Alternative fuels not competitive

Dear Editor:

Last Thursday, I attended a film at UBC Okanagan titled “Beyond Climate” with David Suzuki, which was followed by a panel session that addressed, among other topics, a variety of climate issues.

During this panel session Suzuki railed against pipelines and the Alberta “tar sands,” wanting to shut them both down.

While I am all for efforts to reduce our carbon footprint in the interest of curbing global warming and more broadly climate change, I fail to see how shutting down these entities helps in this regard.

If we want to reduce the use of fossil fuels, it is we consumers who need to reduce our consumption because it is at the consumer level that most of the CO2 is produced.

So, until you and I can afford to buy an electric vehicle, we will continue to use gasoline or diesel-fueled cars and until we can afford to heat our homes with electricity generated from renewables, we will continue to use natural gas.

In other words, the large-scale switch to renewable energy will be driven by market forces not by environmentalists railing against certain elements of the fossil fuel industry, the shutting down of which may remove some of them from the marketplace, but until they can be economically replaced by renewables, the transition to a low-carbon economy will have to wait.

Expanding pipeline capacity to the west coast does, however, raise other environmental issues, as does the ongoing operation of the Alberta oilsands. These will likely be alleviated only when their product is no longer competitive with alternatives or they are gradually replaced through a series of regulations. Jan Conradi, Kelowna