Sorry, folks, but if you care about the environment – the
planet for that matter – your strategy to stop oil pipelines is futile if its
only focus is oil spills on land and sea. You may stop one or two poorly
conceived projects, but you won’t stop industry expansion. There is too much
money to be made in a world that allows carbon pollution to remain largely
unpriced and unconstrained.
Difficult as it is to get the attention of enough people to
influence our political process into acting on climate, there is unfortunately
no other way to win this long-term battle than to focus on the fact that carbon
pollution changes the climate – for the worse – and so we must stop the
expanding extraction of fossil fuels from the earth’s crust. No expansion of oil
sands. No new coal mines. No new delivery infrastructure like pipelines and
coal ports. No aiding and abetting of the carbon pollution that will wreak havoc on the environment everywhere – not just the
environment in the path of pipelines, tankers and trains.
Curiously, one environmental activist sort-of acknowledged
this when she said to me, “We have to focus on local environmental impacts from
oil spills because that’s all the public is interested in. But, yes, I don’t
think we have slowed down fossil fuel expansion – if anything it is
accelerating.” My response? “How can you expect enough people to talk about
climate if even you aren’t talking about it?”
(Note that I keep saying “enough people.” We don’t need 50%
of the population demanding action. If 10% really care and get vocal, then
politicians, ever in pursuit of the swing-voter, have to pay attention – their
survival instincts kick-in.)
While I have been saying this for a long time, the urgency
of the message got stronger this past week with the launch of National Energy
Board hearings into Enbridge’s proposed reversal of an oil pipeline (Line 9) to
move more oil from Alberta’s oil sands east through Ontario and Quebec – again
to aid and abet oil sands expansion. The NEB – and the government, and the oil
industry – only wants to hear evidence and testimony about local impacts. They
don’t want anyone mentioning the fact that the impacts of climate change are
local – everywhere!
Forest Ethics and Donna Sinclair are challenging in court
the rules that the NEB has for allowing evidence and testimony and asked me to
provide an affidavit on the direct causal relationship between oil sands,
pipelines, climate change and environmental impacts everywhere, which obviously
includes people living near the pipeline – and far from the pipeline. In it I
explain how all of the world’s leading, independent energy-economy modeling
institutes show that the promise of Stephen Harper and other global leaders to
not allow temperature increases greater than 2 C is completely inconsistent
with expansion of oil sands, coal mines and other fossil fuel projects that
lead to carbon pollution. Take a look and if you like it, please pass on to
others.
