The news that the Trans Mountain pipeline will cost Canadians $21.4 billion should not come as a surprise. At those costs, more analysts are considering it a bad investment. Did you think we haven’t been lied to? Did you listen to that crap from Alberta that energy self-sufficiency was Canada’s ace in the hole? Filled your gas tank lately?
Canadians are paying the same world-wide surcharge on oil as everybody else. Alberta oil—better known as tar sands bitumen—has nothing to do with it. Some of what we pay at the gasoline station is likely profiteering, some is carbon tax and some is federal and provincial taxes, And the excuse for the serious escalation in price is Russia invading Ukraine.
And the problem is that Europe cannot switch its dependence on Russian oil and gas in the middle of the winter. The Russians are the experts in using winter as a weapon.
But there is only one rationale for the continued twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline. The old pipe has been delivering refined automobile and airplane fuels to B.C. and the State of Washington for many years. The $21.4 billion buys the second pipe and the high-pressure pumps and heaters for both pipes to pump tar sands bitumen at high pressure across the Rockies to ocean tankers in the Burrard Inlet. From there, it is to be shipped out across the Pacific Ocean to customers mainly in China and South Asia.
Of course, prime minister Trudeau takes no responsibility for the carbon released by the refining processes or the eventual carbon release when used to heat homes or fuel internal combustion engines in other parts of the world. Oh no, Mr. Trudeau does not think he is to blame for bitumen processed outside our country.
Our prime minister lies to the world that he is protecting the environment. He makes green-house gas emissions promises that he knows he cannot really keep. The promises are all into the future—when he is unlikely still trying to breath the air of a dying world. He leaves it for our children’s children to revile him as a destroyer.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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