The opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion this month — widely celebrated in the media — reminds us that Canada is still very much in the grip of Big Oil. That $34 billion expansion was financed by Ottawa and it amounts to a massive public subsidy for the oil industry — at a time when we should urgently be financing renewable energy, not fossil fuels. The renowned U.
S. climatologist James Hansen famously said the oilsands were such a “dirty, carbon-intensive” oil that if they were to be fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the planet. Yet here we are, applauding the tripling of the pipeline’s capacity to carry oil from the oilsands, even as that moves us closer to “game over.
” A report last week revealed that the world’s top climate scientists believe the world is headed in a frightening direction — towards more than 2.5 C degrees of warming, charging past the international target of 1.5 C, beyond which fires, floods and heat waves become seriously unpredictable.
Today, we’re at just 1.2 C of warming and look at the mess we’re in. Already this season, wildfires are burning out of control in B.
C. and Alberta. Climate scientists have been clear: the only real hope of avoiding climate disaster lies in dramatically ramping up the transition to clean energy by building new wind and solar farms at breakneck speed.
But this isn’t happening, even though the price of wind and solar power has become very competitive. That was supposed to .
