It only takes one look at the oil pumps today to know the world has changed. Hydrocarbons have become damned pricey.
Economic growth is a function of energy consumption and for the past 100 years, cheap oil enabled global economic growth to soar. Today the easy flowing, cheap conventional crude is gone and what’s now coming on line is filthy, hard to locate, challenging to produce and expensive. Oil costs more than $100 per barrel, a quadrupling in the past 10 years, and these costs are changing the way economies can grow if they can grow at all.
The energy industry may be finding new sources of “oil” (tar sands, shale deposits, deep Arctic waters) and it may now be achievable and profitable to tap into it, but the environment and our economies are telling us we can’t afford the cost.
Exponential population growth, exponential resource depletion (copper, clean water, fish, soil, rare earth metals etc.), exponential debt and now a climate crisis are facts. Our economic system may be based on infinite growth, but the planet and its resources are finite.
Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Choosing to reindustrialize Howe Sound with the proposed LNG plant and allowing the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to be built is using the same kind of thinking that created our predicament in the first place. Perpetual growth is not the answer. It’s the problem and these projects are a bad deal for British Columbia. They risk too much.
Would we not prefer to see our remaining surpluses be invested in policies and projects that help us reduce emissions and manage the inevitable contraction of our economies? (Conservation measures, regional agricultural programs, local manufacturing, efficient transit options.)
Economic growth is just one way to measure our world.
Static growth will be challenging and sometimes frightening and it will reduce our standard of living, but it does not necessarily follow that it will reduce our quality of life.
Margaret King
Squamish
