How to Advance a Just Energy Transition in Oil-Dominated New Brunswick

There are many places today that depend heavily on a single industry. This creates vulnerability should the industry in question start to fail. One industry that often leads to economic dependency is oil.

Such is the case of New Brunswick, a small province tucked away on Canada’s sparsely populated Atlantic coast. New Brunswick is home to Canada’s largest oil refinery, which employs more than 4,000 full-time workers, produces over half the province’s export value—and emits 3 million tons of carbon annually.

What matters is not merely whether a green transition is occurring but how such a transition occurs.

The company that owns the refinery, Irving Oil, is facing a precarious future. A report issued by the Atlantic Economic Council in February 2024 says the company can survive the net-zero transition, but only with government aid. The recent death of the company’s patriarch, billionaire Arthur Irving, has heightened doubt over Irving Oil’s future at a time when the group has admitted an openness to a “partial or full sale.”

Whatever the future of New Brunswick’s most controversial employer, it is clear that fossil fuel is on the way out. Will the province adapt by diversifying its energy sector and building a green economy? Or does the inevitable fall of Irving Oil portend a future of economic hardship for what is already Canada’s poorest province?

What matters is not merely whether a green transition is occurring but how such a transition occurs.

The Fight against Natural Gas

Last summer, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released a report describing the grassroots movements opposing fossil fuel development in Eastern Canada (Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island). CCPA researchers found that these movements have experienced significant success over the past decade. Public pressure in Quebec and Prince Edward Island has led to legislated bans on future extraction projects.

In New Brunswick, too, grassroots movements have succeeded in blocking new extraction and transportation projects. In 2014, various Indigenous, Anglophone, and Francophone groups formed the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance (NBASGA) to oppose shale gas extraction and infrastructure. Shale gas is a methane-rich natural gas found in fine-grained sedimentary rock.

The group’s opposition resulted in a moratorium on shale gas exploration and extraction, as well as a commitment from the Western Canada-based hydraulic fracking company Headwater Exploration that it would not invest in new projects in the province without “clear social licence and consent from Indigenous groups.” For a time, it seemed protestors had won the fight against shale gas.

But fears of natural gas projects have been renewed. The moratorium was partially lifted in 2019 by what was then a new provincial government. Still in power today, Blaine Higgs, the province’s premier (the Canadian equivalent of governor), has been an outspoken supporter of natural gas.

The Higgs government’s most recent energy plan has come under scrutiny for its express dependence on technological innovation, centering its efforts on hydrogen production and going so far as to name its report the New Brunswick Hydrogen Roadmap (NBHR). Hydrogen also holds export value, being transportable over long distances, and is carbon-free at the point of use.

But carbon-free at the point of use does not, it turns out, mean that the product is actually carbon-free. The degree to which hydrogen is a carbon-free energy source depends on its feedstock or the product used to produce hydrogen, which is later consumed. (This broader analysis of energy impact is sometimes referred to as “life cycle assessment”).

Critics of the report have not been hard to find. Jim Emberger, spokesperson for NBASGA, wrote that “the good and proven parts of the province’s new plans must be larger in scale and more rapid in execution, while those parts that are speculative, or based on political or economic factors, must be harshly judged on their ability to timely provide the necessary help.”

J.P. Sapinski, professor of environmental studies and sociology at the Université de Moncton, echoed Emberger’s sentiment. He also said that the government has poured millions of dollars into building small modular nuclear reactors—another point of emphasis in the provincial government’s plan—which, Sapinski told NPQ, are “probably never going to exist.”

One reason for the government’s divergence from popular opinion might be the influence of Irving Oil, owned by the province’s most influential family. Such influence is suggested in the CCPA report, coauthored by Sapinski, which states that the “political dominance of the Irving family is a major barrier to change, and the new climate action plan reflects the current political will to maintain the economic and energy status quo.” Challenging government policy is one thing, but challenging the province’s most lucrative corporation and biggest for-profit employer is another task entirely.

The Québécois Approach

Though all Eastern Canadian provinces have been able to block proposed fossil fuel projects, only Quebec has seen success in challenging existing infrastructure beyond coal plants. Quebec’s challenge has gone further still, taking on not only fossil fuel infrastructure but also the neoliberal conditions that abetted the climate crisis in the first place. Le Front Commun pour la Transition Énergétique (the Common Front for the Energy Transition) emerged on the back of 130 local committees, coming together to oppose the Energy East pipeline. The project was proposed to connect the crude oil produced in the Alberta tar sands to the then Irving-owned Canaport deep-water export terminal in Saint John, on New Brunswick’s east coast.

Organizers in Quebec have managed a level of success far beyond what has been achieved in other Eastern Canadian provinces, Quebec’s long and proud history of political organization proving fruitful in the climate crisis era. According to the CCPA:

Long-standing civil society resistance to fossil fuel extraction and transportation—built over 20 years and met with multiple key successes—has moved toward implementing a just transition. There is now an active province-wide public debate on energy transition and its social and ecological dimensions.

Movements take time. And one that challenges New Brunswick’s energy sector is unlikely to appear overnight. But what if there is no viable alternative to grassroots committees leading in the green energy transition?

A Conflict of Visions

The CCPA report outlines two paths to a green energy transition: a localist and a technocentric approach.

The localist approach seeks to empower communities and minimize the ecological impact of industrial scale solar and wind farms. Proponents champion focusing on communities’ needs through small, local, efficient projects that put control and power in their own hands while reducing the need for “emission-generating commodity imports.”

Supporters of the technocentric approach feel the urgency of the climate crisis as deeply and sincerely as the localists, but also stress corporate incentives and tax breaks for those creating energy-efficient and energy-producing technologies and building them en masse.

How does one challenge the proprietors of fossil fuel infrastructure when the prospect of social and economic ruin looms?

Sapinski argues that a technocentric approach is not only less effective in reducing emissions but could precipitate a kind of capitalism lock-in. When asked about large-scale wind farms, for example, Sapinski said he’s against such projects because it’s “usually large transnational companies that own and operate them, so they get the income.” Local communities have little to gain.

Sapinski added that it’s not that wind-generated power itself is unfavorable, but corporate-owned wind farms wrest agency from ordinary people. It is this concentration of wealth and power which is to be opposed. He gave the example of a case in New Brunswick, on Lamèque Island, where a local co-op and Spanish energy company, ACCIONA, jointly own a new small-scale wind farm. “[The co-op] gets 200 grand a year from the wind farm. It’s a very small part of the profits, but they get something.” Not much, but perhaps a start.

While many, like Sapinski, oppose New Brunswick’s current hydrogen-based energy plan, not all are as convinced the climate crisis necessitates a purely localist transition. Emberger is less insistent on how the green transition should occur. He explained to NPQ that NBASGA is an alliance encompassing groups of many types, which naturally have their own views, ideas, and agendas.

As such, NBASGA does not take an official position. While agreeing that the green energy transition should empower communities and minimize ecological impact, Emberger says, they “recognize that in order to meet the climate challenge that some solutions will require the involvement of governments—either because of the size, complexity, speed and expense of the solution, or simply as a matter of regulatory necessity, enabling legislation and public persuasion.”

Challenging Existing Fossil Fuel Infrastructure

As the movement against shale gas demonstrates, New Brunswick has the social infrastructure to challenge new fossil fuel projects as they emerge. In itself, this is a striking achievement, considering the popular support for new extractive projects in similarly sized American states. North Dakota, whose population is nearly equal to New Brunswick’s, increased its crude oil production by 260 percent between 2010 and 2023, with an explicit social license, reflected in the Republican Party’s political dominance in the region.

But where New Brunswick activists lag behind other provinces is in their challenge to existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Higgs, the province’s premier, is a former senior executive at Irving Oil.

Until recently, the Irving family held a monopoly on virtually all the local newspapers in New Brunswick. They recently sold their media company, Brunswick News, to Postmedia, which shares the same pro-business, pro-oil editorial views.

The Irvings are certainly divisive, but they are tacitly accepted by most New Brunswickers. The family is estimated to employ roughly one in 12 people in the province—if you do not work for the Irvings yourself, someone close to you does. How does one challenge the proprietors of fossil fuel infrastructure when the prospect of social and economic ruin looms?

Local empowerment…can be a powerful antidote to climate denialism.

This is where consideration of how a green energy transition is to occur becomes critical.

A technocentric approach threatens to abet the trope of the coastal elites—out of touch with the rural, small-town masses—who close manufacturing plants, refineries, and drilling sites to build often-despised renewable energy infrastructure.

A localist approach, by contrast, seeks to empower local communities by finding climate solutions suited to their unique needs. These transitions are more likely to involve smaller-scale, locally owned energy production infrastructure, improvements in public transport, efficient urban planning, and improved energy efficiency in houses. And citizens are assured that there will be opportunities to live decent, healthy lives during and after the green transition.

Empowered to make choices about the future of their community, people will be less inclined to turn toward reactionary, authoritarian politicians. The fact that so many need convincing of the gravity of the climate crisis is deeply unsettling. Local empowerment, in short, can be a powerful antidote to climate denialism.

What must be more carefully considered by the vanguard of the green energy transition—scientists, activists, and ordinary citizens—is the need to address climate and economic justice together. How we build a green economy matters. Empowerment, cooperation, and a rejection of mass, technological nonsolutions—that is the path to a greener, fairer, and healthier world that benefits all of us.