We’re not about to quit oil cold turkey. Does that mean we should continue with business as usual?
In Canada, “business as usual” means rapidly increasing oil sands exploitation and selling the bitumen to anyone who wants it. It means continuing to import half the oil we use, mostly from the Middle East, while shipping oil extracted here to other countries. It means continued tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies while other industries suffer.
This could spell a bleak future: a failing economy; deteriorating health of citizens; and increased droughts, floods and water shortages.
But it doesn’t have to be bleak. We could have a healthy and prosperous future. The solutions are not radical. They include such reasonable measures as slowing oil sands production, eliminating subsidies to an industry that hardly needs them and encouraging energy conservation and renewable energy development.
We could also learn to use fossil fuels more efficiently. For example, about 75 per cent of petroleum in North America is used for transportation. Automobiles waste 85 per cent of the energy from each litre of fuel burned. And the useful energy goes to moving a vehicle that typically weighs 10 to 20 times more than the passengers it carries. That translates to about one per cent efficiency.
Part of the solution requires untangling the rhetoric. Consider what our prime minister recently said in China: “We will uphold our responsibility to put the interests of Canadians ahead of foreign money and influence that seek to obstruct development in Canada in favour of energy imported from other, less stable parts of the world.”
How will selling most of our unrefined bitumen to China and the U.S. make us less reliant on “energy imported from other, less stable parts of the world”?
And why, when we know that global warming is serious and that oil will run out, are we hell-bent on using it up as quickly as possible? Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben suggests a disturbing reason why people in the fossil fuel industry and the governments they bankroll put profits ahead of the future of the planet: the value of these industries “is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.”
As McKibben notes, “ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind.” If they were to slow down production, it would hurt their bottom lines.
And so we have politicians and industry shills using bogus talking points to discredit or silence those who are calling for sanity for the sake of our future. They falsely accuse us of wanting to shut down all industry and call us hypocrites because we are unable to completely disengage from the fossil fuel economy and infrastructure that humans have created.
All we’re saying is: let’s step back and think of a sensible way to go about this. They can say we’re radical if it makes them sleep better at night, but we prefer the term “rational.”
David Suzuki is host of CBC’s The Nature of Things and author of more than 30 books on ecology.
