There is a toxic relationship between the fossil fuel industry and too many of the world’s powerful people who try desperately to protect a business model that has reaped billions of dollars in profit at the expense of our planet.
I have been living in Squamish for 41 years, and thankfully for many of us here, there has been a huge shift in our thinking about the environment and our connections to it. Our trust in corporations has been fractured. I am thinking about the contamination of Howe Sound from mining, the mercury from former chemical plants, the filling in of large portions of the estuary, the loss of marine populations, and now the pipe dream some folks have of building a fossil fuel LNG facility in our midst.
It is not about the carrots of jobs and taxes anymore. Many of us realize that we are all actually on a spaceship called Earth and that it does have life-support systems for which we are responsible.
As former B.C. MLA, Gordon Wilson has said so eloquently in The Common Sense Canadian (Nov. 4, 2013) about liquefied natural gas (LNG), “The most compelling reason to be concerned about relying on this golden goose is the fact that the markets we are told will buy all we can supply may not materialize as we think, and even if they do, the price they are prepared to pay for our product may be well below what is anticipated.” And he also said, “The impact of an expanded hydrocarbon economy will certainly speed up global warming and cause us to build a dependency on a revenue stream that originates from processes that are poisoning our atmosphere.”
This push-back requires both personal changes and global system changes. It is next to impossible for you and I alone to lift ourselves out of the global warming quicksand by our bootstraps.
We need some bigger hooks at the local, provincial, national and international levels. We need more citizens to speak out firmly for a transition to renewable energies and to reject the idea of an archaic fossil fuel facility in Sea to Sky Country. We may also need an adherence to the teachings of David Thoreau and Gandhi in order to push back the LNG assault. So far, they do not have a social license. Let us make sure they cannot manufacture our consent.
Lynn Wilbur
Squamish
