BC wants to be the next Norway

British Columbia says it wants to be like Norway. What it means by that is that it wants to be at the forefront of clean tech, while still pumping out fossil fuels, a fine balancing act indeed.

It's a balancing act that is close to the balancing act that characterizes Mark Carney's vision for Canada as a whole, but it's one that has BC's strong environmental movement in something like panic mode.

BC is pressing ahead with at least ten large new solar and wind projects, almost all of them joint ventures with Indigenous companies, and is building new transmission lines to share this clean energy with the province's resource-rich northlands.

But, at the same time, it is further developing its lucrative liquid natural gas (LNG) resources, with its first export terminal coming online and others in the planning or building phase, as well as a new gas transmission pipeline up to Prince George.

All of these large-scale projects easily fall into the definition of the large "nation-building" and "energy superpower" projects that Prime Minister Carney is trying to encourage with federal money. But the tension between fossil fuel development and sustainability is palpable. The sustainability part seems to be mainly for the domestic market, while the fossil fuels are mainly for export to the likes of Japan and South Korea, which see BC fossil fuels as slightly more sustainable than some of the available alternatives.

It's a fraught and frankly unconvincing argument - the old "transition fuels" justification that the oil and gas industry had been peddling for decades now - reliant on the increasing electrification of gas production (a bizarre juxtaposition in itself) and some stricter regulation around methane leaks.

This ability to hold two conflicting views simultaneously - a textbook definition of cognitive dissonance, with all of the psychological discomfort that involves - is not dissimilar to that of Norway, the undisputed world leader in electric vehicle take-up, with one of the cleanest power grids in the world, but at the same time a major oil and gas exporter. 

Norway, like BC, is unlikely to be able to achieve its ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets due to its continued fossil fuel production (its carbon emissions ARE coming down, although nothing like fast enough to meet its goals). But it manages to be able to keep both ideas in its mind without its metaphorical head bursting. Should we laud its efforts? Uncertain.