Yes There Are Some Things That Should be Left In the Ground

Asbestos is one, that's a no-brainer.   We should not be exporting a product we prohibit from use at home.  There's no moral ambiguity there.

Bitumen is another.  With climate skeptic Professor Richard Muller's research so forcefully (and for him, surprisingly) confirming the reality of anthropogenic global warming, the consensus is overpowering and must be accepted.   The case is made for leaving the most environmentally degrading, carbon emissions intense, and dangerous fossil fuel in the ground.   Not forever.   Just for now.

For many years the governments of Alberta and Ottawa along with the Oil Patch have been assuring us that carbon capture and sequestration, CCS, is both technically and economically viable and just around the corner.   The idea is that the tar sands producers would capture the emissions from extraction and processing, and bury them safely and permanently underground.  We're still waiting.

An operational and effective CCS system would change the Tar Sands dynamic significantly.   With carbon capture and thorough upgrading or refining, Alberta bitumen could be transformed into something similar in emissions to conventional crude oil.   That wouldn't resolve the local and regional environmental hazards, such as tailing ponds, groundwater contamination and the constant threat to the world's third largest watershed, the McKenzie, but it would take a good bit of wind out of the sails of Athabasca's critics.   So where is it?   Why are we still waiting?

We're putting the cart before the horse on the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipeline/supertanker initiatives.  It's letting Alberta and Big Oil off the hook for their long-promised, never delivered environmental remediation.   If they won't make it happen now, why would anyone trust them to deliver afterward?

Let's face it.   The pipeline routes have been chosen because they're the most direct, the cheapest, not because they're the safest, the most easily monitored, the most accessible in the event of a pipeline failure.   They're the cheap and dirty option.   That's the one that Alberta and Ottawa and Enbridge, and the oil producers and the Chinese want rammed down British Columbia's throat.

And we know that there are no safe supertanker routes along British Columbia's rugged and treacherous coast.   We and the Americans recognized that a long time ago when we agreed that Alaska supertankers heading for the Lower 48 would stay well out to sea a safe distance from British Columbia waters.   Why would we think even larger tankers, Chinese owned and operated, would be safer than the American boats?

And then there's the thorny question all The Players want to duck, liability.   They know that Exxon got tagged for somewhere between four to six billion for the Exxon Valdez catastrophe.   And that was a ship much smaller than the tankers the players want to ply British Columbia's waters.   And the Valdez was laden with ordinary conventional crude.   Compared to a bitumen-laden supertanker tragedy, the Valdez was spilled milk.   The Players know it and they're not lining up to indemnify British Columbia for what is almost certain to befall us.   Those risks are way too high for them so they're ducking them through a variety of devices including shell companies and limited liability agreements.

What British Columbians are finally waking up to is the reality that these pipelines are about cutting corners, shaving costs, and ducking liability, all in the name of ever greater bitumen profits.  They're coming to realize that the greatest cost saving of all comes from not having to do the right thing and from offloading the liability on British Columbia.   That's treachery.

So go back to the drawing boards.   Get that CCS system up and running.   Take responsibility for transforming bitumen into the safest form of crude oil possible.   Then find the safest routes possible for your pipelines.   The safest, not the cheapest.   Point those pipelines to port facilities and coastal waters that are as safe as possible for tanker traffic.   The safest, not the cheapest.   And, if going the safest route is just too expensive for your already too expensive fossil fuel, that's tough.   Leave it in the ground.