The following is a re-print of the March 2026 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.
In the 1970s, a series of crises culminating in the 1979 Iranian Revolution caused a global oil supply shortage that doubled the price of oil and drove much of the global economy into recession.
Different countries learned different lessons from the oil shock. Denmark, for example, resolved to reduce its dependence on volatile fossil fuels by investing in alternative energy sources. Through a state-led industrial strategy, the country invested aggressively in wind power and worked to reduce consumer energy consumption. Denmark is now one of the cleanest, most energy-efficient and most prosperous economies in the world.
Canada, on the other hand, resolved to double down on oil production. Through a state-led industrial strategy of its own, the country unlocked the oil sands and began a decades-long project to commercialize the sector at the expense of other value-added industries. The Canadian economy is now twice as dependent on oil production as it was fifty years ago (not to mention vastly more polluting), and we have done little to reduce consumer demand for fossil fuels.
In 2026, U.S. and Israeli aggression in Iran has triggered another global oil shock. Oil prices are up about 50 per cent so far, but depending on how and when the crisis is resolved, there is no telling how much higher they will go. That will be painful for the Canadian economy—even as the Canadian oil industry rakes in tens of billions of dollars in windfall profits—but the bigger question is whether we learn anything from the experience.
In the 1970s, Denmark was the outlier in pivoting to renewable energy. Most of the world followed the same path as Canada in trying to secure new sources of oil. In the 2020s, the situation has reversed. Most countries are already trying to reduce their dependence on oil, and this latest crisis is likely to accelerate the trend. The difference this time, besides an awareness of climate change, is the availability of cheap renewables and electric vehicles. Countries like Spain and Pakistan are weathering the current crisis thanks to their massive investments in solar in recent years, while electric vehicle super adopters like Norway, Ethiopia and China are insulated from gasoline price hikes.
The Iran crisis is all the more reason for countries to double down on clean tech to escape future oil shocks. Indeed, as a new report from the think tank Ember argues, the Iran shock may have pushed forward peak oil demand by several years.
For Canada’s oil provinces and the federal government, this is both a warning and an opportunity. The current oil windfall—perhaps the last big boom in a century-long rollercoaster—should be aggressively taxed, as the Alberta Federation of Labour recently called for. Those revenues should be reinvested in affordability-focused energy efficiency measures, economic diversification and environmental clean-up.
Assuming the current crisis is the new normal, on the other hand, and consequently doubling down on oil and gas production once again, would be a disastrous economic mistake. When it comes to major new infrastructure projects, we need to be thinking less about short-term profits and more about where the economy is going to be in 40 years, as I said on the Progress Summit main stage earlier this month.
It’s not the 1970s anymore. Time to start acting like it.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Canada’s top energy forecaster puts the fossil fuel blinders back on
In its flagship 2023 report, the Canada Energy Regulator for the first time considered what a global net-zero scenario would mean for the Canadian energy industry. It was a big deal for a federal agency that has traditionally served the interests of the oil and gas sector by perpetuating a narrative of indefinite fossil fuel demand. And the results of the analysis were striking—an 83 per cent decline in oil sands production by 2050. The results were so stark that Matt Hulse and I undertook a whole research project to unpack what a decline of that scale would mean for workers and communities in Alberta.
The big takeaway at the time: no political party or government in Canada can save the oil sands from collapse if the rest of the world stops buying Canadian oil.
Three years later and the global shift toward a cleaner economy continues apace. Not fast enough to put the world on a path to net-zero emissions, but fast enough to put oil and gas markets into structural oversupply in the coming years—a fact that the present oil shock does not change and may even exacerbate if countries accelerate their decarbonization efforts. For Canada, collapsing medium-term oil demand remains a significant risk with potentially catastrophic consequences for unprepared oil and gas regions.
How unfortunate, then, that the 2026 Canada’s Energy Future report, the CER’s first update since 2023, no longer considers a global net-zero scenario in its analysis. Instead, the report assumes that global demand for Canadian oil—and consequently the production of Canadian oil—remains robust in all scenarios, even one in which Canada theoretically achieves net-zero emissions within our own borders.
I won’t get started on the report’s domestic net-zero scenario—the amount of magical thinking required to claim carbon neutrality while maintaining oil sands production is astonishing—but it’s worth highlighting the bigger problem here. It is not a forecaster’s job to predict the future. But it is their job to consider a range of possible futures. By removing the global net-zero scenario, the CER has blinded itself (and, more importantly, the governments that depend on it) to the greatest downside risk facing the oil and gas industry in the years to come.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
The reviews are in for the new Sustainable Jobs plan. In last month’s newsletter, I called the new Sustainable Jobs Action Plan a “glorified press release,” a position that I repeated to the CBC. The government’s official sustainable jobs advisory body has now reached the similar (if more diplomatic) conclusion that the plan “does not yet reflect the forward-looking vision required by legislation.” It’s a rough start for a key plank of Canada’s just transition strategy.
Where will Canada’s electrician apprentices come from? A research paper from the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum finds that Canada needs to train 264,000 new skilled tradespeople in the next ten years to meet projected demand. Electricians, in particular, are the lynchpins of a decarbonizing economy and worker shortages loom. The report is unfortunately thin on recommendations, but it emphasizes the importance of proactive, coordinated recruitment and retention efforts.
Industrial carbon pricing is costing the oil industry pennies. A helpful analysis from researchers at the Canadian Climate Institute points out that the average carbon price paid by oil sands companies today works out to a mere nine cents for every barrel of oil they produce. That figure will rise to an average of 50 cents per barrel by 2030 if the federal government follows through on its industrial carbon pricing commitments, which is unsurprisingly being fought by Alberta and the oil industry. Imagine oil producers actually had to pay for the full cost of their pollution.
First fossil fuel phase-out conference to kick off in Colombia. Santa Marta plays host to the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels on April 24-29, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. The goal is to produce a concrete roadmap for the wind down of fossil fuel production and consumption in like-minded countries. It’s an exciting and positive response to the capture of the UNFCCC process by a handful of petrostates and their oil companies. Canada ought to participate, but I don’t have my hopes up.
What does a fossil fuel phase-out look like anyway? In anticipation of the Santa Marta conference, the International Institute for Sustainable Development published Progressing the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, which offers principles for effective decarbonization roadmaps. It’s not exactly a new idea, but the report helpfully consolidates lessons from the best examples globally. It also highlights avenues for international cooperation to manage the costs of fossil fuel decline.
Sticks—not carrots—are the crux of effective climate policy. A new study published in the journal Climate Policy finds that the most effective climate policies undertaken around the world to date—in terms of significantly and reliably reducing greenhouse gas emissions—have mostly been variations on taxes. It’s an area Canada lags in, especially with the rollback of consumer carbon pricing. Incentives may be popular, but they don’t solve the root problem of pollution. One especially underused tool in Canada is congestion charges. Getting a car off the road is always going to be better for the environment than replacing it with an EV.
The news is not paying attention to climate change… The Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder published its year-end review of global media coverage of climate change. It finds that climate-related stories fell 14 per cent in 2025 from the previous year and were down 38 per cent from the peak in 2021. North American coverage, in particular, has cratered.
…but climate change is still a problem, you guys. The World Meteorological Organization’s latest State of the Global Climate report is a grim reminder that ignoring climate change doesn’t make it go away. Every key indicator of planetary destabilization continues its irrepressible march upward (or downward, in the case of sea ice and ocean pH). This year’s report also includes a cheery case study on the heat-driven expansion of infectious tropical diseases.
The wrong people are taking credit for good climate policy. An interesting study published in the journal PNAS, “Why Biden-era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns,” complicates an argument I’ve made around climate policy durability. While the study does validate the theory that providing material benefits increases political support for climate action, it also finds that the political proceeds often accrue to the wrong people. In the U.S. case, Americans tend to attribute the benefits of former (Democratic) president Joe Biden’s green infrastructure to their own (often Republican) governors, even if those governors did not support the program. It’s a tough pill to swallow for federal policymakers.
Clean tech requires mineral extraction, but not as much as you think. The mineral needs of the clean energy transition present a conundrum for many pro-climate environmentalists wary of the mining industry. The good news, as a new report from the University of Technology Sydney and Greenpeace International, Beyond Extraction, concludes, is that we can cut projected mineral extraction in half through better resource efficiency measures and a greater commitment to recycling. That’s one of the big silver linings when it comes to things like batteries. Unlike fossil fuels, which require indefinite extraction, you can reuse most of the materials in clean technologies when they reach their end of life.
Africa has the most to gain from decarbonization. The Earth4All initiative, launched by a coalition of global NGOs, has published Africa’s just transition opportunity. It points out that African countries import more than US$100 billion per year in fossil fuels even though Africa has enough renewable energy potential to meet 1,000 times its own energy needs—a ratio vastly more favourable than any other region of the world. According to the report, getting there will require a “radical” restructuring of the continental economy. Getting out from under the heel of global capital starts with debt cancellations and more long-term development finance.
Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon
We don’t understand what AI is doing to the labour market. Two new papers highlight the challenges of trying to measure the impacts of rapidly evolving technologies on jobs. In Workers’ exposure to AI, the International Labour Organization criticizes the false equivalence made by some researchers, commentators and governments between theoretical AI exposure and actual labour market outcomes. In Research on AI and the labor market is still in the first inning, the U.S.-based Hamilton Project points out that jobs data is extremely noisy, and efforts to measure AI’s impact may ignore other underlying employment trends. Both papers make it clear that it is too early in the generative AI era to assume, for better or worse, that AI’s impact on the labour market will echo prior technological disruptions.
