A fire engulfs Tehran’s Shahran oil depot after Israeli airstrikes hit the facility. Photo courtesy OSINTtechnical/X.

“As severe energy shortages mount in Europe, Canada’s role as a progressive, reliable global energy supplier could be part of the energy solution, a Canadian grassroots coalition spokesperson says.”

“Canada’s status as a politically-reliable source of fuel makes it an attractive target for investment to meet future energy needs.”

“Canada is among leaders in providing reliable energy… Canada stands out more than ever as a partner of choice for Europe; and Europe has every interest in signing long-term contracts and investing massively in Canada.”

These statements might sound like they were made this week. But they’re from 2022, when the fossil fuel industry launched a well-coordinated communications and influence campaign that would use Russia’s war in Ukraine to effectively destroy the Western climate movement.

The industry saw the 2014 annexation of Crimea and its impacts on European energy markets and politics as a missed opportunity, and they spent the following decade ensuring they were prepared for the next crisis. When Russia launched the war, they were ready for it, and they were able to quickly spread a coordinated message across their influence networks, including through media, think tanks, trade associations, and direct access to politicians.

In the US, the fossil fuel industry and the right launched a campaign blaming “Biden’s green agenda” and calling for a radical expansion of fossil fuel production. In British Columbia, our two dominant parties fought on the floor of the legislature over who supported the LNG industry more aggressively. In Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney called for expanding oil production with the slogan, “Alberta oil is better than dictator oil.” In Newfoundland and Labrador, Premier Andrew Furey said their offshore oil was needed “to relieve some of our NATO partners of the tyranny of Russia.”

In short, the industry was able to effectively control how the war’s effects on global energy supplies would be discussed and perceived in the public sphere. They used the moment to push one key message: that the only appropriate response in North America was to aggressively ramp up fossil fuel production. Today, the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran has spurred a new and more far-reaching energy crisis. Industry representatives, think tanks, and pro-fossil fuel politicians across Canada are attempting to replay the same political strategy.

Within two days of the news that Iran was closing the Strait of Hormuz, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson—who until recently sat on the board of oil sands giant MEG Energy—told reporters, “What it [the war] absolutely means for our position in the world as an energy and natural resources superpower is we are even more important today than we were before the weekend.” He called the illegal attack, which has already killed over a thousand Iranian civilians, “an opportunity” and described Canada as a “stable, reliable, predictable, values-based producer of energy.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was quick on the draw, too, declaring on March 2 that a new pipeline connecting the tar sands to the west coast is needed to provide “our trading partners and allies [with]… a stable source of supply.”

CBC is doing its part to launder the new narrative—much like the old one—without even including an ‘analysts say’ qualifier: “The widening war in the Middle East is driving up spot natural gas prices in Europe and Asia, highlighting the potential for Canada to play a greater role as a stable global supplier.”

The federal Conservatives are using the situation to push not for insulating Canadians from price shocks, which Canada is more than capable of doing, but for de-regulation and a radical expansion of export projects.

The rhetoric, the political strategy, and the media uptake are all eerily similar to those of 2022. The last time around, the fossil fuel industry won unequivocally: fossil fuel subsidies doubled, oil and gas companies wreaked record windfall profits (that went primarily to shareholders in the US), and restricting fossil fuel supply disappeared from the climate policy toolkit, replaced with so-called “all of the above” energy policy.

Their campaign also launched a new form of fossil-fueled nationalism in North America, which helped bring about both the 2024 rise of Trump 2.0 and the ostensibly anti-Trump, pro-fossil fuel nationalism of Mark Carney’s campaign.

Unfortunately for the industry, things look a bit different this time to the would-be customers who might buy our “reliable” and “values-based” energy products. LNG demand in Asia is already declining. Proponents have paradoxically been betting that the emerging LNG supply glut (prior to the war) would drive down prices enough to convince Asian countries to build a huge amount of gas energy infrastructure, locking themselves into reliance on decades of Canadian exports.

That was already tenuous a few weeks ago. India’s top LNG importer, for example, said in January that prices would have to fall to $6-7/mmBtu for India’s LNG demand to grow, a price that is likely below breakeven levels for expensive Canadian producers.

But it’s now absurd: Asian LNG spot prices rose 50 percent to more than $15/mmBtu in the last week.

The calculus for investment decisions in South and East Asia, and even in Europe, is straightforward: do you invest in fossil fuel infrastructure—expensive, exposed to volatile commodity markets, vulnerable to bombing campaigns and geopolitical shocks, and subject to the whims of fascist regimes—or do you invest in renewables?

Ethiopia’s 2024 decision to ban internal combustion engine vehicles looks very prescient in the light of the 2026 energy crisis, and it is likely an indicator of where much of the world is about to go. China, long thought to be a bottomless pit of demand for North American fossil fuels, is heading in that direction as fast as they can, in part by spending tens of billions of dollars on a cash-for-clunkers style program designed to phase out gas and diesel vehicles.

The question is not whether the industry’s attempt to replay its 2022 strategy will succeed in pushing the rest of the world back towards fossil fuels. It won’t. The question is whether the industry—an integrated, cross-border bloc of capital that spans both the US and Canada—will succeed in deepening the creep of fossil fascism in Canada and tying our fates to the dying project of oil-lubricated US hegemony.

That’s where the Canadian left and the climate movement come in. The industry won decisively in 2022 and has consolidated its political position in the intervening years. It’s up to us to fight back and make sure that this same strategy can’t be used to railroad Canada into going down with the American ship.

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on X @ngottliebphoto.

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