Chinese Out, Gateway Pipeline (Hopefully) Dead

From Interfax China:

Shanghai. July 16. INTERFAX-CHINA - The China National Petroleum Corp. will bail out of a landmark oil pipeline project in Canada as well as reduce investment in other oil sand projects in the country due to insufficient support from the conservative Canadian government, a senior company official said during an industry conference held in Canada's resource-rich city of Calgary late last week.

This is actually good news, because all good Canadians should want the Gateway Pipeline project dead as a doornail. Forget about the environmental problems that arise when you run an oil pipeline through a bunch of mountains, and think of the larger issues around the "greening" of the tar sands. Right now the best hope for that lies not in Ottawa, but South of the border.
California, for example, has passed a clean gas law that requires cuts in carbon emissions through the entire life cycle of the product, from extraction to transportation to final combustion. In May, Ontario and B.C. got on board with this concept, signing agreements with Governor Schwarzenegger to only consider oil purchases from low emitting sources. Furthermore, national (U.S.) legislation with a similar intent may be as little as two years down the road.

Since so much energy goes into producing gas from the tar sands, this kind of legislation will pressure the players in the Alberta Oil Industry to get their act together. If they don't clean up their processes, they won't be able to sell their product.

Unless of course they have a pipeline to the Pacific that lets them sell dirty oil to the less finicky Chinese. No pipeline, no escape hatch. See?

Something You Already Knew

The Tory Green Plan has "oil and gas lobby" fingerprints all over it. Most obvious quotation in Hill-Times story, from Liberal l MP John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Ont.) :

"I think industry's challenge was to not look too happy with it, so that it wouldn't look as though they'd won," he said. "In the whole question of the gamesmanship of these things it would be very hard to know what their actual reaction to this is and what they could have really tolerated in tougher regulations, because it's not in their interest to say that."

All of which I predicted here.

Expect Crocodile Tears...

...out of the oil patch after Thursday, no matter how soft the Tories new emissions targets, goals, regulations etc. might be. Expect more whiny bullshit like:

We're seeing an industry now really with no leadership in Western Canada, nobody seems to be speaking up for this industry and when they do, nobody wants to say anything of substance...It's really an industry predicated on soft love.'

Because, as someone who has worked with PACS of various industry lobby groups for years, that's what they do: they whine like welfare queens. Like the guy in The Terminator said, that's ALL THEY DO.

You know as a lobbyist that you've hit the sweet spot when an industry friendly government says: we must have found the middle, because we've offended both sides of the issue. Ever since offending both sides became the acid the test for being in the political Center, lobby groups, no matter how much free candy they get handed, have made a point to feign offense.