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trans mountain pipeline
Canada Must Switch Its Loyalty From Big Oil to Renewables
The only real hope of avoiding climate disaster lies in dramatically ramping up the transition to clean energy by building new wind and solar farms at breakneck speed.
May 22, 2024
The opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion this month—widely celebrated in the media—reminds us that Canada is still very much in the grip of Big Oil.
That $34 billion expansion was financed by Ottawa, and it amounts to a massive public subsidy for the oil industry—at a time when we should urgently be financing renewable energy, not fossil fuels.
The renowned U.S. climatologist James Hansen famously said the oilsands were such a “dirty, carbon-intensive” oil that if they were to be fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the planet.
Over the past four years, Ottawa has provided $65 billion in financial support for oil and gas, but only a fraction as much for renewable energy.
Yet here we are, applauding the tripling of the pipeline’s capacity to carry oil from the oilsands, even as that moves us closer to “game over.”
A report this month revealed that the world’s top climate scientists believe the world is headed in a frightening direction—toward more than 2.5°C degrees of warming, charging past the international target of 1.5°C, beyond which fires, floods, and heatwaves become seriously unpredictable.
Today, we’re at just 1.2°C of warming, and look at the mess we’re in. Already this season, wildfires are burning out of control in B.C. and Alberta.
Climate scientists have been clear: The only real hope of avoiding climate disaster lies in dramatically ramping up the transition to clean energy by building new wind and solar farms at breakneck speed.
But this isn’t happening, even though the price of wind and solar power has become very competitive. That was supposed to be the trigger point at which the market would begin working in our favour, with renewables cheaper than fossil fuels, facilitating the transition to clean energy.
Renewables keep getting cheaper. The price of solar power has plunged by 90%, yet Big Oil remains dominant.
That’s because, with its long-established monopoly and extensive government support, Big Oil is far more profitable—and therefore more attractive—to major financial investors than the struggling, competitive firms that make up the budding renewable sector, notes Brett Christophers, a political economist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Clearly, given the climate emergency, we can’t just leave the vital task of transitioning to renewables up to the whims of financial investors, whose only interest is maximizing their returns.
Governments must become a lot more involved, and they have to switch their loyalty from Big Oil to renewables.
The Biden administration has moved in this direction, with sweeping measures aimed at doubling renewable capacity in the U.S. over the next decade. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government is locked into serving the immensely powerful oil industry.
Over the past four years, Ottawa has provided $65 billion in financial support for oil and gas, but only a fraction as much for renewable energy. Its main program for subsidizing renewables provides less than $1 billion a year, says Julia Levin, an associate director with Environmental Defence.
The extent of Ottawa’s willingness to accommodate Big Oil became clear in 2018 when it took over the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, rather than let the project collapse after its original backers threatened to pull out amid intense environmental opposition.
Now Ottawa is planning to spend $10 billion, possibly much more, subsidizing Big Oil’s futile but costly efforts to reduce its carbon emissions through “carbon capture and storage”—despite ample evidence the technology is highly ineffective at reducing such emissions.
This enables Big Oil to pretend it’s serious about reducing emissions, lulling Canadians into believing we’re making progress on climate, when we’re really just spinning our wheels and wasting a lot of public money in the process.
For years, there was the comforting thought that, when the horrors of climate change truly became clear, humans would be smart enough to figure out a solution. That turned out to be true. It’s just that we haven’t figured out how to override the powerful so we can implement the solution.
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'Economic Crime': Cost of Canada's Trans Mountain Pipeline Soars by Billions, Again
"Everybody warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he bought this white elephant pipeline it would turn into a financial and political boondoggle," said one climate campaigner.
Mar 13, 2023
Climate, environmental, and Indigenous advocates in recent days condemned the skyrocketing cost of expanding the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which is now expected to carry a CA$30.9 billion price tag—44% higher than last year's estimate and nearly a six-fold increase from the original appraisal.
Trans Mountain Corporation said Friday that the project—which will add more than 600 miles of new pipeline and will nearly triple existing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day—is currently close to 80% finished and should be completed by the end of the year. The company blamed the project's soaring cost on numerous factors, including floods in British Columbia, supply chain difficulties, inflation, and the discovery of major Indigenous archaeological sites along the pipeline route.
"Everybody warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he bought this white elephant pipeline it would turn into a financial and political boondoggle," Peter McCartney, a climate campaigner at the Wilderness Committee, said in a statement Friday.
"I don't want to hear from any federal official that bold, transformative climate action is too expensive ever again."
In what critics called a betrayal of his purported commitment to tackling the climate emergency, Trudeau's government bought the pipeline from Houston-based Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4.5 billion.
"Honestly, I really hate to say we told them so because there are far better things we should be doing with over $30 billion than exporting a polluting product the world has agreed to abandon as fast as possible," said McCartney.
"In the last year alone, the price tag for this pipeline—already the most expensive industrial project in Canadian history—has gone up almost $10 billion," McCartney added. "If the Liberal government doesn't abandon this pointless albatross now, how do we know taxpayers won't be looking at even more cost overruns and further delays a year from now?"
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, toldReuters that the pipeline was "always a disaster from a climate change perspective."
"But this is now an economic crime that has stolen $30 billion of public funds from real climate solutions," he added.
According to the Wilderness Committee:
When Trans Mountain first proposed its expansion in 2012, American company Kinder Morgan estimated the construction costs at $5.4 billion. In 2018, when the federal government bought the pipeline it had a forecast price tag of $9.6 billion, on top of the $4.5 billion purchase. Last year, the company announced costs had risen to $21.4 billion, and now it predicts it will cost $30.9 billion in total to finish the project with about a year left to go. That means the price of this pipeline has ballooned almost six times.
"How deeply ironic it is for this fossil fuel company that climate disasters have led construction costs to spiral out of control," McCartney said. "I don't want to hear from any federal official that bold, transformative climate action is too expensive ever again."
According to the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, at least 58 Indigenous sites—including former villages and burial grounds—were destroyed during the pipeline's construction in the early 1950s.
Completed in 1953, the Trans Mountain Pipeline carries crude tar sands oil, often called the world's dirtiest, over 700 miles from Alberta to the British Columbian coast. Activists have urged the Canadian government to cancel the expansion, arguing that it will further fuel the climate emergency, threaten the environment, and desecrate sacred Indigenous lands. Additionally, pipeline workers sometimes murder, rape, traffic, and perpetrate other crimes against First Nations women, girls, and two-spirit people.
On the same day Trans Mountain Corporation announced the revised estimate for the pipeline's cost, Calí Tzay, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, ended a 10-day visit to Canada and published a report linking the project to human rights abuses.
"A large number of megaprojects in Indigenous territories proceed without good faith consultation and in the absence of obtaining Indigenous peoples' free, prior, and informed consent as, in the case of Trans Mountain Pipeline," Tzay wrote. "I am also concerned about the ongoing militarization of Indigenous lands and the criminalization of Indigenous human rights defenders resisting the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines in British Columbia."
"I urge the government of Canada to end these violations," Tzay added, "and to adopt adequate measures to guarantee Indigenous peoples' right to consultation and free, prior, and informed consent, and their rights to lands, territories, and resources."
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The Salish Sea Is Under Grave Risk From the Trans Mountain Pipeline
Years from now, Liberty will look back on this decision with remorse if they continue to support the status quo of corporate power instead of listening to the communities who seek nothing but clean air, food to eat, clean water to drink, and a healthy climate.
Aug 29, 2022
This weekend was my 31st birthday, and I had the joy of yelling and skinny dipping in bioluminescent waters, every motion of my body lighting up the waves around me, the salt on my lips. There is little as freeing and as humbling as jumping into cold water, the sea bringing out my inner child, shrieking and playing. I live on the West Coast of North America, on the Salish Sea.
Will Liberty leadership change the course? Or will the company keep choosing profit over people.
Yesterday, my partner and I processed local salmon to keep in our freezer. We are living near a community with local fishery management, where thousands of salmon return every year. The salmon return brings eagles and osprey, and further up the coast, bears.
We returned the blood, guts, bones, eggs, skin, all that we didn't use to the inlet the salmon came from, knowing the nitrogen feeds this entire ecosystem. Salmon are the lifeblood of this coast, their silvery scales tough as they determinedly return year after year. The animals that eat this salmon often bring their bones up unto the shores, where the nitrogen from their remains feed the forest, fertilizing the trees. Local Indigenous communities have been subsisting off of this salmon for thousands of years.
At Chief Seattle days in Suquamish, where I live--I was helping to hand out salmon to residents that have lived in this region since time immemorial, and the community thrives with the salmon. Salmon give their whole lives to this place, returning to their homes from thousands of miles away, and give the largest sacrifice one can make, returning their bodies to the river to provide for their young. This is the miracle of life and death, the splash and whirls of salmon dancing their way to demise, a smelly salty and powerful rhythm that defines the region.
Yet, I fear for the salmon's lives, and for the very backbone of this place, of this community. As industry has logged the region and development steals the trees that once shaded these narrow streams, and water warms from the changing climate, humans are surrounding these beautiful beings with everything from dams to overfishing. The local killer whale that lives from the salmon is endangered because the salmon counts are low, and the increase in vessel traffic means that the sound that they use to hunt together is preventing them from fishing.
A major pipeline expansion-- Trans Mountain --is being constructed as we speak, the roar of machines tearing up a swath across this earth, and this pipeline would bring a sevenfold increase in oil tanker traffic to the region. The oil that moves through the existing Trans Mountain pipeline and the related expansion is diluted bitumen which sinks in salt water and is impossible to recover, and the oil tankers that carry it are moving through one of the busiest channels in North America. Just last week there was a shipwreck that led to many gallons of diesel spilling in the region, demonstrating this ongoing risk of shipping accidents. The construction is ongoing in a wild salmon bearing river, in spawning grounds.
All of what I hold dear is at risk every day from corporate driven expansion, akin to death by a thousand paper cuts. Corporate power has people believing in the almighty dollar over the very essence of our humanity.
One of the major decision makers related to this life threatening industrial expansion is the insurance industry. The industry makes multi-million-dollar deals with pipeline companies lining the pockets of the wealthy, instead of prioritizing the health and well-being of communities.
Liberty Mutual still hasn't ruled out the Trans Mountain pipeline, and there's no mystery as to why: money talks. Some of the company's wealthiest board members have close ties with the oil and gas industry, with important folks in the company's upper echelons simultaneously profiting off of positions in tar sands companies.
This week Trans Mountain's insurance certificate expires on August 31st, and is being renewed behind closed doors- the company having filed to keep the insurance information secret. Despite this, people in Denver, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle, are taking action at Liberty Mutual, and delivering a petition with thousands of their customers calling on them to drop Trans Mountain--a quarter of a million people signed on in total.
We are taking action because tar sands expansion poisons the water that fish rely on, resulting in deformations and poisoning, increasing cancer rates for communities at the sites of extraction, and driving the climate disasters we see every day from hurricanes to wells going dry.
Years from now, Liberty will look back on this decision with remorse if they continue to support the status quo of corporate power instead of listening to the communities who seek nothing but clean air, food to eat, clean water to drink, and a healthy climate. We deserve better. With billions invested in oil and gas, and insurance contracts for some of the largest expansions of oil and gas in the world, Liberty is currently materially supporting projects that put us all at risk.
The question is, will Liberty leadership change the course? Or will the company keep choosing profit over people. The ball is in your court, Liberty. We know this Salish Sea is worth defending, but do you?
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