News comes this evening that the Liberal Government in Ottawa has signed an approval for a natural gas pipeline with its terminus at Lelu Island. This project, the Pacific Northwest LNG pipeline, was ushered through with Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned oil company that has seen its share of controversy of late through a web of what look like rather dubious payments to the highest echelons of governance in that country.
Current prices for LNG would indicate that there is little chance of this project going ahead any time soon. There is a glut on the market and, as many others in pertinent blogs have pointed out, BC is really quite late to the game. However, even if this is a clever ploy, approving a project that has little chance of coming to fruition so that the government can more easily reject others, it still sends a message far removed from the visionary pronouncements by Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau at COP 21 in Paris and leads us to believe that Trudeau will be to the Paris Agreement what Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were to Kyoto: all talk and no action.
The message is that Trudeau will play politics with energy and environmental concerns, frittering away valuable time when he could be investing in infrastructure for renewable energy and conservation initiatives that might be contributing factors to setting us on a path to long-term survival. As it is, the window of opportunity is closing and, were we to believe a consensus of serious heavyweight scientists, the calculations give us less time than we might have thought, meaning that the current attitude of our “leaders” in Ottawa aligns with the destructive lot that currently inhabit the Rockpile on Belleville Street and who find community of interest with troglodytes like Brad Wall and Rona Ambrose, who now quips that she thinks that Justin now needs to be a champion for this project that will be a primary economic driver for the country.
In addition, there is the lurking approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership which, if pushed through by Trudeau and his international trade minister Freeland, obviates the need to approve individual projects as it will bring us to a state where national and provincial governments will be largely rubber-stamp simulacrums of government and enablers for corporate profiteering at the expense of both labour and the environmen
Pretty sad stuff, all in all.
I couldn’t find a YouTube video of Stephen Bruton’s “The Clock”. Too bad, it’s a great ditty on fiddling while the planet burns.