Making Peace with Pipelines

This is just a quick piece. The conversation is more nuanced than this, but really I just wanted to stake a simple position out. 

I don't love pipelines. I think they're problematic in many dimensions, but unlike many who feel the way I do I am forced to live in a realm with a certain amount of reality. Despite approval from the federal government and consistent pleading of the Alberta government the pipeline projects are stalled. The British Columbia government has promised fresh roadblocks to prevent the only accepted pipeline from going ahead. This is unacceptable.

We live in a world with certain realities. The anti-pipeline movement has lost at every official level over and over again. One may disagree with the process, but it has gone through. Nearly all of the legitimate avenues to stop this pipeline has been exhausted. Canada is an energy producing nation, we cannot hide from that. Even if the world were to radically move towards a post-carbon future we would need these resources for other purposes. But we're not heading in that direction any time soon. The environmental movement's treatment of Alberta in some ways is merely cutting our collective nose to spite our face.

More to the point, Canada needs to acting more like a country and less like a loose confederation of petty countries if we are going to succeed. The federal government ruled this pipeline was in our interest, which it arguably is. British Columbia cannot pretend to be outside that decision.

It's not that the fight wasn't justified, but I think people should consider what the fight really was. We transport chemicals via train, which is far more dangerous and hurts our productivity. The product is being made regardless of how it is shipped. Energy is a critical part of our economy. We cannot thumb our noses at Alberta's economic priorities while continuing to profit from it. Frankly, the energy devoted to the pipeline question would probably have been better served in improving regulations, changing land-use patterns and focusing on the real culprit for carbon monoxide emissions - the public. But those are harder challenges and it's easy to rally against pipelines.