Dear Editor,
The recent Senate committee hearing on Bill C-48, the tanker moratorium, in Terrace displayed the limited capacity and thus credibility of the committee.
Nowhere did the senators take up climate change or global warming, the core issue, nor did any but a few of the presenters address it. Instead, compassion went to the oil economy and India and China in their attempt to escape “energy poverty.” Google “Chinese city at night” to see the self-inflicted poverty they suffer.
One pro-tanker senator, thinking hypocrisy, demonstrated his own unwitting when he not unjustifiably asked how eco-tourists got to their destination. His gloating over the reply revealed an obtuseness that should have excluded him from the committee. Likewise, a pro-tanker presenter, when asked afterward for his view of climate change, said only that climate is always changing, showing his own impoverishment.
Burning hydrocarbon is now only immoral. In the not-too-distant future, it will be illegal. To build a pipeline to the coast for tankers, regardless of the quality of build, ultimately wastes money, worsens the crisis, degrades trade, and deepens the Canadian malaise. Plastic proliferation exacerbates the problem, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the critical warning.
Jobs and the “national interest” are at stake, they say. What, then, to do for work? Nothing that is immoral or criminal. For direction, look to the former Canadian banker Mark Carney, now Britain’s chief banker, who on the same day as the Senate hearing warned of the neglect demonstrated by it.
Northwest BC is the front line of the climate crisis in Canada. Driving it is the flawed global economic model. Take a job in it, you have to justify betrayal not just of yours but everyone’s future.
As for “national interest”, whose nation, whose interest? Not our childrens’.
David Heinimann
Terrace, B.C.
