Fuelling dissent

Energy East pipeline spurs even more opposition against Canada’s fossil fuel industry TransCanada submitted a 30,000-page application to the National Energy Board, whichindicates the absurd level of preparation required to prove sucha project is in the pu

The filing of the Energy East oil pipeline application Oct. 30 by TransCanada Corp. shows the multi-year war against Canada’s fossil fuel industry is widening. Instead of welcoming the $12- billion project between Alberta and Saint John, N.B., because it enables exports to new markets across the Atlantic, reduces Central Canada’s dependence on imports and spreads the benefits of the Alberta-centred oil industry, an even larger front of opponents is mobilizing against it.

In addition to the expected green and Aboriginal groups, labour groups, natural gas utilities and wider-agenda advocacy organizations such as the Council of Canadians are lining up to defeat it. “We will fight Energy East every step of the way, and we are far from alone,” said Andrea Harden-Donahue, the Council of Canadians’ energy and climate justice campaigner. “Fishers, landowners, indigenous people and local communities are becoming aware that Energy East will cause unsustainable expansion of the tar sands and a significant increase in pollution.”

Anticipating the negative reaction, TransCanada submitted a 30,000- page application to the National Energy Board, which demonstrates the absurd level of preparation (which only boosts costs and reduces the competitiveness of Canada’s biggest export industry) required to prove such a project is in the public interest. The widening opposition also reflects the pipeline’s cross-country impact, while similar projects such as Northern Gateway, the TransMountain expansion, and Keystone XL — all delayed — primarily affected Western Canada.

In The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels — a must-read for anyone confused by the energy-versus-environment debate — Alex Epstein invites us to look at the industry in a new way: as an enabler of progress, rather than a merchant of destruction. Despite widespread claims that fossil fuels are precipitating climate catastrophe, he argues climate-change related deaths have plunged and that our high-energy civilization has made the climate more livable.

He documents how fossil fuels have been instrumental in supporting the industrial revolution, increasing life expectancy, improving the environment, and boosting food production to levels that would have been unthinkable without it. “It is an undeniable truth that, in providing the fuel that makes modern, industrialized, globalized, fertilized agriculture possible, the oil industry has sustained and improved billions and billions of lives,” Epstein, the Orange County, Calif.-based founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, writes. “If we rate achievements by their contribution to human well-being, surely this must rank as one of the great achievements of our time, and when we consider the problems with that industry, shouldn’t we take into account that it fed and feeds the world?”

Similarly, without fossil fuels, Alberta would not be the economic powerhouse and transfer-payment workhorse it is today. British Columbians would not have ready access to coastal communities connected by ferries. Newfoundland would be poor. Industry in Central Canada would be handicapped by a reliance on more expensive energy imports.

Indeed, Energy East itself offers a glimpse of how upset Canadians get when they don’t have access to cheap and abundant domestic energy. But with the pipeline involving a conversion to oil service of part of TransCanada’s underutilized gas Mainline, utilities such as Gaz Metro and Union Gas are lining up to oppose it, not because they don’t like fossil fuels, but because they want continued access to Western Canadian gas, even as Quebec has discouraged shale gas production with its moratorium on fracking.

Energy East provides Canadians with a window into all the risks and benefits of fossil fuels. If they care to look, they’ll discover Canada has nothing to be ashamed about.