This letter is written by North Bay resident Peter Ferris.
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I am writing to express my strong disagreement with your government’s recent approvals of Petronas’ Pacific Northwest LNG project and the Enbridge Line 3 and Trans Mountain pipelines. Building these and other proposed pipelines will fuel expansion of the tar sands for decades to come, while the Petronas LNG project would become one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.
The degradation of our environment associated with the fossil fuel industry can only worsen in the coming years as industry and governments try to maximize profits and tax revenues from remaining oil and gas reserves and national economic policy promotes ever rising levels of growth and consumption.
Like numerous other Canadians, I am concerned about out government’s support of the fossil fuel industry in Canada. If our government is seriously committed to transitioning away from fossil fuels, why do Canadian taxpayers continue to provide $3 Billion annually in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry while the renewable energy sector receives only a quarter of that amount?
While climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is clearly the most serious looming threat, the pursuit of constant economic growth, with ever increasing demands for energy and finite natural resources, is also contributing to the incremental destruction of numerous ecosystems and threatening our quality of life. If a healthy environment and the relentless pursuit of economic growth are really compatible, we may reasonably ask why so many of our waterways continue to be poisoned by oil, mercury and other industrial toxins? Why are wildlife, songbird, bee and amphibian populations declining? Why are forests, wetlands and pristine wilderness areas around the world disappearing and numerous species going extinct? I am concerned that these matters do not seem to be a high priority for most governments, including our own. Instead, governments everywhere are absolutely preoccupied with promoting constant growth, which generally means more production and consumption, increased conflict and competition over scarce natural resources, more pollution, and environmental degradation.
Rather than support a business as usual approach, our political and business leaders must find the courage to decisively move us toward a truly sustainable economy based on clean energy and respect for the physical limits of growth. There are alternative economic models that can show us the way forward, including Steady State Economic Theory. This model of economic activity would attach a higher priority to preserving biodiversity, stabilizing levels of production and consumption, replacing GDP with new measures of growth and societal well-being, and ensuring a stable population and a more equitable distribution of wealth and income. It is unfortunate that this economic alternative is not more often debated by our politicians and by mainstream media.
In closing, I believe that a much more rapid transition to a clean energy future is possible than is envisioned under existing climate plans. In World War 2, the “Manhattan Project” developed the atomic bomb in just a few years because the project was backed by a sense of urgency and political will, and supported by adequate financial and intellectual resources. Rather than wait for the transition to a clean energy future to be timed according to the investment priorities of the fossil fuel industry, what we need is a government backed Manhattan Style Energy Project to promote immediate and massive investments in the research, development, marketing and deployment of clean energy solutions. Such a major commitment would create new jobs and investment opportunities. It could also become the catalyst to facilitate a serious rethinking and reprioritizing of economic goals and values to bring them into alignment with the overriding needs to protect and preserve our environment and ensure our collective well-being.
Canada can and should assume leadership on these matters.
Sincerely
Peter Ferris
