Thread by @aaronhoyland

As we watch Keystone XL go up in smoke, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to offer some unsolicited advice to Premier @jkenney. 🧵

Most Albertans don’t love oil and gas. What Albertans love is the prosperity that oil and gas brought to our province.

I can appreciate that, for a province with some of the largest oil reserves on the planet, the idea of a world transitioning away from oil & gas is scary, and many desperately wish we could return to the halcyon days of high oil prices and the corresponding bulging public purse.

However, there are realities at play here well outside our control.

1) Oil demand is going away. We can quibble about the timing, and how long the residual demand tail will last, but there is no mistaking what’s happening here.

2) Oil from the oil sands is difficult and expensive to extract and process, and results in significant carbon emissions and waste byproducts. Yes, very smart people are working on solving that problem. However, they’ve been working on it for 50 years.

But Alberta is so well-poised to be a leader in the energy transition. We have nearly twice the number of engineers per capita as the next closest province. We have countless brilliant people chomping at the bit to solve the next generation of technical challenges.

It would be so much easier if we could just return to the “good old days”. So we create war rooms. And fund investigations into environmental groups. And provide loan guarantees for pipelines.

But none of these things work. They don’t work because they’re all predicated on the assumption that we can change market forces that are outside our control.

It’s not Biden. It’s not Trudeau. It’s not the Sierra Club or Jane Fonda or Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s the invisible hand of the market that you’ve long claimed to respect and support, telling us that the tides are changing and we’re still stubbornly building our sand castles.

The change is coming. We can either embrace it, or we can continue tilting at windmills and let the new world pass us by. I implore you, choose the former. It will be hard work, but we’re Albertans; since when have we let that stop us?