Fantasy to imagine expensive bitumen can compete
Where’s a Churchill when you need one?
A prime minister willing to accept the reality of dangerous climate change, or a premier willing to do more than foster false hopes and half-truths, delusion and denial?
Case in point; Jason Kenny announcing the death of the carbon tax in his province against a backdrop of choking smoke from out-of-control wildfires, followed by a multi-million fund to investigate “foreign funded special interests” in Alberta’s tar sands.
Not the foreign corporations that have turned Alberta’s north into a sea of toxic waste, but a hallucinatory cartel of Russians, respected scientists and environmentalists, targeting Alberta.
Truth is, financial markets — not imaginary enemies — have left the tar sands on taxpayer funded life support; the big international oil companies have walked away and private companies consider new pipelines an “unacceptable financial risk” to their investors, because boom times are finished.
Faced with falling demand and declining prices for oil, ominous global heating and the arrival of cost-competitive renewable energy, it is fantasy to imagine that expensive bitumen can ever compete.
Appeasement may work in the short term, but ultimately we will all pay for our leader’s lack of courage and vision.
Mike Ward
Duncan