We get lots of promotional stuff in our Internet in-boxes. It usually only takes a second to click on the little garbage-can icon.
But the other day, with my finger hovering, I took a minute to think about one of them. This promotion was by the Canadian Energy Centre—better known as Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s taxpayer-funded war room. It was promoting a petition they were sending to Canada’s members of parliament. It was saying that this citizen is standing up for pipelines. My first reaction was to think of a nasty reply about where they could stick their pipelines.
What I was feeling was not anger but frustration. It was caused by the sense of futility about taxpayers’ money being used by governments to fight the environmentalists. It is a lop-sided fight.
How can Canadians who care about global warming fight their federal government when it is providing billions of our money to twin the TransMountain pipeline? And how can Canadians support the State of Michigan in its fight to protect the Great Lakes from a catastrophic pollution in the Straits of Mackinac?
The State of Michigan knows very well the hopelessness of trying to clean up the spill of diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands in a major waterway. The clean-up of the spill into tributaries of the Kalamazoo River has never been complete despite the expenditure of more than $700 million U.S. dollars.
To have a catastrophic spill from the under-lake pipeline at the Straits of Mackinac would just take one more tanker dragging its anchor through the shallow straits.
And shipping for this bitumen from Burrard Inlet and through the west coast’s Straits of Georgia is just as risky. It is the summer feeding grounds for the endangered Orcas.
The American administration of president Joe Biden has made it very clear that they neither need nor want diluted bitumen from Alberta fed through American pipelines. Neither do clear-thinking Canadians.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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