Sometimes you have to work hard to make the connection between events to tell a story, and sometimes the events just connect themselves. 

The first story was trumpeted as great news! Alberta’s oil producers had outdone themselves and sucked four million barrels of oil a day out of the ground to set a new record for July. About 80 per cent of that output is from the tar sands bitumen, one of the most polluting forms of energy on earth. 

All in all, this milestone is nothing to cheer about. 

The second story was that July 2024 was the hottest month on record for both Edmonton and Calgary, with Edmonton recording 11 days above 30 degrees. The average is just two. 

Hotter temperatures, year over year, created the conditions for the Lesser Slave Lake, Fort MacMurry (the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history), and Jasper fires, along with multiple devastating hail storms, a four-year-and-counting drought, and the second most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, the 2013 southern Alberta flood. 

The final story is from the Narwhal, which revealed, through documents obtained through the province’s freedom of information process, that the Minister of Utilities, Jason Nuedorf’s, office was bullying senior bureaucrats in the province’s independent electricity regulator to lie to support the government of Alberta’s justification for a moratorium on renewable energy projects. 

TAKE ACTION: Tell the Alberta government it’s time to turn the power back on for Alberta’s clean energy future! 

So, let’s take a crack at connecting these dots. 

While the Town of Jasper was burning as a result of fires made more probable and intense as a result of a warming climate, Alberta was producing a record amount of carbon-intensive tar sands oil, and doing its best to quash any internal opposition to a politically motivated, anti-free enterprise moratorium on vitally important clean energy. 

Sound about right? 

Of course, these are just three examples that happened to cross my desk within an hour of each other. Unfortunately, there are more. Lots more. 

The Alberta government is opposing any meaningful policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that the federal government is attempting to implement. Of the policies being proposed by the feds, it’s hard to pick the one that the province of Alberta hates the most, but the cap on oil & gas emissions would have to be in the top two, along with the clean energy regulations. 

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies spend millions of dollars to convince Canadians they care about climate change while at the same time, they lobby governments to delay or stop actions that reduce their pollution. 

We need to hold polluters accountable for driving climate change. 

It’s time the government of Alberta oil and gas companies took responsibility to reduce pollution and prevent further weather disasters that impact millions and cost billions to clean up.

We are seeing this happen across Canada but in Alberta, it has the added sting of irony that while we celebrate big polluters’ accomplishments and crush the aspirations of clean energy companies, we suffer the consequences of our actions with record-breaking heat, wildfires and incalculable tragedy again and again. 

That’s not a coincidence, that’s just connecting the dots.