Dear Editor:
In Maude Barlow’s recent excellent book, Boiling Point, she documents six large oil spills in Alberta from April 2011 until July 2015. The total of these was over 10 million litres.
Moreover, in 2013, Global News reported that Alberta had averaged two crude oil spills a day for nearly four decades. Enough said.
As a fourth-generation Canadian, who has lived in B.C. for 83 years, the majority of it near the magnificent English Bay, perhaps I have a different view of an impending disaster.
The five-million-litre spill of bitumen in 2015 occurred in a pipeline only one year old. Please don’t try to impress me with modern technology or the reliability of foreign-owned tankers.
I am dismayed that a recent letter writer believes that the economy of Alberta and B.C. justifies the obvious threat to the environment that the Kinder Morgan pipeline presents. The other inference, that shipping raw materials out of the country, whether logs or oil, is the best approach for creating employment.
I believe that anyone with grandchildren wants to start by minimizing the damage to our B.C. water system and coastal areas, not proposing more threats to it.
By the way, as a kid, I had never heard of bottled water.
Don Forsyth
Osoyoos, B.C.
These types of arguments do zero for the flourishing of humanity. We don’t live in a safe easy world. We live in a harsh world where energy is needed to survive and prosper (40+ summer weather). Imagine the only desert in Canada without reliable energy. I’ve seen the golf course after the irrigation has broken, it isn’t pretty.
So your solution is to reduce access to energy and thereby increase energy costs? Who does that affect? The wealthy and middle class will find a way to deal with the increased costs that will be added to EVERYTHING but the lower class and those on fixed incomes (seniors like yourself) will suffer. Humanity needs to flourish and that can’t be done without cheap reliable energy for EVERYONE (not just Canada).
Humanity can’t flourish without an environment that will support all peoplekind. Fear mongering over the environment won’t protect future generations. Nor will killing the economy. Future generations need jobs (housing issues in BC??). Would you rather support a regime like Saudi Arabia where the list of human rights abuses is too long to list while rejecting ethical Canadian oil? That doesn’t make sense to me. You may think Ethical and Canadian oil don’t belong in the same sentence but do you think this same protest would exist in Iran or Saudi Arabia?
You can’t ignore all the progress that has been made over time. The River Thames is the cleanest river in the world that flows through a major city. This is a major feat considering that fifty years ago the river was so polluted that it was declared biologically dead. From 1830 to 1860 tens of thousands of people died of cholera as a result of the pollution in the Thames.
How did this happen? How many people die of cholera today? Should we not us energy/technology for these sorts of endeavors? There is no perfect answer/scenario, we need to be careful and calculated, not fearful.