I am rather conflicted on how I feel about the announcement by the federal government about their buying of the Trans Mountain Pipeline from Kinder Morgan. The reason for this is I can see both sides of the argument with regard to the pipeline.
On the pro-side petroleum products are pervasive in our lives. They not only heat our houses and provide us with a means of getting around they are used for practically everything we use. Unless you walk around barefoot wearing nothing but cotton, wool and linen you are wearing clothing whose fibres contain petroleum. The same is true if you use any kind of plastic. Virtually every plastic we use contains petroleum. In fact the list of everyday consumer items that use petroleum as part of the manufacturing process, excluding for producing the energy needed for that process, is too large articulate here.
That makes petroleum a valuable commodity and as Canada has a great deal of that commodity it is going to be pulled from the ground. That is a simple reality and there is no way to change that. When it gets pulled from the ground it has to go to market and the most efficient and safe way to do so is by pipeline. Note, pipelines are not perfectly safe but they are safer than the alternatives as the people of Lac Megantic learned a couple of summers ago.
On the con-side the pipeline in question is not going to be used to transport crude oil it is going to be used to transport diluted bitumen, or dilbit. Dilbit is nasty stuff. It is tar sands oil diluted with all sorts of chemicals to liquifiy it and then it is heated to high temperatures and shoved down the pipeline at high pressure. Further dilbit is heavier than water. So, if it spills into a body of water it does not float on the top waiting to be cleaned up it sinks to the bottom. For most bodies of water life begins on the bottom and it supports all other life above it. So, if dilbit were to destroy life on a significant stretch of seafloor all life in the ocean above would be destroyed along with it.
So both sides have strong arguments for and against. The problem is such arguments are almost always hijacked by the extremists on either side.
On the environmental side the extremists come off as a bunch of loonies. One of the arguments that I see alot from them is we need to ween ourselves off of petroleum products and shut down the industry. We can replace it with alternatives like solar and wind energy. Those two are fine examples of alternate ways to generate electricity but until someone finds a way to convert sunlight into material to manufacture the shirt I am wearing or to convert the wind into a container which I can use to store my left-overs, petroleum is here to stay.
Further environmentalists need to convince the broader public that being green will not cost them financially. It is another reality that most people, if they are faced with the choice of helping the environment or meeting their financial needs, will choose meeting their financial needs almost everytime. This is particularly true if the ecological costs will be felt in the future while the financial costs will be felt almost immediately. Many ecologists state that there is money to be made being green. I happen to agree with them but they are still going to have to continually work hard to prove that.
On the business side we see the typical shortsightedness that we have all grown used to seeing from business. As I stated above there is plenty of money to be made going green, even on endeavours that would seem not to be green at its inception but most businesses almost always take the opportunity to miss the opportunity to exploit that potential. As well, there are a large number of people out there who care about the environment. Many of them are motivated and well organized and they can play merry hell with any plans to develop projects like pipelines so business has an incentive to work with environmentalists to maximise their profits or even just to successfully complete projects.
Fortunately, there are pragmatists on both sides of this divide and perhaps they should be looking to work together so that they can demonstrate to everybody that the "choice" between the environment and the economy is a false one. There is no choice. They go hand-in-hand. Businesses can maximise profits considering the environment in their business processes and environmentalist can preserve the environment by helping business to pursue green practices in their business processes.
One note on the government buying the pipeline. I would have preferred that they did not do that but this is not the first time it has happened. For decades governments, of every political stripe, have been providing subsidies and bailouts to private companies in this country. It is a simple reality and it is not going to stop regardless of what politicians promise during election campaigns. So, since I cannot really do anything to stop this practice I am not going to really worry about it. By doing so I will probably live longer.
Oh yes, when is business in this country going to stop shipping raw materials to other countries for processing? One of my pet peeves is the Canadian practice of selling our raw resources to other countries, which then process it into a finished product and sell it back to us at a markup. We should be doing that ourselves. Unfortunately, Canada is a first rate country with a fourth rate business class, who do not have the motivation and the smarts to come up with new and innovative ways to make more money on the development of our resources.
So after all of this how to I feel about the government's decision? I am still conflicted.
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