Let's stop kidding ourselves. No one is going to give up cars, trucks, powerboats, planes, helicopters, ski-doos, etc., so we might as well quite posturing about the Enbridge pipeline and the oilsands.
None of us will ever go back to the real traditional ways of life - be it farming in Europe or early Canada, or hunting and gathering.
Nor is anyone going to give up all the other amenities of modern life like cell phones, computers or natural-gas furnaces.
Moreover, anyone investigating the failure of green power in Europe will realize that alternative forms of energy have been a bust.
Fifteen per cent of Germany electricity is green, yet carbon reductions are virtually zero.
Even the Greens admit that.
The Germans, the most dedicated greens, shut down their nuclear plants - and import nuclear energy from France and are building new coal-fired plants.
Green power and modern industrial societies do not go together.
Instead of draping ourselves in feel-good make-believe ideology, let's be honest and admit that modern life takes a certain toll on the environment and work to minimize this toll without threatening what we have - and are not willing to give up. We need the oilsands and the pipelines to keep up our society and all the advantages it brings from health care to mass public education.
To maintain the way of life we all want we need to sell this oil and to do that we need pipelines like Enbridge. It's time to get over the posturing and to adopt some plain common sense.
Ian Kluge
Prince George
