Google Inc. Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl poses stands among a group of solar panels at the company’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. this past June. People around the world are working on innovative ways to reduce pollution, combat climate change, increase energy security, and strengthen economies with clean energy technologies.
People around the world are working on innovative ways to reduce pollution, combat climate change, increase energy security, and strengthen economies with clean energy technologies. At the same time, people in the most profitable and heavily subsidized industry in the history of the world, the fossil fuel industry, are stepping up efforts to slam the brakes on this progress. Some of them hope recent events in Canada will help fuel their obstructive plans.
Fortunately, many people are starting to see through the oily film. In California, voters didn’t buy immoral efforts by out-of-state oil companies to kill progressive legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sparking the clean energy economy. Despite massive amounts of money the oil companies sank into Proposition 23, which would have suspended the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, Californians overwhelmingly rejected it on Nov. 2.
Unfortunately, the industry is far from running out of gas when it comes to promoting its short-term interests. During the November U.S. election, thanks in part to generous campaign contributions from oil interests, voters elected many Republicans who don’t believe in the incontrovertible scientific evidence for human-caused climate change.
Meanwhile, oil companies continue their massive campaign to spread disinformation through the media. Recent letters and opinion articles in The Vancouver Sun and numerous other publications by oil industry front groups masquerading as scientific organizations and weathermen and oil company executives pretending to be objective observers have proffered disingenuous arguments that veer back and forth — often among the same writers — between denying that climate change even exists and accepting that it is real but claiming that there’s little we can, or should, do about it.
One of those letters claimed that the recent resignation of federal environment minister Jim Prentice gives the Stephen Harper government an opportunity to “make a fresh start” on climate change. But by fresh start, the writer didn’t mean the government should move beyond its current obstruction of international efforts to address climate change and refusal to forge a coherent response to this issue on the domestic front. Instead, he meant that the Conservatives ought to do even less than they are already doing — if that is even possible.
Prentice’s resignation and that of B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell do present opportunities for B.C. and Canada — but real opportunities rather than the false and morally reprehensible choices the oil industry and its shills are promoting. Neither Prentice nor Campbell could be considered a true “green” leader, but both at least showed some foresight in controversial decisions on a few environmental issues.
Prentice, for example, made some progress with parks and marine protected areas and he put a halt to plans for an environmentally destructive mine in British Columbia, the Prosperity Mine.
Campbell, though a disappointment on many environmental fronts (species protection, fish farming and freeway expansion plans under the Gateway project), deserves credit for bold leadership in establishing B.C. as the first jurisdiction in North America to put a price on carbon emissions that increases over time, for banning coal-fired power plants and for toughening vehicle-emissions standards.
We need leaders who can build on these initiatives and put the interests of Canadians first.
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