Moving beyond the pipeline economy
Last week, the Liberal government added a speed bump and a potential detour in the path of transcontinental oil pipelines.
Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna joined Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr in announcing that all resource projects, including pipelines, will now take into account the greenhouse gas emissions involved in their development, including extraction, delivery and processing.
The government will also appoint a ministerial adviser to consult with indigenous communities whose lands would be affected by such projects.
Although these are merely interim changes while a permanent review process is hammered out, the decision will directly affect the controversial Trans Mountain oil pipeline in B.C. and TransCanada’s Energy East project, whose review periods are now extended four and six months respectively.
The stated intention is to restore “trust” in a review process which was seen as compromised and high-handed under the previous government.
While many environmental groups perceive the move as a positive step, they also note that it is hard, if not impossible, to square further infrastructure investment in tarsands oil with the December 2015 Paris commitment to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Moving away from a fossil-fuel-based, “pipeline economy” will not be simple, but it is, ultimately, necessary.
U.S. President Barack Obama, in rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline last November, noted that the U.S. will continue to rely on oil and gas as “we transition, as we must transition” to renewable energy.
Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Obama followed an administration that embraced fossil fuels as the primary, and virtually unassailable, engine of economic prosperity. In torpedoing the Keystone pipeline, Obama stated that America is now a “global leader” in combatting climate change, and approving such a project would “undercut such leadership.” Rejecting Keystone was thus a matter of “keeping face” in a world increasingly recognizing the need to transition to a sustainable world economy, one which invests in a diversified field of energy production, including solar, wind and geothermal sources.
At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Prime Minister Trudeau also strove to recast Canada’s international eco-image, calling Canada’s diversity the “engine of invention.”
“My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources,” he said. “I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness.” Both Trudeau and Obama know the stakes, both politically and ecologically, are high.
On January 20, while Trudeau was addressing world leaders in Davos, scientists from NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their independent analyses of the planet’s surface temperatures for the past year.
2015 was clearly, according to both studies, the hottest year on record. The NASA team reported that 2015 was more than a full degree Celsius warmer than temperatures in 1880, when regular record-keeping commenced.
The findings are especially disconcerting in light of the stated aspiration of the Paris agreement not to exceed a 1.5-C temperature increase over pre-industrial temperatures.
A pipeline economy is linear, extractive and, at the end of the day, and the end of the pipeline, ecologically and economically deleterious.
First, such infrastructure is based on high oil prices, which don’t always remain high.
When Brent crude recently dropped below $28 (U.S.) a barrel, commentators noted that oil was now cheaper than the barrels it was stored in.
Second, pipelines have a tendency to leak.
Since 2011, Alberta alone has experienced five major pipeline spills. This past July, for example, one of the largest leaks in Alberta’s history witnessed five million litres of a mixture of bitumen, water and sand ooze from a Nexen Energy pipeline south of Fort McMurray, coating an area of approximately 16,000 square metres. In addition, as reported by Global News, from 1976-2013, Alberta experienced an average of two crude oil spills a day. That amounts to 28,666 crude oil spills overall — that’s a lot of leakage.
To continue to build “trust,” Canada’s government is being invited to continue to shift responsibly away from a pipeline economy to an economy of diversity, one that invests in renewable energy and listens and responds to the concerns of those most affected by its energy decisions.
A pipeline economy is linear, extractive and, at the end of the day, and the end of the pipeline, ecologically and economically deleterious