The Capitalist Pressure to Extract, an Ecological and Political Economy of Extreme Oil in Canada. (original) (raw)

Barely five years ago, the debate about humanity's energy future was still organized by the paradigm of "peak oil." That is, the existence of a relative threshold beyond which the planetary consumption of oil would grow more quickly than the advances in new methods of extraction within a given margin of economic viability. 1 The end of the oil era was fast approaching, as the reserves would eventually run dry. 2 The peak oil paradigm garnered two kinds of responses. On one side, those who were convinced of the necessity to get away from oil advocated a transition toward a new energy base consisting of renewables and/or toward much less energy-intensive societies. 3 Others, particularly the stakeholders in the hydrocarbon industry, claimed that we were far from a "peak," because the reserves of hydrocarbons were actually much larger than we thought if we included the vast potential of unconventional oil sources in the form of fracked gas and oil, the tar sands, certain deposits of coal and certain deposits of offshore oil and gas, along with the conventional oil reserves. These sources of hydrocarbons, the existence of which had been known for a very long time, suddenly became recoverable with the rise in the price of oil and gas in the early 2000s. And in fact, history has tended to side with the industry rather than the transition advocates, who watched with some astonishment as the prices rose -in keeping with the peak oil model -producing effects that were the complete opposite of what their theory predicted. The impact of demand overtaking supply, combined with geopolitical factors such as the two Gulf wars certainly translated into an increase in prices. However, this increase, rather than having an effect on demand by pushing energy consumers toward renewable sources and even technology that is more energy-efficient (as was the case during the last big energy crises in 1973 and 1978), played out on supply instead, stimulating the production of the so-called "unconventional" forms of oil, the extraction of which had become economically viable at the new heights of price per barrel. The global exponential increase in oil consumption has not been stopped by the equally rapid increase in prices. Instead, the reality since the 2010s has been a price ceiling and then a drop as these new sources of oil entered the market, which has allowed the consumption of oil to continue rising at a brisk pace. The price mechanism sent the wrong message: as the rate of increase in consumption accelerated faster than the rate of increase of extraction, prices moved upwards as expected 4 , but at a certain price threshold, the quantity of recoverable oil increased suddenly. Rather than telling us that the wells were running dry, the increase in prices promised abundance and pushed the pressure for a change of our energy base into the mists of the distant future. 5