While Andrew Sheer's Conservatives will undoubtedly wring as much political capital as they can out of the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline, less partisan people will see it as the inevitable outcome of two facts: the current low price of oil and the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels if we are to have any chance of mitigating the worst effects of the climate change now well underway.
Fortunately, Star readers are sufficiently sophisticated in their thinking to understand that new pipelines have no place in our world today, as the following letters attest:
TransCanada pulls the plug on Energy East pipeline project, Oct. 6Meanwhile, today's Star editorial offers some astute observations:
Politicians fuming about TransCanada’s cancellation of the Energy East pipeline apparently believe that short-term profits for Big Oil trump not only the welfare of the communities the line would run through, but the welfare of all Canadians, since the bitumen it would have carried worsens the devastating impact of climate change. Mimicking U.S. President Donald Trump’s futile quest to bring back coal, Big Oil’s apologists try to focus the public’s attention on jobs, ignoring the fact that green energy already employs more Canadians than the oilsands. TransCanada’s decision is in line with a worldwide trend away from oil and towards a sustainable energy future. It’s time that politicians faced the truth and stopped propping up fossil fuels with billions of dollars in subsidies every year.
Norm Beach, Toronto
I expect Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna are now, finally, after all, getting the message. It’s time to stop approving and building more pipelines. This is not the way to the low-carbon economy, to the clean-energy future we desperately need.
In addition to other compelling reasons against pipelines, it is now abundantly clear that building more pipelines does not make economic sense. When called to give full account for the pollution up and downstream, considering the return on investment of extracting and processing the dirtiest fuel on the planet, the plug has been pulled on the Energy East Pipeline. And rightly so.
There are court cases currently underway in B.C. to challenge the seriously flawed decision to approve the Kinder Morgan expansion. I ask the Trudeau government to reconsider the Kinder Morgan approval and other such decisions as they come up. Extracting energy from tarsands is disastrous, doesn’t make economic sense and must be ended sooner rather than later. This means phasing out, not expanding, the extraction and use of fossil fuels, particularly from the tarsands.
We must not move forward with a project that does not assess and take into account the downstream as well as upstream emission impact. It’s not acceptable to export pollution and emissions. We must not continue to use, build or support the fossil fuel industry to finance the transition to a sustainable economy based on renewables. Rather than supporting jobs in tarsands extraction, help workers move toward greener occupations. We must honour our commitment to reduce our emissions.
Jill Schroder, Vancouver, B.C.
Canada has been slower than other countries to see that climate change is changing the calculus of national interest. China, choked by air pollution, has aggressively invested in renewable energy, driving the price of wind and solar power precipitously down. Last year, renewables matched fossil fuels for the first time both in price and power capacity. [Emphasis added] As countries seek to meet their climate targets, demand for the sort of energy that depends on pipelines seems bound, even if slowly, to decline.No one would suggest that there will be no economic repercussions of moving away from oil. But the longer we delay the transition, the longer we pretend that it can be business as usual, the greater that impact will be.
...our long-term competitiveness, including but not only in the $5-trillion global energy business, depends on our ability to look beyond fossil fuels and foster clean-tech and alternative-energy innovations and industry.
UPDATE: Thanks to The Salamander for providing this link to an excellent article analyzing the failure of Energy East.
.. its complicated ..
ReplyDeleteExcellent G & M article
(not the foolish M Wente article
proving she cannot even spell
'greenhouse gasses' (sic)
https://trib.al/Rxa9ewB
I also note CBC article today suggesting
the BC south coast resident Orca
will be extirpated by Kinder Morgan expansion
To pretend our marine coasts, our wild species
& habitat are not under critical assault is a foolish pipedream
Unfortunately, Canada & BC lost a champion - Rafe Mair
but we have a new cadre of exemplars stepping up
Thanks for the link to an excellent analysis, Sal. I shall add it in an update.
DeleteRegarding the environmental price to be paid for Kinder Morgan, it would be nice but fanciful of us to think that the elimination of species is a real consideration for the powers-that-be. "Natural capital' seems to mean nothing to the philistines in Ottawa and the oil patch.
The writing is n the wall, Lorne. It's been there for a long time. But some people refuse to take off their blinders.
ReplyDeleteThose blinders provide only an ephemeral comfort, Owen.
DeleteAs I read letters like those posted here, Lorne, I keep asking how near we are getting to the critical mass of support that will make implementation of a decarbonized economy unstoppable. There are certainly more of us today than there were 10 years ago and vastly more than our numbers 10 years before that. We're getting there but will we reach that critical mass in time?
ReplyDeleteTime, or the lack of it, presents the gravest problem. If we had another twenty or thirty years, as some do imagine, we would probably be able to phase in enough change in time to pull up short of our emissions limits. Unfortunately there is no reason to believe we have that luxury.
Anthropogenic climate change may have become a secondary problem. The narrative has changed. Early on the rationale for slashing greenhouse gas emissions "in time" was to avoid triggering nature, natural feedback loops that would cause warming beyond our control on a scale far in excess of anything man-made. That causal link has now been dropped from the narrative. Why? What does that tell us?
From what I have learned, we've tailored the narrative to comport with the new reality of natural feedback loops, the dreaded natural warming, already well underway. That Genie is out of the bottle. From the loss of Arctic sea ice and its knock-on effects of warming of the Arctic waters and the atmosphere above, to the retreat of our glaciers and the major ice caps, to the thawing of the permafrost across the Polar girdle and the release of masses of CO2 and methane once safely sequestered as far back as the last ice age, to the melting of seabed methane clathrates, to our forests being transformed from 'carbon sinks' into carbon bombs due to human predation, heat stress, droughts and pests, to the increase of that most powerful greenhouse gas of them all, water vapour, in our warming atmosphere - on and on and on. New research suggests that warming will trigger a great release of soil carbon transformed into greenhouse gas. How many more of these positive feedback loops are already active? Do we really want to know?
I have not the slightest doubt that any meaningful response to climate change would demand sacrifice on the scale required of people in a major war. Do you think we'll ever have the collective will to make that sacrifice voluntarily?
Your commentary reveals the imminent peril we are in, Mound. I am convinced that the kind of sacrifice required of people in war is something no government will inspire, for some fairly obvious reasons: despite the increasing volatility of the weather, the narrative that we still have times continues to be spun; our governments are in the thrall of the neoliberals, who prefer ideological cant to reality, and finally, few will risk their political power to confront people with harsh truth, as it will only provide leverage to other politicians to exploit with 'alternative facts' and take their places.
Delete