Cost of shutting down oilsands too high with little benefit

Re: “Pipeline supporters need to remember ‘the elephant in the room’; Oilsands growth is incompatible with PM’S own climate-change promises,” by Mark Jaccard, Opinion, Jan. 27.

Mark Jaccard tells us, “If you love this planet and your children, and are humble and objective in considering the findings of science, you have no choice but to battle hard to stop Gateway and other oilsands pipelines.”

On a personal note, I do not love this planet all that much, I have no children and I have been neither humble nor objective in considering anything for many years.

Even so, sometimes I am smitten with thoughts, and here is one of them: the oilsands emit only a minuscule portion of the world’s greenhouse gas, and therefore shutting them down would have no effect on the problem of global warming.

Shutting down the oilsands would cost Canadians billions of dollars in lost revenue and tens of thousands of good jobs. Why should Prime Minister Stephen Harper adopt a policy that has huge costs and no benefit?

Jaccard tells us that “the facts are simple.”

What a coincidence. So am I. It should be easy for Jaccard to answer my simple question. I invite him to do so.

Ian Coleman, Edmonton