LIFE AFTER OIL IS COMING … BUT WILL WE BE READY?

The year is 2040. Symbolic of Edmonton’s rust-belt economy, electric cars whiz by an abandoned, derelict Refinery Row, although there are plans to turn part of the old complex into a petroleum heritage site. In a nearby run-down cafe, Chad and John talk about the boom years of their youth. They recall the time before Alberta got left behind, as governments and consumers worldwide turned away from dwindling oil and coal energy sources in a mass response to global warming and other environmental concerns. They discuss the time before downtown Calgary became an abandoned shell of empty buildings, before Fort McMurray turned into a ghost town, before so many of Alberta’s youth moved to Atlantic Canada to take plentiful jobs in the red-hot tidal-power industry. “We never thought Alberta’s boom would end,” says John. “Yeah,” replies Chad, looking philosophical. “But the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.”
This future shock scenario may sound far-fetched, especially with all the hype about Alberta’s current petroleum-driven boom and seemingly unending supply promised by the province’s oil sands.

But environmentalists are predicting a post-carbon or “carbon-constrained” future, when the world will use significantly less fossil fuels to the point where they will no longer be a main source of energy.

“We’re at the very beginning of the end of the oil age,” said Lindsay Telfer, director of the Sierra Club of Canada’s prairie chapter. “Our own government’s trying to struggle with it.”

After hearing the fictional dystopia described above, an analyst with the Pembina Institute replied “I don’t know if things would happen that dramatically.”

Jaisel Vadgama said the more likely conversation would be “if we had started planning, we could still have a vibrant economy, or a boom based on something else.

“We are certainly at risk of being left behind on new technologies,” Vadgama admitted. “Alberta could shoot itself in the foot.”

Vue Weekly