s new emissions cap for their sector as “very aggressive” and “almost unrealistic”, even as Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault hastens to offer them flexibility and an extended deadline to hit the long-awaited target.

Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity turned up the heat on swing-vote senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, a wider network of business groups stepped up to defend the deal, and environmental justice campaigners decried concessions to oil and gas as advocates absorbed the details of the $369.75-billion climate and clean energy package announced last week by Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer.

The projected cost of the contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline spanning northern British Columbia has skyrocketed 70% to C$11.2 billion in the wake of a freshly-inked deal between operator TC Energy Corporation and the group building a liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal on the West Coast.

With the Canada Energy Regulator still months away from completing its next projection of the country’s future oil and gas production, climate policy watchers are cautiously optimistic that the analysis will chart a real course for a low-carbon future—and rooting for the CER to get its modelling right.

An initial proposal for an oil and gas emissions cap that is a cornerstone of Canada’s 2030 climate strategy is generating glimmers of hope but early skepticism on all sides, after Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault opened public consultations on the plan earlier this week.

A heat emergency earlier this week in the U.S. Great Plains region forced the operator of the Keystone pipeline, Calgary-based TC Energy, to cut back its flow of what Bloomberg Markets calls a “crucial grade of oil” to refineries.

Changes in global oil prices and markets will continue to destabilize jobs in Alberta, and declining oil demand due to the shift off carbon will have job impacts far beyond the province’s fossil sector without the right mix of just transition policies, an Oxford University research team concludes in a paper published this morning in the journal Climate Policy.

A Michigan regulatory panel said Thursday it needs more information about safety risks before it can rule on Calgary-based Enbridge Energy’s plan to extend the Line 5 pipeline through a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac. The state Public Service Commission voted 3-0 to seek further details about the potential for explosions and fires involving […]

There will be no federal financing for two companies vying to export Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe from terminals on the East Coast, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail.

A scathing budget analysis and a new lawsuit alleging police harassment produced a day of bad news Wednesday for the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines in British Columbia.

Wet’suwet’en land defenders are facing the threat of criminal records for their idealistic fight to save precious sacred resources for all of us, writes guest author Susan Tanner.

Internal analysis by federal officials raises tough questions about whether the Canadian fossil industry can achieve the 81 megatonnes of emissions cuts the Trudeau government has promised by 2030 without cutting production, according to confidential documents obtained by the Globe and Mail.

British colossal fossil BP is exiting the Alberta tar sands/oil sands to focus on offshore oil development instead.

An “unlikely” alliance of rural conservatives, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups is resisting the potential use of the eminent domain doctrine—a legal tool that allows private land to be seized for perceived public good—to build America’s largest carbon dioxide pipeline.

Public health doctor, pipeline protester, and renowned tree-sitter Tim Takaro doesn’t deserve four weeks in prison for violating a court injunction against blocking construction of the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, climate communicator James Boothroyd writes in an op ed for the Toronto Star.

A consulting report for Enbridge Inc. estimates the closure of the Line 5 pipeline would lead to an increase of one to two cents per litre in gasoline prices for Ontarians and Quebecers, a revelation that has reignited debate on the true economic impacts of shuttering an aging pipeline with very clear environmental risks.

Alberta’s energy minister is warning that anything resembling the United Kingdom’s windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies must not be implemented in Canada, adding that any federal action in that direction would be an “extreme act of aggression”.

The European Union’s plan to build new natural gas infrastructure is illegal under its own climate laws and won’t solve the fossil energy crunch triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, climate lawyers with London, UK-based Client Earth are arguing.

Environmental groups are warning that the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea could become an environmental hazard and a source of atmospheric methane if it is left to decay after stopping routine service and maintenance.

The 2,000-pound gorilla on Ottawa’s lobbying circuit is a little bit lighter today, after the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) laid off three of its senior executives.

The British Columbia Prosecution Service said 15 people are being charged with criminal contempt of court following protests last fall over a natural gas pipeline being built near Houston in northern B.C. Those charged are alleged to have breached a B.C. Supreme Court injunction granted to the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline in 2019 that prohibited […]

As the European Union rushes to wean itself off fossil fuels from Russia, it is exploring a “you collect/we buy” scheme to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Algeria, while simultaneously addressing massive methane leaks in the North African nation’s facilities.

The decision by Canada’s six biggest banks to sink another $10 billion into the troubled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is no surprise after a federal loan guarantee made it a straightforward business decision to back the project, says the financial analyst who accurately predicted the decision 2½ months ago.

The officially disclosed carbon footprints of Canada’s largest oil companies could balloon in size if tough new climate rules proposed earlier this year by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission come into effect.

The Biden administration has become the latest target of the Alberta government’s enduring sense of grievance, after Ambassador David Cohen declared a “return to civility” following the Trump years but expressed skepticism about increasing his country’s imports of Canadian oil and gas.

Forty years of largely unregulated growth have left 1.4 trillion litres of toxic tar sands/oil sands tailings sloshing around in “ponds” on the shores of the Athabasca River, devastating ecosystems and First Nations communities with neither plan nor budget for reclamation, says a new report from Environmental Defence.

The current linchpin in Canadian Big Oil’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2050 is its apparent success at reducing the emissions intensity of each barrel of oil produced, a claim that relies on a form of creative accounting that treats a tonne of emissions exported to another country as a tonne removed from the atmosphere.

Fossil fuel companies have access to an obscure legal tool that could jeopardize worldwide efforts to protect the climate, and they’re starting to use it. The result could cost countries that press ahead with those efforts billions of dollars.

The federal government has approved a new, approximately C$10-billion loan guarantee for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, a move it says is common practice and does not reflect any additional public funding for the high-profile, over-budget oil pipeline.

Alberta’s top court said Tuesday the federal government’s environmental impact law is unconstitutional, and Ottawa almost immediately announced its plan to appeal.

Lack of corporate transparency about climate-related exposure will allow the Canadian economy to continue growing in a “climate bubble”—until the bubble suddenly bursts, wreaking economic destabilization and damage.

A gas pipeline in Texas released enough methane in just over an hour in mid-March to equal the climate impact of running 16,000 internal combustion cars for a year.

Canada’s big oil companies are making record profits this year and should be investing some of that extra cash to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Thursday.

A Wisconsin Indigenous band is seeking a permit to immediately evict the Line 5 pipeline from its land, creating a second shutdown risk for a piece of fossil infrastructure that has already faced closure threats from the Michigan government, as well as other Indigenous and environmental groups.

The head of Canadian pipeline giant TC Energy says the company sees a future opportunity in providing what’s described as “small-scale” nuclear power for Alberta’s tar sands/oil sands.

The world’s fifth-largest insurance company, Munich-based Allianz, is withdrawing coverage and investment dollars from a wide swath of fossil fuel projects as of next year, and will stop insuring its existing fossil clients when their policies come up for renewal.

Most Canadian politicians still don’t understand the most important thing about fossil fuel subsidies, writes UNB’s Jason MacLean: Eliminating all financial support for the fossil fuel industry is a necessary first step in completely phasing out fossil production and consumption in Canada.

Divest from the Coastal GasLink pipeline or Hollywood will divest from you was the message for the Royal Bank of Canada, delivered last week by Office of the Wet’suwet’en spokesperson Sleydo’ Molly Wickham and climate activist and actor Mark Ruffalo.

The intensely controversial investment tax credit unveiled by the federal government earlier this month isn’t enough to convince Canada’s major tar sands/oil sands producers to begin construction on a proposed massive carbon capture and storage transportation line, the chief executive of Cenovus Energy Inc. said Wednesday.

A private email shows a Conservative MP from Alberta calling an NDP-initiated study into the relationship between resource development and increased violence against Indigenous women and girls “disgraceful.”

A decision just a decade ago to invest heavily in the Alberta tar sands/oil sands has turned out to be a big liability for the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)—and now the company is looking to sell off its Long Lake and Hangingstone operations before being hit by sanctions related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In an administrative first, the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) has announced it will consider the climate impacts of the four-mile (6.5-kilometre) tunnel that Calgary-based Enbridge is proposing to build beneath the Straits of Mackinac to house the controversial Line 5 pipeline.

South African fuel and chemicals giant Sasol Ltd. is stepping away from plans to invest in a new pipeline from northern Mozambique, for fear that it will end up saddled a stranded asset in a decarbonizing world.

Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 66 million tonnes during the first year of the pandemic. But not all of those gains likely survived the economic recovery in 2021, and only a small share of the emission cuts came from the Alberta tar sands/oil sands, according to the government’s latest National Inventory Report released late last week.

In what campaigners are calling a world first, Quebec’s National Assembly voted Tuesday afternoon to ban new oil and gas exploration and shut down existing drill sites within three years, even as the promoters behind the failed Énergie Saguenay liquefied natural gas (LNG) project try to revive it as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the hours and days after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled a budget that promised $7.1 billion in subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCUS) technology, one of the most intriguing questions was whether the government was finally calling the fossil industry’s bluff on emission reductions—whether or not it meant to.

The European Union’s fuel supply options carry different implications for the climate, according to a life cycle assessment released while the continent is rethinking energy policy from between the rock of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the hard place of a looming energy supply crisis.

The Alberta government has released recovery plans for two herds of threatened caribou in the province’s north that it says will bring the amount of usable habitat on their ranges up to the level required by a deal signed with Ottawa, The Canadian Press reports.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) has “solidified its position as a climate leader among Canadian pension funds,” but still isn’t fully heeding its members’ calls to invest in a climate-safe future, according to an independent analysis of its annual report released late last month.

Amid pushback from industry groups and both Republican and Democratic politicians, U.S. energy regulators scaled back plans late last month to consider how natural gas projects affect climate change and environmental justice.

Fossil investment from the world’s 60 biggest banks hit US$4.6 trillion in the six years since the Paris climate agreement was signed, while the Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank led a 51% increase in tar sands/oil sands investment last year, according to the latest edition of the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report released Wednesday.

Canada’s oil and gas industry says it’s been left in the dark about exactly how much it will be required to reduce its emissions in the coming decade, after the federal government’s new Emissions Reduction Plan made it clear that fossils must bring their carbon pollution down 42% from 2019 levels by 2030.

The fossil and transportation sectors get a relatively free ride and electricity producers do the most to decarbonize in the much-anticipated 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan released yesterday by Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault.

With the federal government’s new Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) due for release any day, news commentary is focusing on the central role of oil and gas in hitting the 2030 target—and what it’ll cost taxpayers to secure the industry’s cooperation.

Federal financial institutions and federal-regulated entities would have to line up their investment activities with Canada’s climate commitments under Bill S-243, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act introduced in Senate yesterday by Sen. Rosa Galvez (ISG-Quebec).

Although many of the world’s biggest financial institutions have been vocal about their climate commitments, fewer than half of them have introduced policies to restrict new oil and gas investments or phase out existing ones, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis released earlier this week by Reclaim Finance and more than a dozen advocacy groups.

Canada’s long-awaited 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) must set legally-binding limits for the oil and gas industry that are “coherent with national targets”, since “other sectors would be required to do even more for Canada to achieve its target” if fossils failed to pull their weight, the country’s Net-Zero Advisory Body said in its official advice to the government earlier this week.

Iron & Earth has launched a new online tool to help Canadian fossil fuel workers move into careers in the net-zero economy, matching their skills to trades and administration positions in wind, solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicle charging, and more.

The damage to public groundwater resources in Minnesota from missteps during construction of the Line 3 oil pipeline is more severe than previously known, state environmental regulators said earlier this week.

The federal Liberals and New Democrats must make good use of the next three-plus years of political stability by embracing more decisive climate action than they promised in the supply and confidence agreement (CSA) unveiled yesterday, leading climate policy analysts have told The Energy Mix.

The contentious Trans Mountain pipeline project could be the “modern-day economic version of a smallpox blanket,” the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs warned last week, in an open letter to the several Indigenous consortia that are lining up for a possible financial stake in the project.

Business leaders from the United States and Canada are again wading into the fray over Line 5, citing the energy crisis brought on by Russia’s war in Ukraine to accuse the state of Michigan of dragging its heels to keep the controversial cross-border pipeline in a state of legal limbo.

With oil prices soaring, Canada’s fossil industry is reaping record profits that ought to be invested in a low-carbon transition, not spent as returns for shareholders, says a Montreal-based finance professor who’s urging the feds to force the sector’s hand—to address the climate crisis, and for the workers who will inevitably suffer when fossil fortunes tank.

Steelworkers in Regina and politicians at all levels were scrambling to assess the local implications Friday after the federal government extended its Ukraine sanctions list to include Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and part owner of the steel mill that produced pipe for the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines.

Oil and gas companies and lobby groups in Canada are heavily investing in campaigns to present themselves as defenders of Indigenous interests in the face of high-profile protests against a controversial natural gas pipeline on First Nation land, a new investigation by Eco-Bot.Net and the Guardian has found.

The Trudeau government may be left with big gaps in its 2030 climate strategy if it delays its oil and gas emissions cap until 2023, or holds off on setting tough carbon reduction targets for the industry, according to news reports this week.

Just two weeks after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland declared that no more federal tax dollars will go into the financially troubled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, analysts are warning that investors won’t touch the C$21.4-billion megaproject without government backing.

Sixteen Indigenous communities along the Coastal GasLink pipeline route have signed option agreements for an equity stake in the project, a move that one Indigenous leader hopes will set a precedent for future energy infrastructure projects in Canada.

Following a dramatic pledge yesterday to reduce its dependence on Russian gas by 65% this year and phase out all Russian fossil fuels “well before 2030”, the European Union is under pressure to replace gas from all sources through a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The prospect of a new tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology in this year’s federal budget has battle lines drawn across the Canadian climate community, with sharp disagreements on whether fossil companies should qualify for taxpayer support and a former federal environment minister maintaining it’s time for them to pay their own way.

With Vladimir Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine now well into its second week, news coverage and commentary are turning to the steps other European countries can take to break their dependence on Russian oil and gas, once and for all.

In light of the Canadian federal government’s decision to not provide additional funding for the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust is calling the viability of the pipeline a “delusion,” and reaffirming its position that the project needs to be halted.

Parliament spent a good part of its day yesterday debating whether fast-tracking new pipelines to the Atlantic coast would help displace Russian natural gas in Europe, after Conservative foreign affairs critic and repeat GreenPAC endorsee Michael Chong tabled a motion positioning Canadian fossil fuel production as a response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.

Ukraine energy and civil society organizations called for an end to the “global fossil fuel addiction that feeds Putin’s war machine” Wednesday, less than 48 hours before the advance of that war machine left a fire burning on the site of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, the Zaporizhzhia facility in the coastal city of Enerhodar.

Canada cannot realistically expect to hit its current target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 45% by 2030, and should instead set a more modest goal while leaning heavily on the electricity and fossil fuel sectors for deep carbon cuts during this decade, a new think tank report concludes this week.

The Swiss-based company behind the US$11-billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has declared bankruptcy and laid off all its staff, after Germany suspended final certification of the intensely controversial project in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the United States followed with economic sanctions.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fifth day, with colossal fossil BP pulling its US$14-billion investment in state oil company Rosneft, analysts are pointing to fossil fuels as both a cause and a beneficiary of an intense and brutal war, while others urge a faster transition to renewable energy as an antidote to Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

The climate emergency was pushed to the back burner in international relations and oil prices hit US$105 per barrel this week after Russian President Vladimir Putin capped weeks of escalating tensions by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The operator of the contested Dakota Access pipeline in North and South Dakota has failed in its effort to sidestep a new environmental review that could ultimately shut it down, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Earlier this month, as speculation that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine mounted, ABC News reported that “the spectre of a military confrontation” was “pumping fresh life into the debate over whether U.S. President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is brushing up against difficult geopolitical realities.”

There’s virtually no chance private financiers will put up billions of dollars to complete the Trans Mountain pipeline without a federal loan guarantee, analysts say, despite Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s assurance Friday that “no additional public money” will be invested in a project whose cost has now ballooned from $5.4 to $21.4 billion.

A hereditary chief of the Wet’suwet’en Nation is condemning a violent attack on a Coastal GasLink work site near Houston, British Columbia in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Alberta will toughen its emissions standards and close a loophole that would have allowed tar sands/oil sands companies to gain financially from their emissions.

The U.S. regulator responsible for natural gas infrastructure is taking a closer look at whether new projects are needed and how they affect people and the environment, and floating new policy to address the climate impact of fossil gas development.

A shareholder vote will decide whether the Royal Bank of Canada should tighten up its standards for sustainable finance, after a deal last year in which it helped Calgary-based Enbridge issue a sustainability-linked loan and bond while building a new section of its controversial Line 3 pipeline.

There are viable, cost-effective shipping alternatives to the contested Line 5 pipeline in Michigan—both for crude oil and natural gas—according to a new report that contradicts Enbridge’s claim the pipeline is a critical piece of infrastructure for refineries in Michigan, Ontario, and Quebec.

With the illegal insurrection in Canada’s capital now entering its third week, close observers are linking the occupation to past protests supporting pipelines and fossil fuels, digging into the white supremacist funding and logistics behind the convoy, and spotlighting the increasingly serious health impacts for downtown Ottawa residents exposed to round-the-clock noxious diesel fumes, deafening truck horns, and random harassment and intimidation in their neighbourhoods.

Alberta is seeking $1.3 billion in compensation from the U.S. government in the wake of President Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit.

New battle lines are being drawn between Canada’s financial regulators and Alberta’s oilpatch over the country’s climate change policies.

The CEO of one of Canada’s leading tar sands/oil sands companies is admitting that this year’s surge in global oil prices won’t last, projecting future prices that set the broader industry on a course for financial failure.

A letter released today by more than 150 non-government organizations is calling on 27 financial institutions led by the Royal Bank of Canada to pull their investment dollars out of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

A coalition of First Nations from northeastern Alberta is up against the likes of Shell and Suncor for a contract to build and operate the province’s first large-scale carbon capture and storage facility.

The price tag for the federally-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has ballooned to more than $17 billion, en route to a final cost that could hit $20 billion, and project completion has been delayed to 2023 or 2024, according to a new analysis published late Thursday.

The United States, Norway, and Canada are set to produce more oil this year than ever before, despite solemn pronouncements at last year’s COP 26 climate summit on the urgent need for climate action, Oil Change International asserts in a new analysis.

Ecuador’s private pipeline company OCP is expressing surprise over a pipeline rupture in the country’s Amazon region, despite a well-known history of erosion leading to catastrophic oil spills in the country.

A new Indigenous non-profit organization is seeking an ownership stake in the Trans Mountain Pipeline, saying its aim is to make sure communities along the pipeline’s route receive its benefits directly.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has found the cost of cleaning up orphaned oil and gas wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan already dwarfs the money collected from industry to pay for it.

As colossal fossils TotalÉnergies and Chevron Oil withdraw from Myanmar, citing the ongoing brutality of the ruling junta against protesters, campaigners say oil and gas companies have been complicit in propping up the violent regime.

Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. and the state of Michigan are renewing their legal hostilities over the future of the controversial Line 5 pipeline—and their latest court battle looks an awful lot like the last one.

The federal government’s plan to introduce a tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology hit the top tier of the Canadian climate agenda this week, after more than 400 climate scientists and other academics wrote to Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland urging her to drop the idea.

Canada is heralded as having one of the most ambitious prices on carbon in the world, rising from its current C$40 per tonne to $170 by 2030. But large industrial emitters pay only a tiny fraction of it, Corporate Knights reports.

Colossal fossil ExxonMobil has unveiled what news reports are calling an “asset-by-asset roadmap” to bring greenhouse gas emissions from its operations to zero by 2050, but leaves out the much larger climate impacts of burning those products once they’ve reached their final users.

Canada is getting set to roll out a tax credit to support fossil companies’ investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS), Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson confirmed in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News this week.

Citing “overwhelming interest” from the public, the federal government is extending the consultation deadline on its plan to meet a 40 to 45% carbon reduction target by 2030, while the fossil industry signals plans to continue expanding the oil and gas extraction that drives those emissions higher.

Opponents of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion are still raising concerns about plans to redrill a complicated crossing beneath the Fraser River, after the federal Crown corporation behind the project filed a response to their statement of opposition with the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER).

‘Big Oil’ is showing initial signs of a transition to ‘Small Oil’, as a handful of large European fossil fuel companies invest windfall revenues from high oil prices to begin their shift to lower-carbon investments—even if Canadian fossils still haven’t got the memo.

Alberta doesn’t have a good grasp of the overall environmental impacts of the tar sands/oil sands, a decade after implementing monitoring that was supposed to provide it, internal government documents suggest.

A major piece of unfinished business left behind at the end of last year looks certain to haunt British Columbia in 2022, as the province’s NDP government faces determined Indigenous opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the project itself runs into serious financial headwinds.

The federal Crown corporation building the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion has been handed a seven-day deadline to answer tough questions about soil stability, drilling method, and environmental impacts after proposing to redrill and reroute part of a 1.5-kilometre tunnel beneath the Fraser River, an iconic salmon-bearing waterway near the Lower Mainland population centre of Coquitlam.

Nearly one-fifth of the power lines around the world are at severe risk from sea level rise, severe storms, and wildfires, and U.S. utilities alone could face US$4.1 billion per year in climate impacts, according to new analysis released this week by BloombergNEF.

The city of Burnaby, British Columbia is pushing back against after federally-owned Trans Mountain Corporation asked to be excused from fire safety plans for its controversial storage tank farm.

Deep energy retrofits and tougher building code standards emerged as winners, while fossil fuel pipelines received no attention at all, as policy analysts dug more deeply into the ministerial mandate letters released in mid-December by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

October 7, 2021: The coal, oil, and gas industries received US$5.9 trillion in worldwide subsidies in 2020—a mind-bending $11.2 million per minute, every minute of every hour of every day in the year—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed.

December 17, 2021: The Canada Energy Regulator is so closely tied to the fossil industry that it can’t be counted on to produce independent advice on the country’s path to net-zero—yet it’s considered the leading source of in-house energy modelling the Trudeau government has at its disposal, according to an independent expert commenting on the CER’s deeply flawed energy futures report released earlier this month.

September 14, 2021: The world’s biggest publicly-traded provider of property and casualty insurance, Chubb, became the 16th insurer to declare that it won’t back the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline, a coalition of climate and Indigenous campaigners announced.

August 7, 2021: ExxonMobil’s massive Kearl Lake mine north of Fort McMurray was at risk of becoming the latest tar sands/oil sands to be devalued as one of the world’s most determined colossal fossils considered designating up to one-fifth of its global oil and gas reserves as stranded assets, part of a company-wide scramble to respond to crashing oil prices and weak markets for its product.

March 24, 2021: A new federal incentive, modelled on a U.S. tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage, would be tailor-made to drive higher greenhouse gas emissions and could produce unexpected surprises for private investors, a veteran U.S. energy consultant and attorney told The Energy Mix.

November 25, 2021: British Columbia’s only confirmed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal may be on its way to becoming a “financial albatross”, even as a developer continues to tout a second LNG project in Howe Sound, just north of Vancouver.

July 11, 2021: Two of Canada’s biggest fossil companies said they’ll by looking for about C$50 billion in taxpayer subsidies to bring their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

November 3, 2021: Canada was to join a group of about 20 countries and institutions to announce an end to public financing for oil, gas, and coal projects by the end of 2022, Le Devoir reported, putting an end to anxious speculation about whether the Trudeau government would sign on to what was seen as a pivotal pledge during this year’s United Nations climate summit, COP 26, in Glasgow.

October 31, 2021: After years of blaming limited pipeline access for the low price they’ve had to charge for their product, Alberta fossil producers were running into another problem by mid-fall: U.S. refineries don’t particularly like the product.

July 29, 2021: A county on the northwest coast of Washington State made a landmark decision to ban new fossil fuel development, reversing a trajectory that had it on course to become a gateway for oil, gas, and coal exports to Asia.

October 7, 2021: Alberta’s energy minister accused her former pipeline industry colleagues of being “really short-sighted” after the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) announced plans to shut down by the end of the year.

November 21, 2021: Heavily-armed RCMP agents stormed an Indigenous blockade and arrested 32 people, including Gidimt’en Clan spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham) and two journalists, in another escalation of the dispute over construction of the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

September 9, 2021: Canada must leave 83% of its fossil fuel reserves and 84% of its tar sands/oil sands in the ground if the world is to have even a 50% chance of holding average global warming to 1.5°C, according to a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature.

An MLA in Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government may soon face a complaint to the Law Society of Alberta, after drastically overstating the dollars from foreign donors that went into anti-tar sands/oil sands campaigns in the province, The Energy Mix has learned.

August 29, 2021: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s campaign promise to cap oil and gas sector emissions at today’s levels and set five-year targets to reduce them beginning in 2025 amounted to the end of fossil fuel expansion in Canada, a leading climate advocate said.

October 5, 2021: A team of international analysts pointed to a Canadian tar sands/oil sands operation as the most carbon-intensive by far in an index of major oilfields around the world, even as Alberta’s Canadian Energy Centre launched a Times Square ad campaign touting the country’s “friendly” oil.

January 20, 2021: The Canadian economy has added 42 new jobs for each one it has lost in fossil fuels since 2014, and a 20-year industry phaseout would only reduce fossil employment by about 8,500 positions per year—as many as the country usually creates every 10 days—concluded economist Jim Stanford in an analysis published by Toronto-based Environmental Defence.

July 14, 2021: More than two-thirds of Canadian fossil fuel workers are interested in jobs in a net-zero economy, 58% see themselves thriving in that economy, and nearly nine in 10 want training and upskilling for net-zero employment, according to a groundbreaking survey released by Edmonton-based Iron & Earth.

September 2, 2021: Blockades, lobbying, media campaigns, and other forms of advocacy grounded in Indigenous rights have stopped or delayed nearly 1.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, or nearly 25% of the combined emissions of the United States and Canada, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International concluded in a blockbuster report.

The Canada Energy Regulator is so closely tied to the fossil industry that it can’t be counted on to produce independent advice on the country’s path to net-zero—yet it’s considered the leading source of in-house energy modelling the Trudeau government has at its disposal, according to an independent expert commenting on the CER’s deeply flawed energy futures report released last week.

A cap on oil and gas emissions, a 75% methane reduction this decade, a net-zero electricity grid by 2035, a mandated 50% target for electric vehicle sales by 2030, and a renewed commitment to international climate finance are among the elements of the mandate letter issued to Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault Thursday afternoon by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

As the federally-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline slowly returns to service after the longest outage in its 68-year history, a senior pipeline executive is pointing to the vulnerability of British Columbia’s energy supplies, while critics call for a faster shift off fossil fuels.

Aligning climate targets with a 1.5°C future, aiming to at least halve absolute emissions by 2030, and issuing annual reports on the climate impacts of investments are among the best practices put forward for Canada’s five biggest banks in a report issued yesterday by Investors for Paris Compliance.

One of the key federal agencies responsible for charting Canada’s energy future is under fire for failing to include a full net-zero scenario in its latest annual modelling report released last week.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) gets special billing as “Big Foreign Oil’s apex lobby group” in a new study that contrasts the trickle of international funding to climate campaigners with the overwhelming influence of foreign fossils in driving up Canada’s oil and gas production and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Canada Energy Regulator (CER) is setting Canada up for climate failure with a report that projects increasing oil and gas production through 2032, relies overwhelmingly on unproven carbon capture technologies, and runs counter to decarbonization analysis and commitments from international agencies, the recent COP 26 climate summit, and the latest federal Speech from the Throne, according to climate policy and campaign groups responding to the report.

Nearly 70% of New York voters have backed an amendment to the state’s climate law to grant all residents the right “to clean air and water and a healthful environment,” potentially laying the groundwork for lawsuits against fossil fuel polluters and developers.

Some Indigenous communities in northern Alberta say they’re being handed a choice between terrible options as the federal government develops regulations to allow treated tailings from tar sands/oil sands operations to be released into the environment. One advocate is calling the prospect of tailings releases into the Athabasca River an “international human crime”.

One year after ordering the owners of the Coastal GasLink pipeline to fix multiple environmental violations identified along its 670-kilometre construction route, and being more or less ignored, the British Columbia government of Premier John Horgan is trying again. 

The RCMP’s mandate to enforce Canadian law is clashing with Wet’suwet’en First Nation sovereignty and opposition to the Coastal GasLink project’s development, raising deeper questions about how the two legal systems can coexist on the same landmass.

Desperate to get the public in its corner as it wrestles with its own imminent decline, Canada’s fossil industry has come up with a novel marketing message: tar sands/oil sands make beautiful (or, at least, non-ugly) things to play with.

Alberta’s oil and gas regulator has rolled out new rules aimed at addressing the growing problem of inactive and abandoned wells in the province, but critics say the industry should be forced to do even more to clean up after itself.

As the east coast reels from last week’s savage rainstorm, and British Columbia struggles desperately for traction with another atmospheric river coming ashore, observers are urging the Liberal government not to forfeit what remains of Canada’s inbuilt resilience, and to embrace the “build back better” agenda it promised in 2020.

A pandemic aid program to help oil and gas companies cut their methane emissions will be revisited now that the industry is back on its feet, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Friday.

Canada’s environment commissioner says a federal pandemic aid program for the oil and gas sector that was supposed to retain jobs and cut greenhouse gas emissions is not set up to do either of those things.

Environmental icon David Suzuki issued an apology Thursday afternoon after his remarks to a journalist Saturday were misconstrued as a call for property damage—and handed Alberta’s United Conservative Party government an opportunity to amplify that interpretation.

British Columbia’s only confirmed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal may be on its way to becoming a “financial albatross”, according to a new analysis released Wednesday, even as a developer continues to tout a second LNG project in Howe Sound, just north of Vancouver.

Profound damage to ecosystem and public health and wrenching cultural loss are the legacy of 54 years of tar sands/oil sands mining for the First Nations communities with primordial roots along the Athabasca River, concludes a special report by Inside Climate News.

Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy is looking for more than US$15 billion in damages after U.S. President Joe Biden pulled the plug on the 900,000-barrel-per-day Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office in January.

Two journalists have been released from custody, but the Coastal GasLink pipeline company is demanding that at least two land defenders “prove” their Indigenous status, following heavily militarized RCMP raids on a blockade aimed at stopping construction of a fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

Heavily-armed RCMP agents stormed an Indigenous blockade Friday and arrested 32 people, including Gidimt’en Clan spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham) and two journalists, in another escalation of the dispute over construction of the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

The Trudeau government will use a combination of investments and tax measures to establish an “enforceable”, “workable” cap on greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas operations, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in an interview with a CBC Radio podcast.

As rescue workers continue to search for the missing and communities struggle to cope with broken supply chains, damaged and endangered infrastructure, and lost homes and livelihoods in the wake of British Columbia’s catastrophic rainstorm, experts warn of many more such “disaster cascades” to come in an overheating world.

One person dead, hundreds involved in harrowing highway rescues, thousands evacuated from their homes after a wastewater treatment facility flooded, and a shutdown for the Trans Mountain pipeline: these were some of the scenes unfolding after a monster storm dropped a month’s worth of rain on southern British Columbia this past weekend.

With Canada intent on helping to slow global warming without destroying its economy, the country’s newly-appointed natural resources minister says his department can no longer be thought of mainly as the ministry for fossil fuels.

British Columbia’s public safety minister is condemning a blockade set up along a forestry road used construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline, after the Gidimt’en clan announced over the weekend that they would enforce a nearly two-year-old eviction order and bar workers from their territory.

As Line 5 pipeline owner Enbridge Inc. declares its proposed underwater tunnel project a perfect fit for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda, environmentalists continue their fight to close the pipeline completely, citing threats to the Great Lakes watershed and to the global atmosphere. 

With the odds of a catastrophic spill growing by the day, both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden need to show some political courage and shutter an “aging and dangerous pipeline” that carries Canadian oil and fuels through Michigan, says the former U.S. Chair of the International Joint Commission (IJC).

Canada fell from 58th to 61st spot in the latest Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), released this week during the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow, with its current climate performance and 2030 targets well below what would be consistent with a 2.0°C limit on average global warming.

Governments will have to coordinate efforts on the road to a net-zero economy to make sure the countries that move first and fastest don’t get most of the benefits, leaving lagging governments to cope with trillions of dollars’ worth of stranded fossil fuel assets, a new report warns.

TC Energy Corporation has committed to up to C$3.3-billion in what it calls additional temporary bridge financing to cover cost overruns related to the Coastal GasLink pipeline project.

A Canadian pipeline giant is citing soaring heating prices in Europe and an electricity crisis in China as proof that the global transition to a low-carbon economy needs to be driven by a “mix of balanced policy solutions,” despite analysis pinpointing the short-term price crunch as an argument for a faster shift to renewable energy.

Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Board (NZAB) is planning to move swiftly with its advice to the federal government on declining greenhouse gas emission caps for oil and gas operations, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his campaign pledge to introduce the caps during his address last week to the World Leaders’ Summit at COP 26, the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

The chief executive of one of Canada’s major tar sands/oil sands producers says he’s not opposed to a federal cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, as long as the government accepts his contention that large-scale emissions reductions will take years to achieve.

Canada will join a group of about 20 countries and institutions this morning to announce an end to public financing for oil, gas, and coal projects by the end of 2022, Le Devoir reported late Wednesday, putting an end to anxious speculation about whether the Trudeau government would sign on to what was seen as a pivotal pledge during this year’s United Nations climate summit, COP 26, in Glasgow.

Despite their loud promises to bring their greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050, eight of Canada’s biggest fossil producers cannot be trusted to manage their operations consistent with a 1.5°C limit on average global warming, says a report issued today by Oil Change International and Environmental Defence Canada alongside 15 other Canadian climate groups 

Today’s question: Net-zero targets have been all the rage for government and industry, but we’ve been hearing over the last year that “net-zero is not zero”. Where are the gaps between the spin and the substance?

Canada will impose a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and deliver a “major commitment” to encourage other natural resource-dependent countries to quickly drive down their own climate pollution, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told assembled world leaders when he took the stage Monday at this year’s United Nations climate change summit, COP 26, in Glasgow.

As world leaders descend on Glasgow this week for the start of the 2021 UN Climate Conference, Alberta is watching.

After years of blaming limited pipeline access for the low price they’ve had to charge for their product, Alberta fossil producers are running into another problem: U.S. refineries don’t particularly like the product.

Veteran climate advocate Steven Guilbeault is Canada’s new Minister of Environment and Climate Change and former environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson is becoming Natural Resources Minister after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled the new federal Cabinet Tuesday morning.

October 24, 2021: An MLA in Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government faced the risk of a complaint to the Law Society of Alberta, after drastically overstating the dollars from foreign donors that went into anti-tar sands/oil sands campaigns in the province, The Energy Mix learned in late October.

Canada is unlikely to be on the podium when a group of countries led by Denmark and Costa Rica unveils the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) during this year’s United Nations climate conference, COP 26, in Glasgow.

The fossil industry pushback has begun as the re-elected federal government begins looking at implementing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaign pledge to cap greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas at 2020 levels, then set five-year declining targets beginning in 2025.

Canadian environmental groups did nothing wrong when they accepted foreign funding for campaigns opposing tar sands/oil sands development, a public inquiry has reported.

Despite a slowdown in oil production and repeat promises to clean up after themselves, fossil operators in Alberta’s Athabasca tar sands/oil sands allowed toxic tailings ponds to grow 90 million cubic metres in 2020, according to an analysis of provincial data.

After a summer that saw one in three Americans experiencing extreme weather events, the Biden administration has released plans from 23 government agencies to address wide-ranging threats from climate change.

The federal government won’t wait for legislation to pass Parliament before making good on its campaign promises to cap greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas production and ensure that at least half of all cars sold in 2030 are zero-emission, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said last week.

As Parliament gears up for a new legislative session, a new poll from Abacus Data shows Ottawa lagging behind what a majority of Canadians want when it comes to climate action and implementing a just transition for fossil fuel workers.

Canada’s Big Six banks together announced Friday that they will join the global Net-Zero Banking Alliance championed by former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.

A decision by Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) to close its investigation into the devastating fire in Lytton, B.C., after concluding that there is no evidence to support concerns that train activity was the cause, has left residents feeling silenced and mistrustful. 

The current spike in oil prices is no reason to force industry to spend more on cleaning up Alberta’s tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, says the province’s energy minister.

The coal, oil, and gas industries received US$5.9 trillion in worldwide subsidies in 2020—a mind-bending $11.2 million per minute, every minute of every hour of every day in the year—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed in an analysis released this week.

Canada is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by only 16% this decade, far short of the 40 to 45% target that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced earlier this year, partly thanks to strategies that favour greater efficiency in fossil fuel use over a transition to non-emitting energy, according to an analysis released this week by the Trottier Energy Institute.

Alberta’s energy minister is accusing her former pipeline industry colleagues of being “really short-sighted” after the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) announced it will shut down by the end of the year.

Pipeline operator Beta Offshore faced tough questions about the hours it took to report a major spill, U.S. Coast Guard investigators boarded a massive container ship suspected of triggering the incident, and California lawmakers threatened an offshore drilling ban as the state continued its cleanup from a 475,000-litre crude oil spill off its southern coast.

A team of international analysts is pointing to a Canadian tar sands/oil sands operation as the most carbon-intensive by far in an index of major oilfields around the world, even as Alberta’s Canadian Energy Centre launches a Times Square ad campaign touting the country’s “friendly” oil.

Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau has invoked the dispute resolution mechanism in a 1977 treaty in a bid to keep the 68-year-old Line 5 pipeline operating through a critical chokepoint along the Great Lakes, prompting concern about the risk to a unique freshwater resource and the implications for Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction plan.

Damage from a ship’s anchor is emerging as a possible cause of an offshore pipeline spill this week that dumped at least 126,000 gallons/475,000 litres of crude oil across an initial area of 13 square miles, threatening wildlife and potentially closing miles of Southern California beaches for weeks.

Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says a detailed plan showing how Canada might finally meet a greenhouse gas emissions target will be ready in a few months, but not likely in time for this fall’s global climate change conference in Scotland.

Having been unable to protect a sacred village site from Coastal GasLink’s wrecking ball, the Wet’suwet’en are now fighting to protect a vital watershed as the pipeline company moves to drill beneath a pristine river in northwestern British Columbia.

Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 pipeline replacement project is expected to enter into service on today, making it the first major Canadian pipeline project to be completed since 2015. The milestone has fossils declaring a significant victory, while Indigenous campaigners vow to disrupt construction work that is still under way.

With the deadline for comments on a federal just transition strategy coming up tomorrow, Canada’s fossil lobby is making best efforts to change the channel from what’s best for oil and gas workers and communities, to what it will take to sustain the country’s carbon-heavy fossil producers.

Canada’s second-largest pension fund manager has announced plans to sell off its oil investments by the end of next year, en route to a zero-emissions portfolio by 2050, while pouring C$10 billion into a green investment fund for large emitters.

Fossils asked for “policy stability”, while oil worker advocacy group Iron & Earth pushed for retraining programs and a just transition package, as the dust began to settle on this week’s federal election.

Countries that have successfully managed a just transition out of polluting, destructive industries had good industrial policy, made best use of community assets, cared about justice, and planned ahead, authors Tamara Krawchenko and Megan Gordon wrote last month for Policy Options.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won a third term, more climate hawks took seats in the House of Commons, and nearly a dozen organizations demanded immediate action on the climate emergency as Canada’s $650-million pandemic election produced another minority parliament Monday night.

Climate change “is now undeniably personal” for most people in Canada, climate policy analysts Angela Carter, Kathryn Harrison, and Nicholas Rivers write for Policy Options. But before the country can map a net-zero future, the Canada Energy Regulator will have to get its low-carbon modelling right. The CER’s recent consultations show it still hasn’t got the memo.

Allowing Calgary-based pipeliner Enbridge Inc. to maintain its Line 5 pipeline by tunnelling beneath the Straits of Mackinac could generate US$41 billion in climate damages over the next 50 years, new expert testimony submitted to the Michigan Public Service Commission states.

Enbridge Inc. has been fined and could face criminal charges for breaching Minnesota environmental laws during the construction of its Line 3 pipeline replacement.

Fossil companies are under renewed pressure to meet a 10-part Net Zero Standard for Oil and Gas, including winding down production and sharply reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, under a new initiative introduced last week by investment firms overseeing more than US$10 trillion in assets.

Canada is one of 15 countries to have their performance rated “highly insufficient” in Climate Action Tracker (CAT)’s latest rating of governments’ emission reduction plans under the Paris climate agreement.

A former Liberal environment minister said the Trans Mountain pipeline could operate through 2060, Canada’s climate performance to date was rated “highly insufficient”, Liberal candidate and strategist Dominic LeBlanc talked openly about a majority government, and former U.S. president Barack Obama sent best wishes to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau as campaigns began crisscrossing the country for the last few days of this year’s federal election.

The world’s biggest publicly-traded provider of property and casualty insurance has issued what may be the world’s quietest media statement confirming that it will no longer offer coverage to the Trans Mountain pipeline.

The world’s biggest publicly-traded provider of property and casualty insurance, Chubb, has become the 16th insurer to declare that it won’t back the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline, a coalition of climate and Indigenous campaigners announced yesterday.

Barely three years after environmental and Indigenous leaders in British Columbia endorsed the province’s CleanBC climate plan, those same leaders have withdrawn their support and are demanding a plan that matches the scale of the climate crisis.

Canada must leave 83% of its fossil fuel reserves and 84% of its tar sands/oil sands in the ground if the world is to have even a 50% chance of holding average global warming to 1.5°C, according to a paper published this week in the prestigious journal Nature.

Climate held its position as a top-tier issue in last night’s English-language debate, parties tussled over their campaign pledges, and Calgarians declared climate action their top concern in upcoming federal and municipal votes as Canada’s national election campaign entered its last 10 days.

With scientists flagging methane reductions as the quickest first step to get climate crisis under control, governments in Canada and elsewhere have to stop relying on fossil fuel companies to reliably report emissions of the colourless, odourless gas from their operations, pioneering methane researcher Robert Howarth told The Energy Mix in an interview this week. 

The fierce, 150-mile-per-hour winds unleashed by Hurricane Ida last week left behind oil and petrochemical spills on land and at sea, with aerial photography and satellite images capturing some of the impacts in the aftermath of the storm.

A border carbon adjustment made an appearance as a campaign issue, parties’ climate platforms came in for renewed scrutiny, and the Liberals’ plan received an accidental endorsement from the Green Party leader and a deliberate one from her former B.C. counterpart as Canada’s federal election entered its second-last week.

Blockades, lobbying, media campaigns, and other forms of advocacy grounded in Indigenous rights have stopped or delayed nearly 1.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, or nearly 25% of the combined emissions of the United States and Canada, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International conclude in a blockbuster report issued Wednesday.

Our continuing coverage of Canada’s federal election September 20 carries the #Elxn44 tag. You can use the search engine on our site to find other stories in the series. Just days before Liberal leader Justin Trudeau made a campaign promise to institute a C$2-billion just transition fund for oil and gas workers, one of Canada’s top […]

Canada would face “diplomatic disaster” and isolation globally if Conservative leader Erin O’Toole carried through on his promise to scale back Canada’s carbon reduction commitments under the Paris agreement, a top climate policy analyst warned, as the federal election entered its third week.

A dangerous carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, last year is a foreshadow of the risks people face in the U.S. and elsewhere if the fossil industry and governments push through with plans to expand carbon capture and sequestration infrastructure.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s promise yesterday to cap oil and gas sector emissions at today’s levels and set five-year targets to reduce them beginning in 2025 amounts to the end of fossil fuel expansion in Canada, the country’s leading climate advocacy network told The Energy Mix Sunday evening.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole pledged to move boldly backwards on Canada’s emissions reduction target, the fossil lobby published its campaign wish list, and the climate crisis held its spot as a top concern for Canadian voters as the federal election moved into its third week.

The 10 companies that insure the lion’s share of oil and gas exploration and production could drop those high-carbon industries and increase their own shareholder value but are choosing not to, Bloomberg Green reports, in a summary of an analysis conducted by French investment banking giant Société Générale (SocGen).

Serious and “preventable” construction problems on the 3,000-mile Keystone Pipeline System in the United States validated President Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the controversial Keystone XL project on his first day in office, a group of senior Congressional leaders said Monday, citing a new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).

An influential Wall Street investment bank is encouraging its customers to pour their dollars into Canadian tar sands/oil sands operators, largely on the strength of two new pipelines that are inching closer to completion.

The Line 3 pipeline from Alberta to Wisconsin could begin operations as early as September 15, after Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. announced this week it had filed final pricing paperwork with regulators in Canada and the United States.

Alberta oil production now exceeds its pre-pandemic high, and has increased 86.2% since 2010, according to new data from the Alberta Energy Regulator and ATB Economics.

After Cenovus Energy CEO Alex Pourbaix made his pitch for C$52.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies to decarbonize production in the Alberta tar sands/oil sands, we asked Energy Mix readers how else they would spend that money to drive faster, deeper carbon cuts. The community delivered.

Less than a day before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest, most dire assessment of the global climate emergency, Cenovus Energy CEO Alex Pourbaix let it be known—apparently without a hint of irony—that he expects Canadian taxpayers to shell out up to C$52.5 billion to help his industry get the carbon out of its operations.

With a federal election likely just days away from being called, sitting governments of all political stripes weighed in with a business-as-usual response to the urgent call to action in this week’s climate science assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the hours after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its new science assessment, Canadian climate organizations linked the report’s stark findings to Canada’s stubborn refusal to scale back fossil fuel emissions and subsidies, and the urgent need to close the gap between science and action.

As climate and finance experts warn urgently against further investment in fossil fuels, the managers of Ontario teachers’ retirement pensions are pouring more dollars into natural gas infrastructure.

Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 pipeline replacement is on track to be in service by the end of the year despite ongoing protests and recent court challenges, the Calgary-based company said last Friday.

Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy is planning to build Canada’s biggest energy storage project to date, a 1,000-megawatt pumped storage installation on the grounds of the 4th Canadian Division Training Centre in Meaford, Ontario, about 200 kilometres north of Toronto on Georgian Bay.

A county on the northwest coast of Washington State has made a landmark decision to ban new fossil fuel development, reversing a trajectory that had it on course to become a gateway for oil, gas, and coal exports to Asia.

The completion of the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline could be delayed if TC Energy can’t resolve an ongoing dispute with LNG Canada over project costs, the Calgary-based company said Thursday.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to bring the Canada Energy Regulator (CER)’s energy futures modelling in line with the Paris climate agreement, The Energy Mix has learned, just as an international agency warns that the world’s 1.5°C climate stabilization target is slipping out of reach.

The Nisga’a Nation in British Columbia is teaming up with seven natural gas producers to propose a C$10-billion liquefied natural gas development, claiming the project will bring its emissions to net-zero within three years of starting operations in 2027 or 2028.

International oil companies may be on the verge of divesting tar sands/oil sands properties worth C$13.4 billion, according to a new report published earlier this month by Toronto-based Veritas Investment Research.

There won’t be any more negotiations over a proposed natural gas pipeline crossing Indigenous lands in northern Quebec, say Innu leaders who oppose it.

In a reversal being hailed as a new precedent, a pipeline operator is dropping its six-year-long federal
lawsuit against the city of South Portland, Maine.

More than two-thirds of Canadian fossil fuel workers are interested in jobs in a net-zero economy, 58% see themselves thriving in that economy, and nearly nine in 10 want training and upskilling for net-zero employment, according to a groundbreaking survey released this morning by Edmonton-based Iron & Earth.

Melting permafrost is causing the structural supports for the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline—one of the world’s largest—to buckle, raising concerns for the delicate and remote ecosystem through which it passes.

Two of Canada’s biggest fossil companies say they’ll by looking for about C$50 billion in taxpayer subsidies to bring their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The co-chair of a new expert panel set up to advise Ottawa on how to reach net-zero emissions says expansion of Canada’s tar sands/oil sands industry is “not well aligned” with that goal.

Much of the federal subsidy that has helped clean up abandoned oil wells in Alberta may have simply replaced money that fossil companies would have spent anyway, according to a new analysis.

Federal and provincial governments have lavished C$23 billion on fossil fuel pipelines, mostly in the form of loan guarantees and other fiscal measures that are heavily distorting Canada’s financial marketplace, according to new research released this week by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The Jason Kenney government’s inquiry into supposed foreign-funded interference with the province’s fossil industry has failed to make its case, but is still an affront to democracy, Greenpeace Canada senior energy strategist Keith Stewart argues this week in an opinion piece for the Edmonton Journal.

Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy has launched a US$15-billion trade complaint against the United States after President Joe Biden cancelled the presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

One U.S. oil pipeline gained support from the Biden administration, a second acquired a new regulatory hurdle, and a third might soon find itself back in court, as federal data showed 19 pipeline projects pushing toward completion this year.

A federal regulator has lifted a stop-work order on tree cutting and grass mowing along the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project route.

Two contract workers involved with Enbridge’s US$2.9-billion Line 3 replacement project in northwestern Minnesota have been charged with human trafficking, and reports of sexual violence and harassment associated with the project have been flooding in to local crisis centres.

The value of crude oil exports from Canada has increased over 15-fold in the last 30 years, according to a report from Statistics Canada and the Canada Energy Regulator.

Haphazard oversight by the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER) may have enabled a lax safety culture at Crown-owned Trans Mountain Corporation that is now making insurers nervous about backing the company’s existing 68-year-old pipeline and its efforts to complete a C$12.6-billion expansion project, a retired insurance executive says.

The United Kingdom’s biggest asset manager, Legal & General Investment Management, is dropping its shares in U.S. insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and three other companies, after concluding they aren’t moving far enough, fast enough to address the climate risks in their activities.

Alberta’s finance minister says the province’s C$1.3-billion investment of taxpayers’ money in the now-defunct Keystone XL oil pipeline project was a prudent gamble given the potential payoff in profits and jobs.

Canada’s five big tar sands/oil sands companies are raising eyebrows with their plan to form an Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero alliance aimed at cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 without reducing their actual oil production.

Alberta’s auditor general is criticizing the government for failing to fix problems pointed out six years ago in a program that’s supposed to guarantee coal and oilsands mines clean up after themselves.

It took nearly five months, after U.S. President Joe Biden dealt a death blow to the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. But Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy finally, formally cancelled the project this week, acknowledging that a decade-long fight has come to an end.

A peaceful protest against the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota on Monday was met with the same helicopter-as-weapon tactic that authorities deployed against citizens protesting George Floyd’s murder last summer.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Sunday called for more public-private cooperation on cyber defenses and said U.S. adversaries already are capable of using cyber intrusions to shut down the U.S. power grid.

Federal officials were asking themselves how many pipelines Canada really needs in the days after U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled Keystone XL.

The dispute over the cross-border Line 5 pipeline is entirely for Michigan to deal with, the state’s attorney general argues in a legal brief released Wednesday that flatly rejects Canada’s depiction of a foreign policy matter that Ottawa and the White House must resolve.

Another insurance company is abandoning the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Alberta’s predictably hostile, defensive reaction to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) landmark Net Zero by 2050 roadmap shows it no longer matters what the Kenney government or its fossil industry allies think about the drive to decarbonize the global economy and hold average global warming to 1.5°C.

The University of Waterloo moved yesterday to drop all its fossil fuel exploration and extraction investments by 2025 and decarbonize its C$2.7-billion pension and endowment fund 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2040, capping a six-year campaign by Fossil Free UW and allied groups to push the school to divest.

A new report by veteran earth scientist David Hughes is reinforcing the argument for a “stark change in direction” in Canadian climate and energy policy.

Limited access to insurance is emerging as a big obstacle for Canadian tar sands/oil sands companies aiming to get new projects off the ground, just a year or two after campaigners began setting their sights on getting insurers to abandon fossil fuels, CBC reports.

Canada’s biggest pension managers saw their investments in the country’s top four tar sands/oil sands producers grow by $2.9 billion in the first three months of this year, a 147% increase from last year, the Reuters news agency revealed last week in a new analysis.

As federally-owned Trans Mountain Corporation begins to tunnel under Burnaby Mountain, and climate and Indigenous activists protest, a coalition of media outlets and press freedom groups is petitioning the B.C. Supreme Court to order the RCMP to stop using injunctions as an excuse to block reporters from protest sites.

Alberta’s inquiry into the funding of oil and gas industry critics is getting its fourth deadline extension.

Canadians are only minimally familiar with climate issues, but give the federal government low marks for its plans to reach net-zero emissions and balance environmental and economic concerns, according to recent opinion research conducted for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) by Environics Research.

A judge has dismissed an attempt to quash the United Conservative government’s inquiry into whether foreign groups have conspired against Alberta’s oil industry.

The Spanish parliament has adopted a new climate law that calls for just a 23% emissions reduction from 1990 levels by 2030, but immediately bans new permits for coal, oil, and gas operations, sets a 2040 deadline to phase out fossil fuel vehicle sales, and commits the country to generate 74% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Tar sands/oil sands workers in the midst of Alberta’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak at Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.’s Horizon bitumen mine say their living and working conditions are putting them at risk—but they can’t afford not to work, even if they’re feeling sick.

Drivers across the southeastern United States have been getting a new sense of the vulnerability of their fuel supplies over the last week, and operators of the Colonial Pipeline ended up paying a ransom to regain control of their system, after a successful cyberattack took out a 5,500-mile pipeline network that runs from Houston to New Jersey and supplies the eastern U.S. with 45% of its fuel.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is planning to stop financing coal mines and power plants and curtail its funding for oil and gas production, according to a draft of an updated energy policy released last week.

A British Columbia legal research initiative and the UK government might just as well have named tobacco lobbyists to oversee health messaging, after two fossil executives were among 26 “exceptional individuals” identified as Canadian climate champions ahead of this year’s United Nations climate conference, one of the country’s top climate advocates said Monday.

Tar sands/oil sands companies are stepping up protective measures as a spate of COVID-19 cases sweeps through the region at the same time that thousands of workers are being brought in for spring maintenance shutdowns at various plants.

With Michigan’s deadline to shut down the Line 5 pipeline just two days away, the state and Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. are telling different stories about whether the leaky, 68-year-old line will still be operating Thursday morning.

Last year’s dive in oil prices has caused Alberta to change the way it calculates payments due from tar sands/oil sands mines make to ensure there’s enough money to clean up the mess they leave behind.

Imperial Oil Ltd. investors have voted 86% to defeat a shareholder resolution that it adopt a target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

This past winter, COVID-19 outbreaks at two Coastal GasLink work camps in northern British Columbia spilled over into neighbouring Wet’suwet’en communities, according to media reports. The spread of disease to Indigenous communities through industrial projects is an example of environmental racism—when government policies discriminate against racialized communities by disproportionately exposing them to harms from industrial and other toxic activities.

The Dakota Access Pipeline will be allowed to operate without a key federal permit while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completes a new environmental review, the Biden administration announced earlier this week.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is less than 10 days away from implementing a momentous decision to shut down a 68-year-old, underwater pipeline that her administration and many of her constituents consider an environmental hazard and an affront to Indigenous rights, but that Canadian Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan has declared a “non-negotiable” irritant in bilateral relations.

The third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting the Al