Last week I highlighted the bad logic of new oil and gas
pipeline supporters. The same folks say pipelines will increase the sale price
of tar sands bitumen, thus boosting oil company profits, while magically
staying cheaper than market for Maritime customers. Any time bad math like this
comes near public policy debate, be very skeptical. They argue we must spend
billions on fossil energy because it would be expensive to build renewable
energy, ignoring that billions are to be spent either way.
But other circular arguments are being spun out, aimed to
keep us too dizzy to demand real action on greenhouse gas reductions to protect
our atmosphere and climate. See if any of these seem familiar.
One is that what we do in Canada doesn’t matter, because
China is building so many new coal plants. Although I still hear this one in
conversations, I don’t see it quite as much in the pro-fossil media echo
chamber anymore, and with good reason. China, once a rapidly-growing coal
monster, has actually made serious steps to turn things around. Their rate of
building new coal plants has dropped dramatically, even though they still want
to expand their energy supply. This is due to a combination of tougher pollution regulations, local opposition, and rapidly increasing production of installed
wind, solar and hydro. The United States has also shown significant cutbacks in
coal plant starts, for similar reasons. Meanwhile, Canada’s coal regulations
have been late and, when they arrive, disappointing. Every time we point a
finger at China or the US, the three other fingers pointing back at us say we
are losing the initiative in the lucrative clean energy market of the future.
Then they say tar sands have less global warming potential
than coal, so we should give them a pass. That’s like someone on a reduced-salt
diet arguing that pretzels have less salt than chips, so there’s no reason not
to eat even more pretzels. Real climate action means reductions on all fronts,
not another round of finger-pointing.
The most pernicious, though, is the “it will happen anyway”
argument. The same interests who, one day, argue that we must build new
pipelines connecting the tar sands to the Pacific, Maritimes, Gulf Coast or
even Arctic in order to free up the “stranded oil” will, on another day, argue
just as strongly that it won’t matter if we prevent a particular pipeline,
because the oil will get out some other way. Well, it’s either one or the
other, and in the real world, pipeline construction and tar sands expansion go
hand-in-hand; neither makes sense without the other. Blocking both is necessary
to shift our capital investment into a renewable future.
Declaring the inevitability of tar sands expansion, pipelines
or burning carbon robs us of our right to build the future we want to have. We
aren’t locked into that dead-end if we don’t want to be. In fact, many are
already ignoring these fossil fools and choosing to build a different, cleaner future;
more on that next week.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner as "Pipelines, tar sands expansion go hand in hand"
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is
a certified member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.
The time has come for our advanced society to start depositing hydrocarbons underground. Nuclear waste take 25 years to become safe. Storage and guarding costs must be collected from today's consumers. Passing the "buck" to our future descendants is criminal.
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