Fort McMurray

Hang around Mac Island for a few hours and you’ll see rivers of families pouring in and out. Mothers in hijabs shepherding rambunctious kids to their swim lessons. Latinx families chatting away in Spanish as they head to the library. East African teenagers carrying hockey bags. All happy vignettes of Canadian immigration and diversity. One relative newcomer to town, Ana Maria Mendez, had originally been a curator in Peru before landing in Fort Mac with her husband, where she was now working as Manager of Arts and Culture at Mac Island. Her infectious personality gave her a real advantage as she worked with others to skillfully repurpose an empty hallway in the cavernous rec center into an art gallery and exhibition space. Focusing mostly on local artists, the gallery also has a deeply international orientation given the diverse global makeup of the town. She has overseen more than seventy art exhibitions and countless public events, administers a dance program, and is involved in other public art projects in town. She has done all this having only immigrated to Canada in 2009.

It’s not just Mac Island; the whole town defies easy portraits. It really is a family town, and a young, prosperous family town at that. Sixty-nine percent of people in town are married (compared to forty-seven percent nationally). Only twelve percent of the town is over fifty-five years old. Almost forty percent of households have kids under the age of six. And more than seventy percent of households make $150,000 or more.11Peter Scowen, “From Boom Town to Family Town: Meet the Real Fort McMurray,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 2015, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/meet-the-real-fort-mcmurray/article24915022. These stats are a bit of a distortion because huge numbers of workers fly straight into the camps and straight out, barely registering on any census data or local population surveys. Those folks bring their bodies in and take their commitments out with them when they leave, invisible to the town’s deeper workings; but left behind are a significant number of people, maybe even a majority, who are not planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

Declarations of love and fidelity to the town are easy enough when times are bumping. But these stats we just cited are from late 2014 and early 2015, when everything was humming along. We were first there just as the real oil slump was starting, and while we could sense a lot of latent fear and anxiety then, most of it was still speculative, a lot of “Ha ha—yeah, holy shit, it’s not good, but it’ll pop right back up” sentiments. But prices kept dropping through 2015 and stayed volatile and low through 2016 and 2017. The cheerfulness of the town turned resentful and bitter as layoffs started coming, overtime dried up, debts started piling up, and marriages showed cracks. As Bernard the Roughneck, a patch worker who has emerged as a pseudo-grassroots public booster of pipelines, put it: “Alberta—we feel like that guy that always buys a round at the bar for everyone, and the one time we don’t have that cash, no one is willing to buy us a round.”22Bernard is a Vancouver-raised millennial trying to pay off student loans by working in the tar sands: “Please, not just for me, but the guys who have kids and are losing their marriages.” Quoted in Elizabeth McSheffrey, “‘Put Me Back to Work’ Pleads Struggling Kinder Morgan Pipeline Supporter,” National Observer, 23 August 2016, http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/08/23/news/put-me-back-work-pleads-struggling-kinder-morgan-pipeline-supporter.

We have no better idea than anyone else: maybe 2018 or 2019, or maybe further down the road, oil prices will leap back up and all will be forgiven. Maybe they’ll plunge right down to $10 a barrel. Or maybe, perhaps even probably, we have entered into long period of volatility. Long-range investors, such as managers of pension funds, are no longer viewing oil and gas as a stable investment. Major foundations like Rockefeller and many others are actively divesting from fossil fuels and establishing fossil-free funds as investment vehicles.33Rockefeller Brothers Fund, “Divestment Statement,” Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 3 March 2017, http://www.rbf.org/about/divestment. The continuum of volatility is built into the DNA of capitalism, and creative destruction is part and parcel of its operating principle. Capitalism attempts to absorb the extreme swings of global warming into its own logic as a justification for its own repetition. Capitalism reproduces volatility in the climate just as much as in markets.

Through 2016 and early 2017 the world was awash in oil. Production and consumption continued to plow along at spectacular levels, in part owing to OPEC’s willingness to open the taps and let their members produce as much as possible, and with any luck push the extreme or unconventional producers—the shale, the tar sands, the frackers of the world—out of business. It was an old-school price war, and OPEC (led by Saudi Arabia) was hoping that by flooding the market with cheap oil, they would be able to capture enough market share to suppress competitors sufficiently to keep them under control. This strategy is so effective because OPEC, and particularly Saudi oil, can be produced so much more cheaply than unconventional sources.44In 2016, the tar sands, with some variance from project to project, needed oil prices to stick somewhere above US$50 a barrel to break even and prices well above that to make profits. See Yadullah Hussain, “How High Break-Even Costs Are Challenging New Oilsands Projects,” Financial Post, 22 January 2015, http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/how-high-break-even-costs-are-challenging-new-oilsands-projects.

Eventually, prices have to head back up. At least, that’s what we heard one night at the bar when a petroleum engineer convinced us that all would be well soon. We had been spending a lot of time at that bar in downtown Fort Mac and we got introduced to a youngish guy who worked for Suncor and was very eager to talk to us.

He was generous with his time, and we really appreciated his willingness to talk with us. Let’s call him Brad. He looked the part: twenty-eight years old, but could have passed for forty-five. Pastel polo shirt. Stylish hair. Very happy to trade golf tips back and forth with Joe. Finished his engineering degree in 2010, looked around for a while in Ontario, couldn’t find anything; so he made his way to Alberta and quickly found himself in the Mac. He intimated that he was making piles of cash, but never said how much, and we never asked. The man was thrilled, ebullient about how things had worked out for him (especially financially), and he was eager to share his investing strategy: “Invest everything, like all of it, like every last bit, in oil.” He had paid off his house and was taking all the surplus capital he could find and was reinvesting it back in the industry. Prices were low, so all the better, he reasoned. “Q2 2016, it is going to be right back up again to $80. Just watch.” We took some careful notes.

We probed him about global warming and the kaleidoscopic environmental and social reverberations of the tar sands. Brad is a smooth one. He said all the right things: “Sure it’s an issue, but the Alberta tar sands are rigorously regulated by multiple layers of government. And we welcome that regulation because we want to be as conscious and environmentally sensitive as possible.” His logic was straightforward: Foreign oil is dirty and unmonitored and supports authoritarian governments. Coal is worse for the environment. And really, if you look at it, the tar sands, even at their worst, are just a drop in the bucket. He easily answered all our questions, happily untroubled by much doubt.

Honestly, it was hard not to believe him. The three of us left that conversation thinking Brad had performed brilliantly in his able defense of his industry and adopted hometown. He had painted a picture of oil powering our world for generations, with a mostly benevolent, or at least willingly regulated, industry that would continuously improve safety and emission standards while Canadian liberal tolerance would lead the way. And every major political actor, provincially or nationally, across the ideological spectrum, agrees with Brad. As he said: the oil is there; it must be taken out for our collective economic well-being. Recently elected Canadian governments—Rachel Notley’s NDP in Alberta and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal majority running Canada—are seemingly progressive and yet both leaders and parties are entirely behind the oil industry, lobbying hard for pipeline building and fossil fuel export expansionism (while at the same time ushering in tepid but well-marketed climate change policies). The state is very firmly on Brad’s side. The state sure isn’t going to leave those barrels of oil in the ground.

The Canadian economy is so deeply wedded to the oil industry that the routes to disentanglement are bewildering: The energy sector makes up roughly ten percent of Canadian gross domestic product.55In 2014, its direct contribution to GDP was 9.8 percent: https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/vrvw/archive/2014/index-eng.html. Energy accounts for roughly one-quarter of Canada’s exports.66See the National Energy Board’s statement that in 2014 energy accounted for $128.7 billion CAN in exports: https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/vrvw/archive/2014/index-eng.html. It’s a lot more pronounced than that in Alberta, where “the energy sector makes up nearly thirty per cent of the Alberta economy. Direct revenues from energy royalties account for more than twenty per cent of the provincial government’s revenue base—and that’s before we even get started on the big slice of the corporate and personal income tax pie that the sector delivers.”77David Parkinson, “Panic Time: As Oil Goes, So Does Canada’s Economy,” Globe and Mail, 15 October 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/panic-time-as-oil-goes-so-does-canadas-economy/article21116012. Even those estimations don’t reveal the full depth of the extractive sector’s direct and indirect economic influences: “One-third of all Toronto Stock Exchange-listed companies are resource related, and another third are financial with heavy exposure to the resource sector.”88Dale Jackson, “How OPEC Is Likely Ruining Your Retirement,” Globe and Mail, 29 October 2015, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/how-opec-is-likely-ruining-your-retirement/article27016937. Virtually everything is directly or indirectly (via transportation or plastics or whatever) bound up with extractive fuels, and this is true in every part of the globe, to greater or lesser extents.99“According to market research by IBISWorld, a leading business intelligence firm, the total revenues for the oil and gas drilling sector came to [USD] $5 trillion in 2014. This sector is composed of companies that explore for, develop and operate oil and gas fields. It is also sometimes referred to as the oil and gas exploration and production industry, or simply as E&P. Since the 2014 estimates for global gross domestic product range between [USD] $77 trillion and [USD] $107 trillion, the oil and gas drilling sector makes up between 4.6% and 6.5% of the global economy.” Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030915/what-percentage-global-economy-comprised-oil-gas-drilling-sector.asp; see the original report here: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry/global/global-oil-gas-exploration-production.html.

So is it true, as Brad says, that we have no choice? Is the only option just to double and triple down on oil and gas and hope for the best, because there really are no alternatives, or the alternatives are basically unthinkable? That’s exactly the language politicians the world over use, because the (short-term) consequences of anything else are considered to be too brutal.

Maybe those choices are being made for us by the erratic economics of oil. The volatility of the Canadian dollar is largely attributed to the oil and gas sector. When oil prices are high, the dollar becomes artificially inflated and negatively impacts manufacturing and tourism. When oil prices are low, the dollar crashes. And when prices stay low, the oil and gas industry sheds workers across the world at a startling rate. Stories blanket the media landscape of layoffs from North Dakota to Alaska, Russia, Venezuela, Alberta, and everywhere in between. Economic projections in every jurisdiction are repeatedly battered by cheap oil. Industry is spinning hard, hoping that the new realities of extractive economics are somehow positive, giving us a chance to tighten belts, increase competitiveness, redouble R&D. Governments chirp about how economies now have an opportunity to “rebalance” and “rebrand,” to shift to more stable and dependable revenue sources, that global warming is really a great opportunity for capital.

This brings us back to the relationship between tradition and change, and the proposition that this changes everything. What has to change is the incipient, roiling, twitching anxiety that informs our colonial relationships with development and progress, locking us all into highly limited sets of possibilities. Affirmative routes forward cannot simply resist and ultimately mirror extractivist ideologies; they must articulate and construct something new, something else. Those visions have to be able to speak directly to the hundreds of thousands of employees who are dislocated by oil sector shocks, and everyone who is thrown back and forth by the capriciousness of global capital: rolling in cash now, scrambling and buried in debt tomorrow. Alternatives to development cannot be nostalgic; they have to be able to overcome corporate promises of yet another F350 truck, one more casino-themed vacation, and a house that’s just a little bit bigger.

Those affirmative visions have to surpass the dispiriting, constant hustle for more and still more, with compelling renditions of resurgent social relations. An ecological future has to answer the seductive promises of capital, to imagine our lives and land beyond profit, beyond domination. If we can find ways to relate with the other-than-human world that are not saturated with exploitation, then new articulations of sovereignty and alternatives to sovereignty start presenting themselves, and new forms of life become believable. That sounded right to us, but we needed to see and smell and taste that more clearly. How can that vision be forged into a believable argument, an argument that a tar-sands worker with a shitty mortgage, a family, and no job back home might take seriously? How can land rematriation be articulated as a fulcrum for a better world for all of us? We needed to get out of the Mac to clear our heads, to look for other ways of thinking about these questions. So we clambered back into our dusty, mud-ravaged SUV and headed west across the province, aiming for Lubicon Territory.