UPDATED: On The Petering Out Of Pipelines

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. 6

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.

Meanwhile, today's Star editorial offers some astute observations:

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.

...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.

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.

UPDATE: Thanks to The Salamander for providing this link to an excellent article analyzing the failure of Energy East.

On This Thanksgiving Day

Clearly, we have much to be grateful for.


H/t Greg Perry

In The Eye Of The Beholder

It is my practice each evening at 6:30 to switch back and forth between NBC Nightly News and Global National, in part because I like to see the differing emphases placed on common news stories. Generally, I find Global National superior for its depth and analysis of key items.

For example, NBC has largely devoted itself to the human drama that was played out during the Las Vegas massacre and its aftermath, telling survivors' stories and sundry tales of individual acts of heroism that occurred. Global National, while not neglecting such aspects, has also examined some of the factors contributing to mass murder, one of them being the thorny issue of gun control, something NBC has shied away from. As a rule, Canadian media will tread where Americans fear to go or are forbidden by corporate fiat.

However, last evening I was quite disappointed at Global's coverage of the Energy East pipeline cancellation. I am including two clips from that coverage, the first a straight-forward reporting of the cancellation coupled with the predictable political games of the Conservatives blaming it all on Trudeau, the second an analysis with a decided editorial bias.



The next clip, which explores the question of the future of energy projects, has a decidedly pro-pipeline bias, as David Akin looks at the impediments to such projects. Phrases such as "interest group activism" and "regulatory dysfunction" leave little doubt that stronger measures to monitor and control greenhouse gas emissions are obstacles to multi-billion-dollar investments and good-paying jobs. While those of us who care about the environment and climate change are heartened by 'impediments' to further fossil-fuel development, others consider it a major blow to all that is good and holy - continuous, unrestrained growth.



In the second video, you will also have noticed David Akin's attempt to conflate pipeline development with some of the great infrastructure projects of the past like the James Bay hydro-electric project and the Trans-Canada highway. He also invokes Sir John A. MacDonald and laments the lack of a "national vision" today, my interpretation being that we are are somehow the poorer for a lack of imagination when it comes to pipelines.

Global National may be content to live in the past and extol the old economic models in which environment factors are simply an inconvenient obstruction to unrestrained growth. The rest of us who take the time to educate ourselves about the climate-change perils we face today can only look on with bemusement that such an antiquated model still holds captive much of the national media.

UPDATE: For those who tenaciously cling to the belief that fossil fuels will always reign supreme, this article provides a sobering dose of reality:

The electric vehicle revolution has been supercharged by plummeting lithium-ion prices, which are half of what they were in 2014. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) forecasts EVs will be as cheap as gasoline cars by 2025 and keep dropping in price until EVs overtake them in yearly sales, by which time EVs will be displacing 8 million barrels of oil a day — more than Saudi Arabia exports today.