It is a tragic constant that whenever calamity erupts, there are people eager to exploit it.

No sooner had Russian tanks, under false pretenses, rolled over the Ukrainian border, than the pettiest propaganda machines began churning for the war in the West—not from the Kremlin, but within our own societies. In the United States, where the Republican Party has devolved into a cesspool of autocratic sycophants driven by the same win-at-any-cost mentality that has guided Putin for over two decades, it is all too predictable that rather than band together to consolidate a national response, elected representatives instead take snipes at their political opponents, whether it is belatedly blaming Obama for Trump's manhandling of Kyiv, or embarrassing attempts to score brownie points in the culture wars.

Next door in Canada, where the shadow of Harperism looms large over the Conservative Party, the same populist authoritarianism has found an eager host. With the Flu Trux Klan finally ejected from the capital city, provincial MP Randy Hillier, a man so extreme that he was thrown out of the Ontario Tory caucus, pivoted to praising Pukin with the same eager recklessness as the tankies touting Assad. But the establishment Conservative response—provincially and federally—has been only marginally less divisive: as soldiers and civilians fight and die for the spirit of democracy itself, the Tories have seized on a much more vital cause: fast-tracking pipelines.

It's the same tired story: Alberta bitumen, one of the dirtiest sources of oil on the planet, provides a strategic alternative to "bad" oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, &c. Indeed, the sales pitch riding the wake of Russian energy sanctions sounds uncannily similar to the sales pitch from back when Iran was the whipping-boy. The criticism hasn't changed, either: tar sands development is extremely energy-intensive and depends on high prices for profitability, meaning anyone with a stake has a vested interest in crises that drive that price up—say, a war in Ukraine.

Not that the Tories would dare claim a European war is a good buying opportunity in public—the Ukrainian diaspora tilts toward the prairie provinces, so Conservative premiers can't afford to alienate them. Instead, Jason Kenney, Harper's would-be successor until he quit federal politics to rebuild the Alberta Firewall, joined in calls to crack down on the Russian oligarchs. There's just one problem: the oligarchs underwrite the pipelines. Alberta public pensioners can look forward to a crunch as the chronically-mismanaged fund AIMCo looks to divest its Russian holdings; meanwhile, as of this writing Roman Abramovich & Co. have not been added to the Canadian government's sanction list.

The inconvenient truth is that fossil-fuel economies and authoritarian politics are deeply intertwined. As the rest of Canada locked down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the oil companies ploughed ahead into Wet'suwet'en territory in brazen contempt of both local sovereignty and health safety. Despite having taken Canadian citizens hostage (to say nothing of the continuing genocide in Xinjiang), Beijing faced nothing near the blowback to Moscow—not the least because a Chinese embargo would shut down most of the world's consumer economy, but also because sweeping sanctions would harm tar sands exploitation too, where the state conglomerate Sinopec manages the single-largest production share. Meanwhile, as taps turn off in Europe, Beijing is offering a lifeline to Moscow just as Russia provided a back door for Iranian exports.

If Canada wants to get tough on Russian oligarchs, it must stop being gaslit by its own pipelines. Overlooked in the war profiteers' scramble to capitalize on the latest fossil-fuel bubble is a much more significant hypothetical: In a world of renewable energy, where the petrostate is the obsolete relic of backward economic thinking, could Putin have afforded this war at all?