Sooner or later, we will turn away from oil
Should Alberta be allowed to move its unrefined diluted bitumen to British Columbia’s tidewater in Burnaby via pipeline and then quadruple tanker traffic through Vancouver harbour, the city that bills itself as the world’s greenest?
And does the pipeline proponent, Kinder Morgan, have the permission of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, the unceded first owners of the relevant waters and territories, to move the diluted bitumen?
What’s going on here? The National Energy Board has heard and the federal government has permitted the project. Are we a country that respects the constitutional division of powers between provinces and the federal government or not?
Finally, shouldn’t we all be acting on the precautionary principle, and getting on with developing alternative and sustainable energy resources? Why do we persist in thinking like John D. Rockefeller instead of Elon Musk?