The controversial Northern Gateway pipeline isn’t the issue. Oh, it is an issue. But it isn’t THE issue.
Canadian public and media attention has been focused on two pipeline proposal processes in the past half-year. The Keystone XL pipeline was to run from Alberta to Texas and was postponed by the United States federal government in September and then again in January. Hearings into the Northern Gateway pipeline – to run from Alberta to a to-be-built tanker terminal on the British Columbia coast – have become controversial. The intended purpose for both is to transport crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to new markets in the United States and Asia.
The pipeline proposals follow the pattern of other resource extraction projects in being touted as essential to economic prosperity/growth. However, the debate about the pipelines is raising troubling questions about government openness. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” Then he went on to accuse opponents of the pipelines of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups (conveniently ignoring the trans-national corporations). On top of this, social costs, environmental degradation, and First Nations’ rights can make it difficult to decide what to think.
The potential for problems is additionally troubling: tankers will hit reefs or face storms, pipelines will leak eventually, and even “fail-safe” technology will fail, as Japan’s Fukashima reactor and BP’s Deep Horizon well have recently shown. As disturbing as this is, where is the debate over whether all this is good ?
As long as our society’s transportation, travel, and ease of living are produced by fossil fuels, it’s hard not to say “we need oil” and “there is no alternative.”
The Northern Gateway pipeline is not the issue, even though its exit on the B.C. coast threatens marine ecologies and First Nations along the way consider their rights further impaired. Behind the pipelines lie the oilsands. Behind all this lies climate change. Average greenhouse gas emissions for oilsands production (extraction and upgrading) are about 3.2 to 4.5 times as intensive per barrel as for conventional crude oil produced in Canada or the United States, according to studies by the Pembina Institute and European Union. Uncontested data shows global warming is occurring now. Climate changes will disproportionately affect populations who have the least resources to mediate the negative effects and who contributed least to the human-made gases that are among the causes. These need justice.
But even climate change is not the issue. The real issue is the way we have socially organized ourselves, and the use of an easy and powerful but rapidly depleting fuel to do so. We fight hard to maintain that organization, despite the evidence that it is leading to global environmental changes in the biosphere, and unjustly harming people (and their livelihoods) who did not contribute to the global problem.
In theologian-historian Jacques Ellul’s analysis “the technology of energy is closely linked to the spirit of domination, conquest and human lust” because it is a will-to-power and idolatrous form of security. Part of the opposition to the pipelines is because they perpetuate the existing culture of global injustice and global environmental change which economic and political institutions so vociferously defend. As transportation for oil, the pipelines represent a roadblock to a more sustainable society.
The real issue is that as long as we have a culture in which oil is the primary engine for everything we do, oil and its extraction are the way we think and the basis for how we organize our society. We have made oil into a necessity, dragging it from whatever source we can find. The Northern Gateway pipeline is just a symptom of the real issue.
