To the editor:
We need a fossil fuel transition plan, not a pipeline
Why don’t we all hold hands and jump off a bridge together? Because we know what will happen when we reach the water. Well, buying a pipeline which will guarantee Canada fails to meet its climate targets, and locks in decades of further pollution over its lifetime is like holding hands and leaping to our death.
So why do it, Finance Minister Bill Morneau? Why buy a pipeline that will ensure economic and environmental disaster, Prime Minister Trudeau? Why threaten any credibility you had on climate change by investing billions to prop up a fossil fuel project instead of investing in a just transition to a green economy?
Why jeopardize the health of our country, its environment and its citizens? Why dismiss the science-based evidence that we are living in a warmer world, a world that needs us to step away from our dependence on fossil fuels and to commit to clean energy?
Climate change is here: Heatwaves in central Canada, forest fires in British Columbia, flooding on the Prairies and in the Maritimes. Temperature records have been set all over the world in recent weeks, from across Asia to the Middle East, in southern Europe and North Africa, and from Quebec to California.
Canada committed to cutting our carbon pollution to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, but a recent report from provincial and federal auditors general show we have no plan to meet those targets. Oil and gas is the single most polluting industry in Canada.
Now is no time to build a pipeline. Now is the time to hold hands and walk together toward a future of clean energy and environmental stewardship. This is the jump we need to take now. A leap toward sustaining life for all Canadians and for the world.
We need a real plan to transition off fossil fuels, not another pipeline to set us back.
Ahava Shira
Salt Spring Island
Editor’s note: The federal government failed to find a new buyer for the Kinder Morgan pipeline they purchased by the deadline this week