Hello. My name is Todd and I'm an eco-terrorist.
Or, at least, that is what I have been branded by Prime Minister Harper and the Conservatives.
Personally, I don't think of myself as an eco-terrorist. I think of myself as someone that is deeply concerned about the sort of Canada that we are going to have for the next 100 years. I think about the legacy that we are going to leave our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.
Or, as Chief Seattle put it, the world that we are going to leave to the seventh generation. Actually, I would even go further than the seventh generation but for the sake of argument, seven is enough.
I also don't believe that there is a dichotomy. It isn't the environment or the economy. It can be the environment AND the economy. There is a series of car television commercials airing lately that stress the point "and" is better.
I have to agree. And is a much better idea - as in, we should find a way to have a healthy economy and a healthy environment so that we can reap the benefits of this great country of ours for now and well into the future.
This means that I don't think that we need pipelines that carry crude bitumen to the west coast or the east coast or the south coast or, as Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is now hinting, the north coast. We don't need to increase the amount of crude oil we sell to have a healthy economy.
I would say no to Enbridge. I would say no to Kinder Morgan.
Which makes me an eco-terrorist.
Some people's knee-jerk response is to say that I must also be a hypocrite because I drive a car. Yes, I do. I would like to continue that privilege. But that is not what these pipelines are about.
The Northern Gateway pipeline is designed to do one thing and one thing only. It is designed to take Alberta bitumen and move it to tidewater so that it can be shipped to countries in the Asia-Pacific. Not to the refineries that supply my gasoline. Not to the refineries that make petro-chemical products for my use.
No. It is designed to move our oil overseas.
Indeed, according to Oliver: "We have one customer for our oil and gas. A customer, the United States, that has found vast amounts of shale gas and tight oil. And we need to move our resources to the Asia-Pacific market which represents the bulk of the demand for energy over the next 35 years."
No question about what the pipeline is meant to do. And no mention that it was a Conservative government that got us into this only-one-customer mess in the first place by its lap dog approach to negotiating energy policy in the Free Trade Agreement!
In any case, the pipelines being proposed to either the east coast or the west are simple a method of accomplishing this aim. Opening the Asia-Pacific market might even sounds like a good idea because there are roughly speaking 1.35 billion people in China and somewhere close to two billion throughout the region. Throw in India and we are talking about half the world's population.
Surely selling Canadian crude to billions of people has to be a good thing?
For the people that own the crude, absolutely. Unfortunately, government policy means that is not you and me. If anything, the people of Alberta have a very limited ownership profile. No, it is the big oil companies or even the small oil companies that own the product and stand to make a killing.
Now before anyone points out that these companies pay taxes and those provide the services that you and I depend on, let's get serious. Does anyone think that Exxon or any of the other large oil companies really pay their fair share? Even the United States congress couldn't get the oil companies to pay their corporate taxes.
Further, if you consider that the thing that they are selling already belongs to us, well, it gets a little weird.
In any case, selling crude oil into the Asia-Pacific is only going to lead to one thing - increased levels of pollution. Everything from PM2.5's to carbon dioxide to ozone. It would be nice if the pollution stayed in the countries in which it was generated but it doesn't.
It makes its way across the Pacific Ocean and finds its way to the people of British Columbia. I guess, in one sense, it is only fair that if we are going to allow Alberta crude to travel to the Asia-Pacific, they should be entitled to send us back the waste product.
But personally, I don't think that is doing our children any good. And aren't our children what it is all about?
That is why I am an eco-terrorist.
