Raise the Hammer

Asking whether you prefer your oil be shipped by rail or by pipeline is the moral equivalent of asking whether you'd rather have poison added to your drink or to your entree; the only correct answer is neither. The laws of physics don't actually care how we ship the stuff, they simply continue to warm the planet further whenever we burn it, however it travels. When the entire global scientific community tells us that we absolutely need to reduce our use of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible to avoid the worst of a global catastrophe of almost unthinkable scope, the only rational response is to reduce our fossil fuel use as rapidly as possible. "But people still want to burn oil, so shouldn't we condemn all future generations to a brutal hellscape of largely unliveable violent scarcity just to secure some of the profits from destroying any hope we have for an even halfway decent future for the foreign investors in tar sands develppment" isn't a rational argument, it's ecocide. When the only way to avoid catastrophe is to move away from fossil fuels, all of the smart money moves away from fossil fuels.

Conveniently, the economic argument is just as strong as the environmental one. Clean energy is the fastest growing sector of the global economy, and producing jobs twelve times faster than the rest of the economy as well. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that ambitious action on climate change can contribute $26 Trillion in growth, of which Canadians could enjoy a share, if we skated to where the puck is going to be rather than doubling down on an industry that is already dying as well as killing us. By contrast, the World Bank, hardly a fringe organization of the left, tells us that climate change is currently trending to destroy $158 Trillion in global assets by 2050, which is about double the entire world's total annual economic output. If the goal is to maximize Canada's economic growth, job benefits, and investment opportunities, fossil fuels are only the way to guarantee that we don't do those things, but we do wipe out our hopes of an even halfway decent tomorrow.

When someone argues that taking action on climate change is too expensive, that's because they refuse to consider the costs of not taking action, which are a lot more expensive. Similarly, when they say that we have to kill our hopes for tomorrow because there's money to be made, all of the evidence shows that there's more money to be made being at the leading edge of the technologies replacing oil.

Comment edited by MichaelNabert on 2019-06-27 17:30:37