Tag Archives: oil prices

Apr 06 2015
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Climate, Culture, Economy, Oil and Gas

The winter of our discontent

We could sell the snow. There's plenty of that

“Atrocious” is the adjective that Canada’s central banker, Stephen Poloz, chooses in order to characterize the effects of low oil prices on the Canadian economy in the frigid months ahead. Sort of like the weather, which is, on the East Coast, equally vile.

Four-hundred-some-odd centimeters of the white stuff alighted on fair Moncton this winter. A good 350 cms of it still perches stubbornly on the ground. The long-range forecast calls for another 40 in the days ahead, bringing us right into daffodil season. It’s a safe bet we’ll beat our 1974 record and top the scales at more than 18.5 feet of dirty, frozen water before the deluge is finally over. If it will be over.

Atrocious, indeed.

I’m taking safe bets that the last of Moncton’s cheerless snow mountains will not be gone before Canada Day, and while the rest of the country celebrates the arrival of summer by beach-combing with ice-cream cones, we’ll be repurposing our shovels as snowboards (having abandoned our gardens to the inevitable effects of short- and long-term climate change).

Oil and gas production, we are told, has something to do with this anomalous circumstance. As David Suzuki writes in a recent blog post, “Rising average temperatures do not simply mean balmier winters. Some regions will experience more extreme heat while others may cool slightly. Flooding, drought and intense summer heat could result.”

He’s kidding, right?

In fact, according to the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change, he’s onto something. It writes: “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere, where such assessment is possible (medium confidence). The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85 (0.65 to 1.06) °C 2 over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist.”

So what accounts for this (and last) winter’s brutal encroachment into spring along the northeastern seaboard of North America?

Blame it on the “polar vortex”. Here’s what Discovery.news.com has to say about the lately observed phenomenon:

“Some researchers suggest that. . .kinks in the jet stream that allow. . .cold air to spill out could actually become more common in a warming world because of changes to the environment where that cold air originates – the Arctic. Rutgers University sea ice researcher Jennifer Francis was one of the first to suggest a link between the steady decline of Arctic sea ice caused by warming and the extreme twists and turns that the jet stream – the fast-moving river of air miles up in the atmosphere – can take northward and southward. (At the same time that a dip in the jet stream sends polar air southward, a corresponding ridge can push warmer conditions up into the Arctic.)

“The idea is that as white, reflective sea ice has been increasingly melting to lower and lower areas in the summer, there is more dark, open ocean that can absorb the sun’s rays. As sea ice begins to reform as fall progresses, the water releases that heat into the atmosphere. That added heat could be pushing atmospheric patterns in a way that destabilizes the polar vortex.”

Lovely! Or is the proper word “atrocious”?

In any case, the oil and gas chickens in this country may have finally come home to roost. I’m buying a Canada Goose parka in July, when Moncton’s snow mountains of 2015 might just be gone – just in time for winter.

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Jan 07 2015
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Economy, Oil and Gas

The economic pendulum swings again

DSC_0042

The grand expanse that is Canada guarantees that one of the iconic realities of our national character remains our ability and willingness, when necessary, to pull up stakes and head for wherever the pastures grow greenest.

Rarely, of course, has that been Atlantic Canada.

Most often – at least since Confederation made honest European invaders of some of us – the Elysian fields of our economy have been located in Ontario, the country’s traditional manufacturing hub. That’s where, as the late, great Stompin’ Tom Connors once famously wrote, “the Maritimers all go.” 

Or, they did.

Over the past decade, or so, the big employment draws have been the tar sands of Alberta and the surrounding support industries of the oil and gas sector in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. That’s where, lately, my friends and former neighbours sojourn – driving trucks, working back-office jobs and otherwise punching gilded time clocks.

Or, again, they did.

Now, the shift – as inevitable as the ebb and flow of an ocean tide – begins again, and one of Canada’s leading financial institutions, the Royal Bank, is sounding almost chipper.

“There has been considerable discussion about the negative impact of falling oil

prices on the Canadian economy,” Bank economists Paul Ferley, Nathan Janzen and Gerard Walsh write in a recent monograph. “This has been reinforced by anecdotal reports about oil-producing companies cutting back on investment spending particularly within the oil sands. However, as we have emphasized in earlier commentaries, there are offsetting positive outcomes from lower oil prices.”

The first, and most obvious one, they note, is the concurrent boost to the U.S. economy, on which Canada depends for much of its export business (some $300-billion a year). “A stronger U.S. economy implies a growing market for Canadian exports. This is the case despite the recent expansion of oil production in that economy reflecting greater utilization of shale oil reserves. Though the U.S. oil and gas sector is likely to see reduced investment activity, its share of overall capital spending is relatively small.”

Secondly, falling oil prices depresses the value of the Canadian dollar relative to its American counterpart. Again, that’s good for domestic manufacturers and exporters, whose wares suddenly cost less to American buyers.

“The third key offset,” the economists report, “is that Canadian consumers will also be looking at lower gasoline prices that will provide an attendant boost to consumer spending domestically. It is of note that while business investment is a sizable 13 per cent of nominal GDP (including investment in intellectual property products), consumer spending is a massive 54.3 per cent. Thus, a small rise in consumer spending can go a long way to offsetting a marked drop in investment.”

All of which has Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne fairly salivating. And why not?

For years, that once-mighty, supremely confident, magisterially self-important province, has suffered the indignities that $100-per-barrel oil has wrought on its manufacturing-export economy, including an ignominious slump into have-not status in the federal equalization formula. Now that the price of benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil has settled below $53 a barrel, Ms. Wynne is doing her level best to appear generous.

“Ontario’s economy can be a buffer,” she told the Globe and Mail last week. “We have a diverse economy and it can be a buffer in a time like this, against some of that volatility. I don’t wish for low oil prices and a low dollar for Alberta. But at the same time, we want our manufacturing sector to rebound. So if that (low oil price) helps, then that’s a good thing.”

In reality, though, as long as Canada’s value to the world is predominantly measured by the oil and gas it extracts and the pipelines its builds – which has been the common hymn, soulfully trilled by the western caucus of the reigning Conservative Government in Ottawa – volatility, and all that this implies, is likely to be the national economy’s organizing principle for years, even decades, to come.

Shall we now expect a new wave of pink-slip-bearing, prodigal Maritimers returning to their roots down home, where the pastures are, if not exactly green, a little less brown than they seemed not so long ago?

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