EARTHFUTURE.COM by Guy Dauncey

While riding the bus from Vancouver to Victoria a few months ago, I struck up a conversation with a young man from Alberta. Fresh in from Fort McMurray, where he worked as a pipe fitter in the tar sands, he was taking a year off to travel with his girlfriend. It didn’t take much to get him talking.
He came from a troubled background with an abusive father, and had left home to live on the streets at the age of 14. He soon got into trouble with the law but luckily went free when a friend took the fall for a crime and was jailed.
My fellow passenger headed for Alberta, got a job in the Athabasca tar sands and turned his life around. With some persistence, he picked up the training he needed, and found work as a pipe fitter. Working a 12-hour day, seven days a week and living in camp, he was earning $120,000 a year.
His girlfriend in Victoria was an exotic dancer, one of the best, I gathered. She ran long distance every morning, ate a vegan diet, kept in fabulous shape and earned $30,000 a month, which her stockbroker brother in New York invested for her. This was a different world than the one in which I lived.
Albertans are proud that their economy is doing so well. At the annual Calgary Stampede, there is a resilience in the air, and a feeling that Alberta is the best of all possible worlds.
And who am I to say that this is wrong, or to deprive a young man of hope and a swelling bank balance?
Because of climate change? Because of a concern that the last time the world was three degrees warmer, sea levels were 25 metres higher? Because we will count the refugees not in the millions, but in the hundreds of millions? Because conservation biologists say that at the current rate of temperature increase, we will lose 25 percent of all land-based animal and plant species to extinction by 2050?
It is hard not to sound like Jeremiah, the broken hearted Jewish prophet of doom, when writing about the impacts of climate change. They are going to hit our civilization so hard that we won’t know what happened.
But why pick on Alberta? Don’t we all drive cars, fly to exotic holiday destinations and enjoy the fossil-fuelled life?
It’s true. But that doesn’t make it right, any more than it was right for southern plantation owners to live a glorious life thanks to slavery, before the American civil war.
It takes so much energy to extract the oil from the tar sands, that it produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. Ironically, it is the very same Albertans who accuse the Liberals of not meeting Canada’s Kyoto goals. The same goals which would have made it impossible for the federal government to touch the tar sands.
It costs $15 per barrel to extract tar sands oil. Most of the rest is profit. As the global supply gets scarcer, the sky is the limit after passing $70 per barrel. Every dollar will profit the oil companies, which pay only a one percent royalty to the government.
How do you oppose a financial force like this? Most of the oil flows south to the USA. Some will flow to China, and if the oil companies get their wish, it will also be shipped down the dangerous inside passage, where the Queen of the North recently sank, damaging the coastal fishery with oil.
It really is an environmentalist’s dilemma. So many solutions that look good on paper are impossible in reality.
Except one. And that is to charge a 75 percent windfall tax on oil companies’ profits, and use the money to propel Canada into a 100 percent post-oil economy, using renewable, sustainable energy, by 2020.
And then to gather the national strength to impose a total moratorium on all future tar sands development, unless it is to make hydrogen with complete CO2 capture and sequestration, and complete ecosystem recovery, so that it can perhaps be a blessing to Mother Earth, and not a curse.

Guy Dauncey is author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association
(www.bcsea.org)