During the debates, all three parties were falling over each other to profess support for more oil pipelines. I don’t think your faith here is well placed.
We aren’t going to get off of oil tomorrow and alberta is throwing a temper tantrum about leaving Canada. We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing, and electric vehicles extensively before we can significantly cut our oil demand.
Even getting off oil as a fuel source, we will still depend on it for plastics and lubricants until we can develop new solutions there.
I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.
Carney praises carbon pricing in his book Values, but had to strategically cancel it as he saw consumer carbon pricing dividing more canadians (still in effect for industry, where the tax can spur the most impactful changes). Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice. For example, building quality, reliable high speed rail would get people to switch their prefered transportation method just for their personal convenience, with a side effect of being more energy effecient and less carbon intensive than driving.
Carney also praises green energy as part of a sustainable future. All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM, whom has pretty much rejected anything concerning the environment in his political career
We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing…
The argument that “we need time” to wean ourselves off of oil is dead. It just is. I know this because I’ve been hearing it for forty years and absolutely nothing has changed in that time. Well that’s not true, it’s gotten worse. We burn more oil and gas, our transport infrastructure is dedicated to private vehicles and crumbling, and the world is literally on fire. “We’re not ready yet” was being passed around in the 70s during the oil crisis ffs, and somehow it’s all the excuse we need to do nothing. The very same arguments were used then as you’re using now and they’re a big part of the reason that we’re still not ready.
You cannot extricate an economy from fossil fuels by building new pipelines. It sounds obvious, but apparently I have to say it anyway. More market liquidity, lower fossil fuel prices, and increased trade in (and dependence on) fossil fuels do precisely the opposite. Instead of backing away from fossil fuels 40 years ago, Canada has committed itself again and again to a “burn the world now, fix it never” strategy for my entire lifetime.
So just stop with this “we’re not ready” excuse when what you really mean is “I don’t want to”. It’s a terrible position to take, but at least it’s an honest one.
I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.
Just what kinds of assessments and monitoring were you hoping for? Oil and gas come out of the ground, we put it into pipelines, ships, and trucks and eventually set it on fire, pushing up the temperature of the planet. The more we burn, the worse it gets. That’s objective. It doesn’t need an environmental assessment, there’s nothing new to monitor. We know what happens when we do it, so asking for it is performative at best.
Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice.
This is true, though it ignores the fact that the reason carbon taxes are so praised is that they work as both a carrot and stick: they make burning fossil fuels more expensive, while funding the infrastructural changes to give people alternatives. The Liberals brought in a carbon tax alright, but true to form treated it as more of a performance, dumping those public funds into fossil projects, and doing absolutely nothing to provide alternatives in more than a decade. Essentially, they taxed Canadians so that we could extract and burn more fossil fuels.
Personally, I’m not happy that Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax, but I can appreciate the pragmatic reasons for it. My problem is that my experience with Liberals and neo-liberal bankers is that I fully expect them both to lack a grasp of basic physics when it comes to the environment and pretend that the biosphere can be someone else’s problem, and his performance in the debates wherein he wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved pipelines was completely unsurprising.
Carney is a neo-liberal banker in his 60s. My daughter is 6. He’ll be long dead while she’s trying to stay alive on a burning world.
All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM
…and this is why we can’t have nice things. So long as people pretend that there are only two parties: “Burn the world”, and “Burn the world slowly”, we’re basically fucked.
During the debates, all three parties were falling over each other to profess support for more oil pipelines. I don’t think your faith here is well placed.
We aren’t going to get off of oil tomorrow and alberta is throwing a temper tantrum about leaving Canada. We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing, and electric vehicles extensively before we can significantly cut our oil demand. Even getting off oil as a fuel source, we will still depend on it for plastics and lubricants until we can develop new solutions there.
I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.
Carney praises carbon pricing in his book Values, but had to strategically cancel it as he saw consumer carbon pricing dividing more canadians (still in effect for industry, where the tax can spur the most impactful changes). Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice. For example, building quality, reliable high speed rail would get people to switch their prefered transportation method just for their personal convenience, with a side effect of being more energy effecient and less carbon intensive than driving.
Carney also praises green energy as part of a sustainable future. All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM, whom has pretty much rejected anything concerning the environment in his political career
So much to cover with this.
The argument that “we need time” to wean ourselves off of oil is dead. It just is. I know this because I’ve been hearing it for forty years and absolutely nothing has changed in that time. Well that’s not true, it’s gotten worse. We burn more oil and gas, our transport infrastructure is dedicated to private vehicles and crumbling, and the world is literally on fire. “We’re not ready yet” was being passed around in the 70s during the oil crisis ffs, and somehow it’s all the excuse we need to do nothing. The very same arguments were used then as you’re using now and they’re a big part of the reason that we’re still not ready.
You cannot extricate an economy from fossil fuels by building new pipelines. It sounds obvious, but apparently I have to say it anyway. More market liquidity, lower fossil fuel prices, and increased trade in (and dependence on) fossil fuels do precisely the opposite. Instead of backing away from fossil fuels 40 years ago, Canada has committed itself again and again to a “burn the world now, fix it never” strategy for my entire lifetime.
So just stop with this “we’re not ready” excuse when what you really mean is “I don’t want to”. It’s a terrible position to take, but at least it’s an honest one.
Just what kinds of assessments and monitoring were you hoping for? Oil and gas come out of the ground, we put it into pipelines, ships, and trucks and eventually set it on fire, pushing up the temperature of the planet. The more we burn, the worse it gets. That’s objective. It doesn’t need an environmental assessment, there’s nothing new to monitor. We know what happens when we do it, so asking for it is performative at best.
This is true, though it ignores the fact that the reason carbon taxes are so praised is that they work as both a carrot and stick: they make burning fossil fuels more expensive, while funding the infrastructural changes to give people alternatives. The Liberals brought in a carbon tax alright, but true to form treated it as more of a performance, dumping those public funds into fossil projects, and doing absolutely nothing to provide alternatives in more than a decade. Essentially, they taxed Canadians so that we could extract and burn more fossil fuels.
Personally, I’m not happy that Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax, but I can appreciate the pragmatic reasons for it. My problem is that my experience with Liberals and neo-liberal bankers is that I fully expect them both to lack a grasp of basic physics when it comes to the environment and pretend that the biosphere can be someone else’s problem, and his performance in the debates wherein he wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved pipelines was completely unsurprising.
Carney is a neo-liberal banker in his 60s. My daughter is 6. He’ll be long dead while she’s trying to stay alive on a burning world.
…and this is why we can’t have nice things. So long as people pretend that there are only two parties: “Burn the world”, and “Burn the world slowly”, we’re basically fucked.
You should read his book if you believe he does not have Climate Change on the mind. Should help with the rest of the misconceptions you have as well.